Any teacher worth his or her salt loves a freebie. Here’s two for you, one school related and the other sure to get you groovin’ on the long bus ride home:
The Writing Triangle: Planning, Revision, and Assessment by Graham Foster
This full text of this book is available for preview at the Pembroke Publishers site. It should be of interest to anyone teaching Language Arts on practicum. Here’s the blurb:
“Writing improves when students learn good planning, revision, and assessment strategies that specifically apply to different writing forms — Description, Narration, Lyric Poetry, Exposition, Persuasion/Deliberative Inquiry Research, Business Letters, and Exploratory Writing. Each of these forms is thoroughly discussed in this book, with suggestions for exploring key features, planning strategies, specific revision criteria, and assessment techniques. This bold book represents a complete makeover for tired textbooks about the writing process. It illustrates effective ways teachers can guide their students to become inspired, and turn ordinary writing into something extraordinary.”
On a related note, the text you’ll be using in the LLED 320 course I’ll be teaching to you is Student Diversity and it’s also from Pembroke.
Girl Talk – All Day
According to everyone’s good friends at Wikipedia, Gregg Michael Gillis (born October 26, 1981 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), better known by his stage name Girl Talk, is an American musician and DJ specializing in mashups and digital sampling.
He has recently released a new album and it’s available for a free download. That’s right. No grey areas here just go to his record label’s site and download it. Watch and listen to this review to get an idea if the album might be of interest:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMKfsj1fg5g[/youtube]
I’ve been listening to All Day a lot lately and it’s fun to play “name that tune” with all the samples. To help you out if you decide to play that game, too, here’s a (lengthy) list of all the sampled songs on All Day.
Well, there you go. Two freebies for the holidays. Enjoy.
– Lawrence