The web can be a great resource for teachers. I've put together a list of several websites that I've found quite useful in my time as private English tutor and web resources that I definitely want to try out once I begin teaching. I hope others will find them helpful too.
Curriculum Resources
Teaching rhetorical devices? Check out this site, which defines and provides examples of more than 60 rhetorical devices.
Some students have difficulty adopting a proper formal tone in their essays. Help them out with this useful list of English words for essay writing. Commonly used phrases and words are categorized according to purposes such as "to conclude", "to indicate a cause or reason", and much more.
Analyzing and understanding poetry can be difficult for many--students and teachers alike. This website, written by the American poet and scholar Timothy Steel, contains excerpts of poems exhibiting all the popular forms of meter and breaks down the process of analyzing meter and its effects in poetry into approachable steps.
Many students may have a preference for ebooks. This site provides free ebooks in a variety of formats (PDF, HTML, and ePUB just to name a few). Many of the classics such as Jane Austen or Mark Twain, which are no longer protected are copyright, are available. If your school provides Ipads, you may think about using a ebook rather than a physical book. Ereader apps such as Kindle and iBooks allows students to highlight and make notes as well as look up unfamiliar words--all at the swipe of a finger.
Looking for good short stories to share and study with your class? Take a look at this site, which contains stories from many of our favorite American authors. From O.Henry and Stephen Crane to Edgar Allen Poe and Langston Hues, it's all there.
Instructional Ideas
Looking for some lesson plans or suggestions? Many an English teacher has been inspired by the variety of lesson plans uploaded on this site,
The National Education Association has some great lesson plans as well as tips on classroom management and teaching strategies.
Founded by the famous creator of Star Wars, George Lucas, Edutopia is an invariable cornucopia of ideas and evidence-based strategies to help students "thrive in their future education, careers, and adult lives"
Wondering how you can get your students excited about writing? Check out the resources at the National Writing Project. The site has page dedicated to Teaching Writing with a multitude of categories. There are teaching ideas for all genres of writing--from academic writing to persuasive, and to poetry.
The IRA offers a wide variety of resources, from lesson plans (through the site readthinkwrite.org) to approaches to encouraging adolescent literacy or providing for the literacy needs of English Language Learners (ELLs).
Technology Resources
Getting students to create cartoons and comic strips can be a great activity. Using this website is easy. Students can simply drag pre-drawn characters and objects onto frames and write their own dialogue in text boxes to create a comic strip to illustrate their understanding or interpretation of the stories you've been discussing in class or to storyboard or plan out their creative writing or personal narrative essays. You can also have them illustrate the elements of plot.
Educational technologist, Kathy Schrock has put together a wonderful resource page listing a variety of useful apps (IOS, Google, and Android) that support students' learning across the different levels of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. Teachers need only click on the graphics to explore the different apps and decide for themselves whether they'd like to use it in the classroom.
Have you started taking advantage of this great (and free!) tool yet? If you haven't you really should. The tool, which now even works offline if you have Google Drive installed onto your device, has wide applications in the classroom and at home. Students can work concurrently on the same presentation for group projects.The comments feature alone can be used by teachers to provide students with comments on their essays and work or by students to identify and label bias, the use of propaganda and rhetorical devices in examples of famous speeches or opinion essays. For students who love to use the excuse that their computers crashed before they hit save (the modern riff on the classic "the dog ate my homework"), GoogleDocs automatically saves all changes.
Thinking about creating a classroom website? Weebly for Education allows teachers to manage and moderate their students' accounts, accept homework assignments online, and keep parents up to date. Students can also create their own websites and blogs using the accounts that you create for them.
Today'sMeet is one of several free chat services which can be used for back-channel (meaning private and not open to the public) discussion with your students or with your fellow teacher colleagues. Just set up a chat room as well as how long you want it to exist and invite participants by sending them the URL. You can use Today'sMeet during classroom lectures or reviews so that students can chat questions and comments at the same time. Just make sure to go over etiquette and other rules to follow beforehand and give students some time to get used to the platform. Students can answer each other's questions or share additional information from their personal background or experiences or even previous classes--all while the lecture continues.
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