Learning 4 Today Webinar Series
Teachers are life long learners, that’s a given. Finding time to learn is another. netTrekker therefore has created a series of webinars to help you stay current with netTrekker and learn new ways to use it throughout the school year.
On the 25th of August we kick the learning off with a “Gearing Up for a New School Year.” In this session we will focus on how netTrekker can help you find lesson ideas, information on how to communicate with parents, classroom discipline ideas and more. And as an added bonus,Jessica Storer, BrainPOP’s Community Outreach Manager, will be joining us share some great back to school tips with you as well!
Then, the fourth Wednesday of every month at 4:30 PM EST we’ll continue the BrainPOP and netTrekker series. Stay tuned for more details and topics!
But that’s not all. On the second Wednesday of every month at 4 PM EST we’ll have a new line up for Learning 4 Today: nT & Me. This series will be hosted by Dawn Crawford and Melissa Knollman of netTrekker. They have some great topics planned to share with you how to maximize your use of netTrekker.
The first Tuesday of the month at 4:30 PM EST, Learning 4 Today will feature integration ideas. Have you ever tried to use netTrekker with some of the most popular products on the market today, such as Glogster EDU, Tech4Learning’s Wixie, VoiceThread, and the many others? Join us as we share a lesson idea and a how to integrate these tools with netTrekker.
But that’s not all! netTrekker is partnered with many other products. I mentioned BrainPOP and Tech4Learning’s Wixie. We also partner with eInstruction, ScanTron, Weekly Reader Express, Defined STEM, NSTA and many others. How? Well join us on the 4th Thursday of each month as we share this valuable information!
All of this information will be shared via the events page of netTrekker Village. And when possible, an archived copyof the session can be found on the Village as well. All sessions will require a phone to call in for the audio and a computer with Internet access. We use Webex for the platform. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager.
Teaching Poetry through the Harlem Renaissance
Langston Hughes' photo Courtesy of Modern American Poets
The following post was written by guest blogger and recent NT101 Alumni, Sharlene Paxton, Teacher Librarian from Sierra Sands School District in California. Sharlene complied this amazing resource folder for high school students as one of her NT101 course projects.
Since I taught high school English for several years, I went ahead and based my portfolio project around the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. I included images of at least one of the famous poets of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Langston Hughes, as well as images that provide students with an idea of the mood and energy that resulted from the art and music that inspired much of the poetry of the period. I included California content standards for teaching elements of poetry at the high school level. In addition to including plenty of websites for students to use to explore and acquire knowledge, I also included websites that would appeal to all types of learners. I made sure to use the Refinements widgets to search for Multimedia information, such as sound recordings and videos. Integrating these kinds of technology into the curriculum appeals to all students, while also contributing to increasing their digital literacy skills. Some of the sites contain primary source materials, so I am confident that I’m providing my students with quality resources that contain accurate, reliable information. I also included a fun resource from BrainPOP–a quiz that tests the students’ knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance.
I have included Timelines that allow the students to view a famous person from that era. The timelines will also allow the students to explore other events of the time period. I have included a webquest that I found from an outside resource; although students will not have access to netTrekker’s dictionaries and read-aloud features, they can still easily access the resource from within the Poetry Project folder.
I have also included two templates, one that requires students to evaluate the digital content of a web resource; the other is a brief assessment that requires students to show some basic understand of the poets and basic elements of the Harlem Renaissance. The folder can be used as a mere starting point; students could advance their studies by adding to the folder if they find resources that are useful. Also, the folder could be shared with other English teachers for collaborative purposes, and it could also be shared with social studies teachers so that English and social studies can collaborate on an interdisciplinary unit.