Nancy.lewis1378

• Best individual tweeter: @CarolJago
• Best twitter hashtag: #engchat (@mrami2) (Meenoo Rami)
• Best free web tool: Evernote
• Best educational use of audio / video / visual / podcast: TED Talks

 

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FluencyTutor for Google is a new offering from Texthelp. FluencyTutor for Google is a Chrome web app (works on Chromebook, PC, Mac) that allows teachers to share selected reading passages with their students. Students can hear the passages read aloud. The text being read aloud is highlighted to help students follow along with the reading.

After hearing passages read aloud through FluencyTutor, students can create recordings of themselves reading the passages. Those recordings can be downloaded.

FluencyTutor offers a 47 page list of passages that teachers can share with their students. The passages are labeled with lexile scores and suggested grade levels. Teachers share the passages through Google Drive.


The video above includes demonstration of premium (paid) features. The text of this post deals only with the free aspects of FluencyTutor.

This year, Pink Floyd’s masterful prog rock album The Dark Side of the Moon turns 40. Yes, 40. Exploring themes ranging from conflict and greed, to mental illness and the passing of time, The Dark Side of the Moon has “everything you’d ever want … : Grand, transporting melodies, synapse-ripping synth experiments and sound collages, intricate musicianship, state-of-the-art studio sound and John Lennon-meets-Thom Yorke lyrics like ‘The lunatic is on the grass/Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs/Got to keep the loonies on the path.’” Or, so that’s how Rolling Stone magazine sums up the album that it now ranks 43rd on its list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”

Next Monday, BBC Radio 2 will honor Pink Floyd’s magnum opus with a new radio drama from legendary playwright Sir Tom Stoppard. Apparently Stoppard (who co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love) first considered writing a play based on the album back in 1973. Now, some 40 years later, he has “transformed the Pink Floyd classic into a psychedelic mash-up of Kantian philosophy, epic rock and John Prescott soundbites,” writes The Independent. To get you ready for Darkside, as the play will be called, Aardman Animations has created a three-minute trailer that evokes themes from the album and play. Says the director Darren Dubicki:

I spent time absorbing the rich detail from the Pink Floyd album, their art and the drama script. What was fundamentally important to us was that we retained a consistent visual tone that echoed the imagery created over the years for the band. The insanely surreal and powerful artwork created by Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis has always had a strong distortion on reality. Their sense of space and twisted context make for some uncomfortably beautiful art. This tone has been consistent for decades and we wanted to honour this with our contemporary digital, and analogue, slant on the style.

You can watch the trailer above, and find some wonderful Pink Floyd material in the section below.

Related Content:

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

Watch Pink Floyd Plays Live in the Ruins of Pompeii (1972)

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters Performs The Wall at the Berlin Wall (1990)

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When I was a student in Mrs. Simmons's second grade classroom one of the things that I looked forward to every week was the arrival of the Scholastic Weekly Reader. I loved read the stories about news from other parts of the world (I guess I was destined to become a social studies teacher). Today, students don't have to wait for the Scholastic Weekly Reader to appear in their teacher's mailbox. Here are five student-friendly news sites to use in your current events lesson plans.

Go Go News is a news website designed for elementary school students. The site features many short news stories that can be read and listened to. The stories that Go Go News covers aren't hard, breaking news stories. The stories are more of a interesting and educational nature.

Teaching Kids News is a news site developed for use in elementary school and middle school classrooms. Teaching Kids News features timely and relevant news stories written on a level that students can comprehend. Each article is accompanied by a set of discussion questions, writing prompts, reading prompts, and vocabulary words.

Youngzine is an online source of news, sports, and entertainment stories for elementary school students. Students will find stories to read and videos to watch in each of the information categories. Each news story is accompanied by a Google Map that has a placemark indicating where the story takes place.

CNN Student News is an excellent resource for middle school and high school current events lessons. The roughly ten minute episodes feature US stories, a world news stories, a "shout out" to a classroom, and a quick quiz. Transcripts for each show are available for download as are suggested viewing questions to cover with your students. 

One of my favorite features on the BBC New website is the Day in  the Day in Pictures. The Day in Pictures displays a small collection of photographs from around the world. The pictures capture a mix of  serious news stories and lighter cultural stories. The Day in Pictures collections are part of a much larger resource from the BBC simply called In Pictures. The In Pictures resource provides hundreds of images in a variety collections and slideshows about current events throughout the world. Some of the slide shows even include narration. All of the images include captions explaining what is happening in the picture and a little background knowledge about the event being photographed.