SOLs are approaching very quickly! I remember when I returned to education in 2004 I was a bit taken aback by the World Geography pacing guide which had me finishing instruction by April 21. It did not make much sense to me since the last day of school was not until June. And then I remembered — SOL End of Course exams are actually given in May, many weeks before the end of the school year. (I still have issues with this, but that’s a topic for another day)

With that in mind, I know many of you are getting ready to delve into SOL preparation and review for your students and you may not know where to find our SOL online resources. At the start of the school year, I moved them all to our web portal. You can find them under the category “SOL Preparation”.

If anyone is aware of any resources that are not included in the portal, please post a comment with the link so that they can be shared with your peers. Then, I will add them to the portal ASAP.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project which keeps track of online trends and usage, almost 90% of all teens are online. Of them, 64% are creating their own online content.

That means that about half of the students in your classes are posting pictures and videos as well as writing for fun on the Internet.

Given our district’s initiative to raise our SAT scores, I can’t help but wonder how we could use Web 2.0 tools to help us in that endeavor. If kids are already online writing on their own, and writing helps improve literacy, what can we do to harness this for school?

There are lots of Web 2.0 tools that incorporate writing and blogging is one such tool. Blogs are very easy to set up and use. Here is a video from Commoncraft that explains blogging “in plain English”.

If you are interested in setting up a class blog, contact your friendly ITRT!

Download Video: Posted by cputnam809 at TeacherTube.com.

As we are in the midst of SOL remediation and testing, I found Alfie Kohn’s post, Do Kids Read Less for Fun? Blame Standardized Tests from The Pulse, particularly poignant. One quote, in particular, stood out:

“We haven’t been doing any reading since we started preparing the kids for the reading test.”

I’m not sure if I would share this resource with students, unless you want them using the resources available here to ”read-up” on the classics rather than reading them first hand. Having said (written?) that, however, this is a really cool site–MyRocketbook.com. If either you or your students want to review classics like The Scarlet Letter, 1984, The Great Gatsby, or more, everything you need can be found here! I was especially intrigued by the video study guides, but downloading the MP3s sounds like a great alternative, too.