The best apps for taking notes in class.
Critical Commons
I came upon this site as I was looking for something else. (I don’t even remember what the something else was because I got so excited about exploring this site.)
Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for scholarship, reasearch and teaching, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments. And although we are huge fans of their work, please note that Critical Commons is not affiliated in any way with Creative Commons.
Arabic Alphabet Resources
Arabic Course, Lesson 1: Alphabet – Brief introduction to the Arabic alphabet
Fun with Arabic: The Alphabet – Detailed information about each letter of the alphabet
Shariah Program: Free Online Lessons – Brief introduction to the alphabet, followed by detailed lessons about the consonants and vowels
Online Resources for Intro Philosophy Students
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a helpful resource for Western and some Eastern philosophy. If you’re just interested in a dictionary-length explanation, each entry begins with a brief overview of the featured term; for those who desire more in-depth explanation, the entries continue in detail. Each entry is refereed by the SEP‘s editorial board before publication.
In the Guide to the Study of Philosophy you can find tips for effective study. The Philosophy Pages site also includes a page of links to major philosophical works online.
The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts offers another good guide: How to Study Philosophy: Tips, Hints, and Resources.
If you’re looking for the “big picture” — and fast! — you may be interested in Spark Notes’ Philosophy Study Guides. Here you will find articles on major Western philosophers and a good number of major works.
Why write well?
Non-English majors in undergraduate composition courses may wonder why writng well matters. Teachers and tutors can argue for future usefulness until we’re blue in the face, but I think we might do better to answer students’ apprehensions with an example.
In a section of her book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, journalist Rebecca Mead describes a decrepit old house in a tiny Wisconsin town:
One splintered house at the low end of town, near the riverbank, seems some time ago to have buckled to its knees like a drunk, and having decided there was nothing much worth standing up for after that, simply stayed in that position.
Let’s ask our students what the difference is between the preceding sentence and this one: A house near the river has started to collapse.
Then, we address their concern directly: You should endeavor to write as well as you can because … well, why wouldn’t you?
Online Resources for Intro Psych Students
About.com: Psychology Basics – http://psychology.about.com/od/psychology101/u/psychology-basics.htm#s1
This material offers an introduction to the study of psychology, summarizing many of the topics discussed in introductory courses. This site is good for review or even for previewing coming chapters in your course. Users can also explore the other psychology sections by About.com, including Theories and Experiments for more details, or they can take quizzes to test their knowledge or examine their personalities.
AllPsychONLINE – The Virtual Psychology Classroom – http://allpsych.com/
This site includes brief online texts – Psychology 101, Statistics Primer, Personality Synopsis, and Research Methods – that offer synopses of the most commonly studied aspects of psychology with accompanying quizzes. I recommend this site for students who want to quickly review and test their overall understanding of key psychology concepts.
SparkNotes Psychology Study Guides – http://www.sparknotes.com/psychology/
The study guides at SparkNotes succinctly cover the information generally presented in introductory psychology courses. Users may also consult the list of major psychology figures and the psychology glossary.
Discovering Psychology video series – http://www.learner.org/discoveringpsychology/index.html
Originally produced in 1990 and updated in 2001, this 26-part video series is familiar to countless students of high school and college level intro psych. It contains hours of student-friendly discussion and illustration of key psychological concepts.
UC Berkeley General Psychology 1 lectures – http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=UCBerkeley#g/c/1D6C5FC9E7B57AF3
These videos, from Fall 2007, present an “introduction to the principal areas, problems, and concepts of psychology” through the actual course lectures of Professor John F. Kihlstrom.
ESL Focus: You know how to use tag questions, don’t you?
Recently, a student encountered a tag question and was quite perplexed. Was this thing a statement or a question?
Yes. 🙂
We use tag questions in speech quite often, but they are fairly rare in academic prose, less so in expressive writing. A tag question asks your listener/reader to confirm or deny a statement. Thus, the tag question includes both a statement and a short question.
Example: You have lunch money, don’t you?
In this tag question, the statement is “You have lunch money.” The short question, also known as a question tag, is “don’t you?”
You may wonder why we use question tags in the first place. Couldn’t the speaker/writer request the same information using a full question?
Certainly, the speaker/writer could do that (i.e., Do you have lunch money?), but the tag question is more than an equivalent to the full question. The yes-or-no question presented above (Do you have lunch money?) is open ended. In speech, unless this question is accompanied by nonverbal clues, the listener can safely assume that the speaker is merely asking for information.
In contrast, the tag question suggests that the speakerwriter expects or prefers a confirmation or denial. In the example tag question above (You have lunch money, don’t you?), the speaker expects that the listener will or could give an affirmative response: Yes, I do have lunch money.
The relationship between the two parts of a tag question are inversely related. That means that an affirmative statement preceeds a negative tag, and a negative statement preceeds an affirmative tag. Look at these examples:
- I am invited, aren’t I?
- You have taken this class before, haven’t you?
- Juliana visits you often, doesn’t she?
- Mr. Kim expects only the best, doesn’t he?
- The movie starts at 7:00, doesn’t it?
- We are moving on to the next lesson, aren’t we?
- My children are beautiful, aren’t they?
In each of the sentences above, the speaker either expects or hopes that the listener/reader will agree with the affirmative statement.
- I haven’t answered your question, have I?
- You aren’t afraid, are you?
- Your sister isn’t coming with us, is she?
- Dad won’t forget to pick me up, will he?
- This house isn’t for sale, is it?
- We can’t park here, can we?
- The dogs aren’t in the car alone, are they?
In each of these sentences, the speaker either expects or hopes that the listener will disagree with the statement.
ESL Focus: Phrasal Verbs
It is no surprise that many ESL students find idioms frustrating. Luckily, there are many resources which can help English learners improve their grasp of phrasal verbs (as well as other idioms). Today, I will focus on print and online resources for understanding phrasal verbs.
First of all, what is a phrasal verb? Here’s a helpful definition from the Academic Center at the University of Houston, Victoria:
Phrasal verbs are compound verbs (more than one word) that result from combining a verb with an adverb or a preposition. The resulting compound verb is idiomatic (e.g. its meaning cannot be derived from the dictionary meaning of its parts).
(To see the Academic Center’s complete pdf handout on phrasal verbs, visit http://www.uhv.edu/ac/efl/pdf/phrasalverbs.pdf.)
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Since phrasal verbs are idiomatic, figuring out their meaning can be a challenge. When you encounter a phrasal verb, first attempt to guess its meaning from the context. Consider this excerpt from an article in the online newspaper, the St. Louis Business Journal:
Belden said late Monday that it plans to stop production at one of its two manufacturing plants in Leominster, Mass., by July 2010, cutting about 170 jobs there.
The wire and cable maker said production from the shuttered plant will move to Belden’s other plant in Leominster, as well as to existing company facilities in Monticello, Ky., and Nogales, Mexico.
About 170 employees will be affected by the move and will be eligible for severance benefits, the company said.
The plant closing is part of a restructuring Belden announced in December, when it said it would lay off 1,800 workers, or 20 percent of its work force, in dealing with a drop in demand for its products.
The article is about the closure of a wire and cable factory, which will result in the company “cutting about 170 jobs.” This plant closing is part of a plan to restructure the company in response to declining sales demand. Part of the plan is to lay off 20% of the company’s work force. Thus, the reader can assume that the phrasal verb lay off means something similar to “to cut.”
Sometimes, however, the context offers no clear clue to an idiom’s meaning, or the reader may wish to verify her guess. In such cases, the reader may use one of two resources: a dictionary or the internet.
If a dictionary is handy, use it. Most common phrasal verbs will be included in the verb’s entry. For example, you can find the meaning of the phrasal verb lay off by looking up the verb lay. Be prepared to find multiple meanings for phrasal verbs. Lay off can mean “to terminate the employment of (a worker), especially temporarily,” “to mark off,” “to stop doing something,” or “to place all or part of (an accepted bet) with another bookie in order to reduce the risk” (American Heritage Dictionary).
If you are more adventurous and want to see the phrasal verb in additional contexts, do a quick internet search for it. For example, go to google.com, enter “lay off” (including the quotation marks) in the search box, and click “Google Search.” The results will be thousands–possibly millions–of websites on which the phrase lay off has been used. Either read the short excerpt on the search result page or click on the links and find lay off in the text. You will have a richer understanding, not only of the definition of the phrasal verb, but also of how writers use it in a variety of genres and for a variey of purposes. For example, when I search lay off, I find that, when it refers to a worker’s termination, it can also be written as one word.
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In addition to basic dictionaries, there are also dictionaries and text/workbooks devoted solely to phrasal verbs and other idioms.
- The American Heritage Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs – $15.56 on Amazon.com
- Cambridge Phrasal Verbs Dictionary – $21.90 on Amazon.com
- Longman Pocket Phrasal Verbs Dictionary – $5.75 on Amazon.com
- McGraw-Hill’s Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs – $15.61 on Amazon.com
- NTC’s Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs and Other Idiomatic Verbal Phrases – $17.90 on Amazon.com
- Oxford Phrasal Verbs Dictionary – $18.67 on Amazon.com
The Academic Drone 