Week 10 - Research and Presentations

This week's unit in Language Skills through ICT involved finding new search tools to incorporate into the classroom. My favorites were Simple Wikipedia, Biography.com, and Newseum.

Simple Wikipedia has been extraordinarily helpful for me in the classroom. On Monday afternoons, I work with advanced fifth and sixth graders on special English projects surrounding natural disasters around the world. Some of the topics can involve technical vocabulary for a second language (e.g. continental drift, seismic waves, tectonic plates). Simple Wikipedia can make an otherwise difficult article perfectly comprehensible for students. Compare this simplified entry on earthquakes to the original.

I was surprised to find that biography.com uses relatively simple English in its entries. Check out this article on composer John Williams:

After three years of military service, Williams returned to New York City, where he worked as a jazz pianist. He also attended the Julliard School, studying with famed teacher Rosina Lhévinne in pursuit of his dream of becoming a concert pianist. However, Williams confessed in a 2012 interview with NPR that at Julliard he heard "players like John Browning and Van Cliburn around the place, who were also students of Rosina's, and I thought to myself, 'If that's the competition, I think I'd better be a composer!'"

My sixth graders could probably understand this. Further, these articles are short, and they wouldn't be that hard to differentiate for weaker students. Here is the same excerpt revised for simple past tense:

John Williams was in the military for three years. Then, he went to New York City to play jazz piano. He studied music at the Julliard School. He wanted to be great, but the other students were better than him. John said, "I don't want to compete with the other students. Maybe I can be a composer instead!"

Newseum was perhaps the most interesting tool that I found. The site offers the front page news from thousands of local print sources around the word. Any city, any country. Ever wonder about what's happening in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia? Or Grand Rapids, Michigan? One could make an interesting activity out of this by asking students to make inferences about the paper's gist (e.g. What kinds of stories does this paper cover? Do the topics seem national or local? Political or entertaining? How do you know?).