SparkNotes app available for Android -teach students responsible use

I remember in high school when ever we had a book report due, we'd head off to the library or bookstore for Cliff Notes. Now students have SparkNotes website and now an Android App. SparkNotes provides guides and chapter summaries of books. The app is free and their is an iOS version.

While some students misuse this and use this instead of reading the actual book, teachers could show these kinds of resources to their students and how to use them to help them understand what they are reading. Show the students that these are help resources, not something to replace the actual reading of the book.

The app has 50 study guides pre-loaded, you can download more and it has a built-in social networking feature to connect with other users.

This is one more resource that students have available to them. One way or another they are going to use it. As educators, we need to show them how to use the resource properly.

Get the SparkNotes app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.sparknotes.sparknotes

Related:

Android for Education resources and apps - app reviews, apps for education, news, tips, resources, and more.

Litcharts - free, downloadable alternative to Cliff Notes

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - book and original movie available for free

Open Culture is a great resource for lots of things. They have incredible listings of free ebooks, audio books, and videos available, which is great for education.

They just announced that they have the original file adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein available for download. It's only 12 minutes and was  made in 1910. They also have the link to download the original Frankenstein book.

Check it out with your students.

Essay Tagger - grade essays easier

I  just found out about EssayTagger, a site developed by an English teacher who was looking for a way to speed up the process of grading essays. It is a web based tool that helps speed up the essay grading process. It does not auto grade. The teacher still has to grade the easy, but it offers tools to do it faster.

The teacher creates a rubric with the elements that they are looking for in each assignment, such as thesis, body paragraph, evidence, etc. and set up the quality levels (excellent, needs work, etc.).

The student submits the essay to the teacher, who then reads the essay and drags-and-drops the element such as thesis, into the paper and tag the part of the essay that fits that element. Once tagged, the quality categories you created pop up and you select the one that fits. This is the feedback to the student.

It seems like it would make grading essays faster than using pen and a paper rubric.


I'm curious to hear from English teachers on what they think about this.

Literature-Map - the tourist map of literature - find authors similar to one you like

Literature-Map is a site that gives you a diagram of authors that it thinks you might like based on the author you put in the search bar. The closer to the original author the new one is, the more closely related they are to your search author.

I did a search for Mark Twain, since I just visited the Mark Twain House in Hartford, CT this past Saturday, and got the following diagram back.

This site could be used to find authors that are similar to other authors. A good way to use this in class would be to have the students run a search for an author they just read, and then have them determine what makes the related authors more or less related to the original.

ReadPrint - Free online books for students, teachers, and readers

ReadPrint is a site that has thousands of free online books to read. You can search the entire collection, or search categories such as essays, fiction, non-fiction, plays, and more.

The site has many of the classics, inclduding "The Ugly Duckling", "Jane Eyre", "Pride and Prejudice", and "The Canterbury Tales."

This is a great resource for educators and students to save money by reading the books online for free.