ACTIVE readers are better readers.  Activities that provide structures for students to use prior to reading, during reading and after reading allow for multiple opportunities to comprehend the text.  To very specifically target strategies and skills that aid learning, retention, and generalization, familiarize yourself with the following databases:

How do we take it up a notch?  Our culture is very visually oriented.  How about our instructional settings?  Are you making deliberate attempts to heighten interest, peek curiosity, build background knowledge, and create excitement about learning by including multi-media in our teaching? 

Ideas for Inclusion of Pictures:

iwon.com posts photos every day which have been submitted by iwon viewers:  http://today.iwon.com/index.html?PG=home&SEC=bnav
User photos, pet photos, celebrity photos, and fashion photos are available to download to your computer and use in your classroom in PowerPoint presentations, hard copy print outs for activities, and as springboards for vocabulary development, writing, and visual links to content area instruction. 

msnbc.com has a daily multimedia webpage that chronicles video, photo slide shows, and images from current events and special happenings around the world:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4999736/

Interesting High-Speed (super slow motion) video clips:  The super slow-motion playback lets you visualize effects
that cannot be seen with the naked eye or with a standard video camera.  http://www.engr.colostate.edu/~dga/high_speed_video/

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input. (description copied from 10x10 website):  http://www.tenbyten.org/info.html for information and links -- go here to see 10x10 directly:  http://www.tenbyten.org/now.html

07/30/2006 02:00:10 PM