UNIFIED LEARNING SYSTEMS

Educational Resources

This website serves as a resource for librarians and teachers of high school and college English students to generate thinking on such issues as outstanding teaching principles, incorporating diversity, dealing with varying skills sets, and integrating technology into lesson plans. This is a work in progress and will continue to evolve.

Outstanding teachers have many qualities, one of which is they are always improving their methods of communication, integrating the knowledge they gain as life long learners. In today’s world of diversity of every type, including classrooms filled with students with varying skill sets, teachers must be particularly savvy. Additionally, with technological tools constantly changing and improving, teachers must stay abreast of the latest technology and how to integrate technology into their lessons.

Today’s students are visual learners, having grown up with television, video games, and the Internet. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important for teachers to integrate visual methods into the learning process. Although young people have grown up with visual images bombarding them at every turn, they still need to become visually literate, that is, learning the skills to analyze images and how images are manipulated to achieve various effects. Visual literacy is just as critical as textual literacy in today’s world. Visual literacy can be taught effectively in an hour lesson with this PowerPoint slideshow. Thereafter those skills should be reinforced by capitalizing on teachable moments that will inevitably arise throughout the semester.

This website provides a variety of ideas and tools for dealing with some of these critical issues. Herein, we have tips on using technology in the classroom, an example of online reading survey for polling the reading habits of students, and a sample of how to use fiction as a catalyst for teaching 21st century skills, which include identifying: logical fallacies, credibility of websites, hidden agendas, and the impact of the media upon mass perception.

Thank you to Peirce Free Clipart for the clipart; Teacherfiles for the banner; Amazon for the book cover image.

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Contact: shoshanagray@yahoo.com Created April 12, 2010 Updated April 25, 2010 © 2010 Shoshana Gray