Annotating the Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born June 27, 1872. He was one of the first African-American writers to establish an international reputation. His work frequently features a conversational tone, innovative rhetorical structure, and a colorful use of both dialect and...
Photo of the Month: A Story in Stone
This month’s photo is of Trajan’s Column in Rome. It commemorates Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. Completed over nineteen centuries ago, the column is an amazing engineering and artistic work. Including the pedestal, the monument is 115...
Shadow Puppets
Any teacher who has ever done a puppet project with elementary students has experienced the amazing potential of creating and using puppets in the classroom. Students are engaged. They realize that they must really collaborate because, “The show must go...
Photos of the Month: When Blurry’s Better
Both of the photos for this month show movement. Give your students a few moments to list what is the same and what is different about the two photos. After they have shared their ideas, ask which part of each photo is in focus and which part is blurred. Also ask...
Arbor Day: 2,300 Photos and 1,800 Illustrations
On Arbor Day in 1921, my mother’s grade school teacher told the class that within 40 years there would be no trees left in the United States. I’m happy to report that the number of trees in the US has remained pretty constant over the past century. Arbor...
Photo of the Month: Controlled Burn
A photo of a burned forest may seem an odd choice as photo of the month since we are also celebrating Arbor Day in April. I remember how disturbed my fourth-graders were when we went on a field trip to a park that had recently conducted a controlled burn. At first, it...
Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!
Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616. It is traditionally believed that he was also born on same day in 1564. We’ve collected audiobooks of the Bard’s most famous works and additional teaching resources to celebrate the life of one of the greatest writers in the English...
Five Reasons To Use Audiobooks for Remote Learning
I’ve written frequently about our free Lit2Go audiobook collection. I’ll paste links to other posts at the bottom. Today, I’d like to share five reasons to include audiobooks in remote instruction. 1. Audiobooks give students a chance to rest their...
Photo of the Month: Asking Why?
Nature photos can be great jumping-off points for exploration. I enjoy being outdoors. I always find the patterns in nature intriguing and often ask myself, “Why?” as I’m walking along. Why are those clouds shaped as they are? Why do these leaves...
OBS Studio: Add Some Interest and Fun to Your Remote Teaching
I recently gave a presentation in which I demonstrated how our various presentation elements with transparent backgrounds could be used in the foreground of a remote video lesson. I suddenly had lots of questions about how I had superimposed images in front of my...
Frederick Douglass: A Voice for Our Time
Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln by Frederick Douglass Lit2Go free audiobook recording (26 minutes) PDF of the speech (6 pages, reading level 11.1) We live in an unhappy time of polarization, when many students (and perhaps their parents) don’t read news...
Photo of the Month: Guess Who?
Here is an interesting photo to show your students to see if they can guess who the sculpture represents. Don’t be surprised if they guess an ancient Roman emperor or perhaps even Zeus. Those really aren’t bad guesses, especially if they’ve noticed...
Basic Counting Resources
FCIT has a great collection of counting resources for early childhood ed. There are photos, numeral sets, drawings, audio counting rhymes, posters, and more. Just one problem—they’re scattered all over various FCIT websites. For this post, I’ve done the...
Photos of the Month: Two Libraries
International Holocaust Remembrance Day falls on January 27. Over the past several decades, I’ve taken thousands of photos of Holocaust-related monuments across Europe for one of our projects. Most such monuments, of course, are intended to memorialize the...
African-American Digital Content Collections
Resources for African-American History Month Each year since 1996, the President of the United States has proclaimed February to be African American History Month. Its origins, however, go back to the 1920s when Dr. Carter Woodson and the Association for the Study of...
Cutout People for Digital Narratives
One of the most effective ways for students to gain (and demonstrate) understanding is through the creation of a digital narrative. Although digital narratives can be used in any subject area, I especially like to see them used in History classes. Students are great...
Photo of the Month: A Tree in Winter
This is a photo of a tree in winter in Western Pennsylvania. Depending on the age level and background knowledge of your students, this photo can be a springboard into understanding something that at first seems pretty mysterious. How does a tree survive a cold...
Winter Pictures and Poetry
Whether you consider Winter to start on the first of December or the winter solstice (December 21 or 22), here are some poems and pictures appropriate for classroom use. The poems are available in both MP3 and PDF formats from the Lit2Go website. The pictures are from...
Converting Raster Clipart to Vector
The ClipArt ETC website includes over 70,000 images for classroom use. The majority of the images are scans of illustrations from 19th-century textbooks, but there are also many thousands of vector illustrations created by FCIT staff. I frequently receive questions...
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Using Digital Content
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