Friday, March 28, 2014

Revisiting Badgerlink

Teachers in Wisconsin- you have a plethora of some amazing free resources available to you that will enhance your teaching significantly.  These resources are available through Badgerlink, Wisconsin's online library.  Badgerlink resources include databases with full-text articles, multimedia, and e-books.  Below highlights some of my favorite Badgerlink resources and how you can use these in your classroom.


TeachingBooks is your resource for finding anything that you want to know about the books that you teach and the books that the kids love.  After searching for a book title or author, you will be linked to a wealth of resources, including author videos and podcasts, discussion guides, lesson plans, book trailers, and even author pronunciations.  This amazing database is not only a must-use for ELA teachers, but TeachingBooks also lists curricular uses of its tools for teachers of any subject.




Wisconsin Media Lab provides free multimedia resources for Wisconsin educators.  Organized by subject and grade level, teachers will find popular titles such as Bill Nye, Into the Book, and Wisconsin Biographies. 





NoveList is that go-to resource for when you need to find just the right book.  Within NoveList, you can search for reading lists, similar titles, reviews, related articles, and further information about various books.  It's a great resource for when you have a student who read a book and is looking for other titles just like that one.

Soundzabound offers royalty free music for students to use in their multimedia productions.  Students can choose from short sound clips or full-length songs.


Access Newspaper Archive allows users to find  full-text newspaper articles dating back hundreds of years. Want to read articles about the sinking of the Titanic on that date that it happened?  Find them by searching here.


Search for full-text poems, essays, short stories, novels, plays, and speeches through LitFinder's amazing repository.

Tools for Differentiating Learning

I was lucky to attend Naomi Harm's WEMTA session on personalizing learning this past Monday.  In her session, Naomi went through several resources that can help teachers easily differentiate learning for students at different levels in their classrooms.  Two tools- The Differentiator and Respondo!- really stuck with me as being fantastic resources for teachers to use with students.

The Differentiator allows teachers to define the learning target by choosing the thinking skill, content, resources, product, and group size from the list given on the site.  This gives students the opportunity to design a learning outcome that meets their needs and gives them options for a variety of products.  After choosing one option from each of the categories, a clear learning objective is set!



Similarly, Respondo! is another awesome tool for having students and teachers create different outcomes to meet different learning styles.  This tool, on the other hand, is specifically focused on creating different outcomes when responding to literature.  It works similarly to The Differentiator by having users choose different outcomes based on different elements of the text.





The best part of both tools- They require students to critically think about classroom content and create products that involve higher level thinking.  Learning outcomes can measure the same objective but be different for students with different needs, abilities, and talents.  I think that students would really enjoy being empowered to use these tools to decide on the products that will show what they know.