Thursday, September 15, 2005

Cool Literacy Site

I discovered a cool literacy site. There is a teacher site and a student site. The site comes out of the UK. It is divided into different themes including dragons, Halloween spells, Renaissance etc.

What is really neat about the place is that there is a heavy emphasis on writing. Students can read stories some of which are choose your own adventure stories (multiple endings and the students choices determine which one they end up with.) They are also able to write stories to be posted online. One part includes discussions about dragons that students can participate it.

There is also a part called Adventure Island that really set me to thinking.
"Adventure Island is a web-based tool for classes, schools and groups to create an interactive online island that other people are able to visit and explore. You can create descriptions for each area of your island, and these can be written in either the style of a story, diary, guide or game, as you wish. You can include on your island areas that will trap an unsuspecting visitor, and force them to start again, as well as including four clues that, once found, will allow the visitor to escape from the island and get back to civilisation." (from the website)

Video can be included which makes this really ideal for deaf students. It would allow them to create their information in video format in their natural language and then caption it into English.

I wonder if I could create a site that would be specifically for deaf students. I would want them to be able to provide video, pix, written text.... I don't want to steal the idea of Adventure Island so I would have to think ........

I have it Time Travel. The students could do something based on the time period they are studying in social studies. They could come up with how they ended up back in time and then find a way back to the present possibly by traveling forward in time through additional time periods?????

More to come as I think about this.

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