Professional+Resources

As you know, an abundance of professional resources exist both within and outside of MSU. This page is an attempt to catalog those resources that users of this wikispace find the most helpful. Please peruse these to develop your own professional resources catalog, and write us ("Discussion" or "Notify Me") or edit this page to add your favorites to this list. If possible, please briefly identify/describe the resource so other viewers can quickly decide whether or not to open the link. Thanks for helping us to make this catalog rich!

English Educator Blogs
[|English Ed with Theory Girl]

The "Journal List" is a resource for all graduate students in the College of Education as they seek opportunities to publish their scholarly work. In this space we would like to compile a list of journal titles with descriptions of the journals' missions, links to their websites, notes about the types of research/writing they look for and accept, as well as commentary about personal experiences with reading, submitting, working with these various journals - and anything else you think might be helpful.
 * Journal List**

Resources for English Educators
[|Center for Media Literacy] - "The Center for Media Literacy is dedicated to a new vision of literacy for the 21st Century: the ability to communicate competently in all media forms, print and electronic, as well as to access, understand, analyze and evaluate the powerful images, words and sounds that make up our contemporary mass media culture" (www.medialit.org). For anyone interested in incorporating media literacy into the middle school or high school classroom in a meaningful way, this site provides theoretical foundations as well as quality, ready-to-use lesson plans based on best practice. Among other things, you will find links to downloadable books, including "Five Key Questions That Can Change the World."

Comics & Graphic Novels - This page contains an annotated collection of resources that will help instructors to experiment with incorporating graphic novels into their English courses. It includes links to education-related resources for using comics in education, collections of online comics, free comic creation sites, information re: commercial comic creation software, and scholarship related to the comic arts. user:chericem1

Community-Building Techniques - One of the four strands of the undergraduate program, building classroom community is an important part of "creating a safe, caring, and productive environment," "an inclusive community," and of helping students "develop personal and social responsibility. This link leads to a collaborative, annotated list of ice-breakers, warm-ups, and other community-building techniques for English teachers. user:sherrymi

Drama & Theater - An annotated collection of resources that includes links to databases, downloadable puppet patterns, instructions for building portable puppet theaters, tech tools, useful readings, and phenomenal interactive activities, lesson plans, and units aligned with the National Performing Arts Standards. user:chericem1

[|Evaluation Cookbook] - Useful to student teachers and teacher-researchers engaged in action research projects in thinking about assessment, program evaluation, and student evaluation from a research perspective. Links to loads of tips and resources. You can browse the information online (by function or by method) or download it all as one giant PDF file. user:chericem1

Teens 'N Tech - This site provides a wealth of media-based examples for use in exploring the implications of emerging technologies for education, literacy, and teenagers. It contains links to free tech tools, as well as a variety of creative projects and activities (complete with examples, instructions, and downloadable worksheets) designed to engage students in various forms of communication. Although it was compiled with an audience of foreign language teachers in mind, most of the activities could easily be adapted for use in a Language Arts classroom. user:chericem1

The National Conference on Research in Language and Literacy [|NCRLL_spring_2010_newsletter.pdf]