Here’s the round-up of posts from last week on teaching composition and rhetoric from Bedford Bits, on teaching English language arts at the secondary level in High School Bits, and on teaching literature and creative writing from Bedford Lit Bits.…
Category: Teaching
Get Rid of Old Writing Practices
Here’s an interesting tip, related to exercise, but with a much wider application: Throw away the bathing suit you wore in high school… and the memory too. It’s normal to have a mental image of yourself when you last exercised…
Activities for Interactive Whiteboards
Interactive whiteboard redefine hands-on activity in the classroom, as students manipulate information on a giant digital display. They also bring teachers a new challenge: what activities can you use to make the most of this new technology? Teachers on the…
Teaching Students About Headlines, Titles, and Subject Lines
This classroom activity shows students how to write a strong headline, title, or subject line by using Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop site to find attention-grabbing blog titles.
Award-Winning Sentences
One day, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton sat down and wrote what have become one of the most infamous opening lines of his novel Paul Clifford (1830): “It was a dark and stormy night.” Bulwer-Lytton wrote other memorable lines. He penned “the…
Which Books Would You Ban?
What do Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter have in common? How do they differ from Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand, Michael Moore, Andrew Breitbart, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Michael Savage? A Rebel Pundit survey last month asked, “Which…
Companies Are Breaking the Rules on Google+
This afternoon, Jeff Naslund posted a list of news companies that have added a presence on Google+. Everyone is getting on board. From NPR to Al Jazeera, everyone has created a Google+ profile. Now setting up a profile for a…
Writing with Wordle
You probably would have guessed that raven was one of the most frequently used words in Poe’s “The Raven,” but the Wordle word cloud on the right makes the impact of that word visually obvious. Wordle is a free tool…
Software, Teamwork, & Collaboration
This week in Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim asserts, “The world is divided into two types of people: those who prefer Track Changes in Word and those who prefer to write collaboratively in Google Docs.” Kim’s explanation of the two…
Reading, Writing, Eating
Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about Food in Fiction and How Cooking Brings You Closer to Characters this week in The Atlantic. The article asks readers to think about how cooking and eating the same foods as fictional characters strengthens the connection…