Each month, we share five things we love as part of our Footnotes Newsletter. Take a look at some of our favorite English language arts resources, articles, videos, and more we found in January!

1. Interactive Lesson: Effective Paragraphs

An effective paragraph should include two things: a topic sentence that identifies its main idea and specific details to support it. This free online lesson by PBS LearningMedia helps students explore this concept through quick interactive exercises and a practice writing assignment.

2. Bulletin Board Ideas for English Language Arts

Classroom bulletin boards aren’t just for show! These spaces are the perfect tools for creating a positive classroom environment. Visit The Secondary English Coffee Shop to find four ELA bulletin board ideas that are easy to recreate and appropriate for the high school classroom.

3. Teaching New Genres: The PSA in ELA Class

Multimodal literacy is the ability to communicate through text, images, video, and other forms. To build these skills while encouraging student creativity, Professor Jessica S. Early suggests adding a unit based on public service announcements (PSA) to your ELA curriculum. Get the details about this hands-on project at the NCTE blog!

4. ChatGPT Will Ruin Education - Teachers are Obsolete

Don’t let the title scare you—this video isn’t as bad as you think! A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool called ChatGPT has taken education by storm, and for good reason: This program can instantly generate text responses for nearly any prompt. In this vlog, teacher Darin Nakakihara examines the pros and cons of AI tools like ChatGPT and discusses what the future of education might look like if AI becomes more mainstream.

5. Introducing ChatGPT to Your Classroom

Now that you’ve learned a bit about ChatGPT, let’s see how you can use it for practical, educational purposes. At MiddleWeb, teacher and advisor Kasey Short offers some ways to incorporate ChatGPT in your day-to-day prepping, from using it to create test questions to providing individualized feedback on student writing.