Learning in Hand Blog by Tony Vincent

Free Poetry Resources for You to See

K12 Handhelds has made available several poetry curriculum resources for Palm handhelds, Pocket PCs, and desktop/laptop computers.

You can download Types of Poetry and Poetry Anthology eBooks. The eBooks are in Mobipocket format and have lots of examples with linked vocabulary words. Mobipocket is a cross-platform eBook reader and you can download it for free. Windows users can even download the free Mobilpocket Creator for making your own cross-platform eBooks. [There are not versions of Mobipocket for Mac and Linux computers--but you can use a Mac to install Mobipocket to a Palm handheld.]

Also available from K12 Handhelds is a Poetry Scavenger Hunt in Microsoft Word format. You can use Palm's Documents To Go or a Pocket PC's Word Mobile to view and complete the scavenger hunt.

Another freebie is a 10-question Poetry Types Quiz in Quizzler format. Quizzler is available for Palm handhelds, Pocket PCs, Macintosh, and Windows.

K12 Handhelds also points to additional resources teachers might use, including two great poetry podcasts. The podcasts are from Houghton Mifflin and School Library Journal.

Finally, K12 Handhelds offers a one-page PDF called Poetry Classroom Activities that gives simple and advanced ideas for using these resources. Activities include comparing poems, creating a poetry blog, and highlighting metaphors, similes, and other literary devices in Mobilpocket.

Thanks K12 Handhelds for making these resources freely available!

Screenshots of Resources

Note: Recall my tip in Soft Reset #19... If you are trying to download a file and only weird text shows up in your browser's screen, click your browser's Back button. Then right-click (Mac users can Control-click) and choose "Download Linked File" or "Save Link As..." from the context menu. The file is saved to the desktop. If the file is saved with a .txt extension, click the file name and remove the .txt. Then the downloaded file should have the correct icon and function properly.

Labels: ebooks, mobile phone, palm, pocket pc, podcast, windows mobile

Comments:

Hi Tony,

Thanks for pointing out the great resources from K-12. Speaking of quizzler, have you played around with version 5?

Dale Ehrhart

posted by

Anonymous at Tuesday, April 24, 2007 6:29:00 AM

Thanks for the post, Tony.

Dale, we've worked with Quizzler 5. It has a lot of promising features, most notably HTML support and an easy way to embed pictures. Unfortuantely, it's still in beta and is not really ready for use. (We tried it with a couple schools and had a lot of issues.) I've talked to the developer though and they're working on it, so stay tuned.

posted by

Karen Fasimpaur at Tuesday, April 24, 2007 9:49:00 AM

Karen, I have it and embedding the pictures on the desktop is nice. I tried it in briefly in my limited capacity (not yet a teacher), and I encountered problems too. Anyways, I've always enjoyed visiting your site.

Dale

posted by

Dale Ehrhart at Tuesday, April 24, 2007 11:14:00 AM

Another limitation of Quizzler 5 is that Palm users can no longer create a quiz in Memos and import it into Quizzler. For that reason, I'm sticking with Quizzler 4 for now.

For more information about Quizzler 5, listen to Soft Reset #18 where we interview Quizzler's developer, John Covele.

posted by

Tony Vincent at Tuesday, April 24, 2007 11:25:00 AM

Wow, I wonder what I was doing to miss that one. :0

posted by

Dale Ehrhart at Tuesday, April 24, 2007 1:31:00 PM

Karen,

The cats' names are Tucker and Dewey. You'd be surprised how many people think I'd name my cats Tungsten and Zire...

posted by

Tony Vincent at Tuesday, May 08, 2007 6:31:00 PM