Padlet is by no means a new tool for the classroom, nor is it new to our district. I have seen it used in classrooms, and for a while, it was a regular on the list of tech tools to explore during building PD sessions. (For those of you who jumped on the bandwagon early on, remember that Padlet was formerly known as Wallwisher.)
Padlet created this padlet "Hacks" wall a few months ago, and it contains tips and tricks for using Padlet more effectively. If you use Padlet or are considering using it, I would encourage you to check out the hacks.
ReadWorks is a non-profit online reading comprehension tool, and it is FREE for educators to create an account and access ALL of their materials. (How often is the entire access free?! Woo-hoo!)
One of the newer features of ReadWorks is the expansion of their paired texts sets, which now includes a number of passages that are deemed 9-10 reading level or 11-12 reading level (according to their Lexile scores). Within the paired texts sets, teachers have FREE access to literary texts, non-fiction texts (some of which are primary sources), artwork, and question sets; all of the pieces are available for print or as a PDF download, which could then be shared with students via an online classroom (such as Google Classroom or Edmodo).
The question sets appear to follow this format:
a few questions pertaining to text #1
a few questions pertaining to text #2
a few questions requiring the synthesizing of information from both texts
The purpose of the questions appears to focus on student ability to state an answer and support it with evidence from one or both texts. The questions could easily be used as is, but they would be enhanced by adding a few questions that look at other aspects of the Informational Text standards or research skills.
To view all of the passages available in the paired texts sets, click here. Filter the list keyword, grade, Lexile, topic, text type, or skill.
If you are a high school English teacher in our district, you are most likely already making good use of Turn It In and its many features, but did you hear about the newest feature?
Turn It In now offers an online discussion board!
I had the opportunity to view it in action this week with freshmen; I get to see it with juniors next week...and I am very excited about this new feature!
Why am I excited and using exclamation points? Don't we already have access to online discussions through Google Classroom?
Google Classroom does allow students to have discussions via questions the teacher posts to the stream. Turn It In takes it a few steps beyond the basics, however. Here's what you can do in Turn It In's discussion feature:
Teachers post questions using a screen similar to posting an assignment. There is a spot for the question, a spot for additional instructions, and a due date.
Teachers can have multiple questions posted at once, and they are easily viewed on the Discussion page.
Teachers can chose to moderate posts or not.
As students post responses and reply to posts, Turn It In visually tracks the thread and labels each response.
1 (or another single number) means the post is the beginning of a thread.
1.1, 1.2, etc means the posts are responses to the original post labeled 1.
1.1.1, 1.1.2, etc means the posts are responses to responses to the original post labeled 1.
(I'm not sure how far down the path it goes, but I did see a 1.1.1.1 yesterday!)
Teachers can manipulate how they view the posts. They can view the posts threaded (meaning the posts read like a conversation, in the order they were posted) or they can view the posts by student.
When a teacher sorts the posts by student, the teacher can see both original posts and replies to classmates posts. The student's every contribution shows up. (In contrast, Google only shows a student's original post.)
Students can post questions if the teacher allows. This could add an interesting dynamic to the conversation.
Thinking of giving it a go in your room? Please let me know how it goes!
PoeStories.com is an informative and easy-to-navigate website dedicated to the life and writings of Edgar Allan Poe created by Robert Giordano, a graphic artist, photographer, and fellow writer. Giordano included a number of features that make his website a fantastic tool and resource for both student and teacher. Like most Poe websites, it begins with a biography of the Master of Macabre, and there are a number of photos accessible within the included photo gallery, including some of Poe's gravesite taken by Giordano himself. Along with the biography, Giordano also includes a timeline that cross-references Poe's life events with major historical events that occurred in his lifetime.
One piece that was especially important to Giordano in creating his website was accessibility to Poe's writings. Through his website, teachers and students have immediate access to the full digital texts. In order to help readers, Giordano hyperlinked words and phrases, connecting them to a glossary he has created. The glossary assists readers in understanding both definitions and allusions. Readers have access to the glossary as a whole, but the information is also visible while reading a text. Instead of being redirected to the glossary page, clicking on a hyperlinked word in a story opens a little pop-up box with the definition/explanation.
Whether you're looking for a new Poe story to engage your students or seeking a more accessible way to read his works, Giordano's website might be worth checking out.
A few weeks ago, I shared this timeline for our English curriculum study. It is a digital timeline that I created through TimelineJS, which is based out of Northwestern University's Knight Lab. A few people expressed interest in how I created the timeline, and the instructions are all presented very clearly and concisely on the TimelineJS website.
In a nutshell, you make a copy of a Google spreadsheet template from TimelineJS. (If you are going to have your students use this program, I recommend making your copy of the template "View Only" so that students have to make a copy from your copy.) Then you (of your students) fill in the information on the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has spaces dates (start and end), times (if appropriate), heading text, explanatory text, digital media (images, YouTube videos, website links, etc.), and digital media source citations.
Once your spreadsheet is complete, the TimelineJS website walks you through how to publish your spreadsheet to the web. After a few clicks on their website, you have a moderately interactive digital timeline that looks pretty polished.
Honestly, the part that took me the longest was finding the perfect picture for each event on my timeline!
If you are thinking of having your students use TimelineJS for a project, here are a few tips from the website:
Keep it short. We recommend not having more than 20 slides for a reader to click through.
Pick stories that have a strong chronological narrative. It does not work well for stories that need to jump around in the timeline.
Write each event as a part of a larger narrative.
Include events that build up to major occurrences - not just the major events
John Green, popular YA author of The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska, has a secret YouTube vlogging persona on the Crash Course YouTube channel!
Did you find him? I hope so because it really wasn't that secret...perhaps just relatively unknown, at least around here. (He has over 3.5 million followers!)
If you took a moment to visit his YouTube channel, you saw a sampling of Crash Course's almost 450 educational videos. Started by John and his brother Hank, the Crash Course channel offers free (and might I add, entertaining) 10-15 minute videos covering all sorts of content. Currently, 24 of those videos are specifically connected to commonly taught high school literature. The literature playlist starts with:
And then it moves on to:
Of Pentameter & Bear Baiting - R&J Part 1
Love or Lust? - R&J Part 2
Like Pale Gold - The Great Gatsby Part 1
Was Gatsby Great - The Great Gatsby Part 2
Language, Voice, and Holden Caulfield - The Catcher in the Rye Part 1
Holden, JD, and the Red Cap - The Catcher in the Rye Part 2
Before I Got My Eye Put Out - The Poetry of Emily Dickinson
A Long and Difficult Journey, or The Odyssey
Fate, Family, and Oedipus Rex
Ghosts, Murder, and More Murder - Hamlet Part 1
Ophelia, Gertrude, and Regicide - Hamlet Part 2
Don't Reanimate Corpses! - Frankenstein Part 1 Frankenstein Part 2
Reader, it's Jane Eyre
If One Finger Brought Oil - Things Fall Apart Part 1 Things Fall Apart Part 2 To Kill a Mockingbird Part 1
Race, Class, and Gender in To Kill a Mockingbird Part 2
Aliens, Time Travel, and Dresden - Slaughterhouse Five Part 1
PTSD and Alien Abduction - Slaughterhouse Five Part 2
Slavery, Ghosts, and Beloved Langston Hughes & the Harlem Renaissance
The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Beyond the literature playlist, however, are many other videos that could be connected to the literature in our classrooms. For example, the US History Playlist contains 48 videos that could help set the stage for texts studied in American Lit. There are also Psychology and World History Playlists that could connect. View all of the Crash Course playlists here.
While these videos were not originally intended for the classroom, the Green brothers are very encouraging of teachers using the videos. I could see the videos working in many classrooms, or as part of a Blendspace activity, or as an informational text/video to be analyzed, or...
The wonderfully helpful Nicole Hansen from ATI shared out some resources for the assessment within our district. I've linked to the two that pertain to high school English below; the one caveat is that you must be logged-in to your k12 account to view these district files. If you happen to find one or some of them helpful, please make sure to thank Nicole!
If you currently teach a course that uses a McDougal Littel textbook (English I, English II, or American Lit), remember that students have online access through Classzone. If you can't find you Classzone codes, please email me and I can send them to you. (I am not posting them here as the codes are specific for our district.)
This spring, Google is hosting a free two-day online conference called Education On Air. Join other educators from around the world, and participate in online Keynotes, panel discussions, and mini-sessions. It appears to be the sort of thing that you can jump in and out as your schedule allows, so if you are unsure of committing, register just in case! Remember, it is FREE!
Friday, May 8: Leading for the Future (9 am - 2 pm CST)
The Friday online Keynote and panel sessions are marketed towards those in leadership positions (anywhere from admin to a team leader to IT), but the posted topics sound applicable to classroom teachers as well. The full schedule will be released in April, but here are a few of the currently posted sessions:
*Creating Student Ownership
*Fostering Innovation in Schools
*Making Technology Work for Learning
*Communicating Change
Saturday, May 9: Shaping the Classroom Today
The Saturday online sessions are meant to be convenient and applicable to the classroom teacher. As Google puts it, "run by educators for educators, designed to be immediately useful to you." Sessions range from 15-45 minutes, and they are led by Google Certified Teachers, trainers, and general Googlers. Again, the full schedule is set to be released in April, but here are the posted teaser sessions:
"While facts and figures engage a small area of the brain, stories engage multiple brain regions that work together to build colorful, rich three-dimensional images and emotional responses. As we read stories, we quickly begin to feel as if what’s happening out there is actually happening in here. Each sensory image, sound, texture, color, sensation and emotion provides a hook for our brain as the story draws us in and maintains our attention effortlessly.
Over the past 12 years, 99,649 people have shared their stories through 57,138 interviews recorded in the form of conversations by StoryCorps. These stories are broadcast via NPR's Morning Edition and StoryCorps' website, but their real focus is on preserving an oral history of a diverse representation of Americans as each conversation is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
These oral stories, however, can be more than just a way to preserve our American history and culture. Stories are one of the most powerful ways for us to learn. About people. About topics. About ourselves. They are also a way for us to learn about listening.
Through StoryCorps' website, we have access to hundreds of those stories to use in our classrooms. The topics range from family to history, romance to struggle to memory loss. Brain research tells us that the language of story telling helps information stick in the brain, specifically because it often connects information to emotion. (On the contrary, straight informational language tends to slip more easily from our brains.)
So why aren't we using more storytelling in our classrooms?
One way we can incorporate more stories into our classrooms is through sites like StoryCorps; those stories, however, are limited in topics and scope as there are only a finite amount available. Thankfully, StoryCorps recently launched a new website called StoryCorps.me, as well as Android and Apple apps. Their purpose? To provide "a way for individuals to connect in a meaningful way with those close to them, and to gain insight into the lives of others." What a fantastic way for students to tell their stories or make meaning of content through connections with their stories or the stories of those they know.
Once a student has access to the app, all they need to do is follow these steps:
Choose someone to interview
Select questions to ask (StoryCorps.me provides ideas)
Find a quiet place to record using the app
Record (and listen!)
Share the interview online via StoryCorps.me
I can think of so many places this could work in the English classroom! Research topics could come to life. Students could explore themes from literature alive and well in the world around them. And through it all, they would be building dendrites while making all of those connections...and not even realizing it!
If you'd like to do some brainstorming on ways to use this in your classroom, please let me know! I'd love to toss around some ideas. And, if you can already see where you might use something like this, I'd love to either see it in action or hear about your results!
An impossible to fail quiz? What would be the point in giving that?
Tom Mullaney, author of the Sustainable Teaching website, posted recently about why they just might be worth trying. From his perspective, this "quiz" is not meant to be a summative assessment. I would argue that it is not even a formative assessment since the teacher doesn't gain much feedback regarding student learning through it. The students receive immediate feedback, however. Thus, it is a non-assessing quiz (if that is possible).
So what exactly is it if it is not an assessment? An impossible to fail quiz is a learning tool, it provides students with immediate feedback, and it is in fact quite impossible to fail. It is a digital quiz that customizes the next step based upon correct and incorrect answers. If the student responds correctly, the student moves on to the next question. If the student responds incorrectly, the student is instructed to view a video reviewing that particular concept. Then the student tries the missed question a second time. When the student correctly answers the question, the student then proceeds to the next one. (Try/view an impossible to fail quiz here.)
Clearly, it is not an assessment because every student should (in theory) earn a perfect score by the end of the quiz. The purpose lies not in assessing student knowledge but in giving students an opportunity to test their knowledge and practice as needed. (How in-depth the practice goes depends upon the teacher creating the impossible to fail quiz.) In theory, each student will eventually correctly answer each question because he/she either knew the material or learned the material through the review videos.
Think you might be interested in giving one a go in your room? Mullaney posted a very thorough tutorial on how to create an impossible to fail quiz using Google Forms. If you give the impossible to fail quiz a try, I'd love to hear about your experience!
Tired of the templates provided in Google Presentation? SlideCarnival offers 26 free templates for you and your students to utilize and customize in Google. While 26 isn't a huge number, at least it is a place to start...
Once you find a template you'd like to use, follow these steps:
Click on the "Options" sprocket found on the black "Google Slides" bar at the bottom of the template.
Click on "Open Editor." (This will open a "View Only" version of the template in your Google Drive as long as you are already signed in.)
Under File, select "Make a Copy."
You should now be able to utilize and customize the template as you desire.
If you currently teach a course with a district textbook...
I would greatly appreciate one minute of your time. I am trying to get a rough idea of how many teachers connect their students with online access to the district textbook. If you have a moment, would you please take this survey? I swear, it really will only take one minute of your time! There are only three questions, and they are checkbox answers. It probably took you more time to read this post than it will take you to complete the survey.
Last spring, I put together this Research Project Blendspace for English IB students who needed to work more independently for various reasons. It is geared more towards the English I level in terms of introducing some of the concepts, but there may be pieces that can be spliced out for other classrooms, depending upon student needs.
If you'd like to use the Blendspace in its entirety, there is an accompanying Google document that provides students with places to record their learning, think critically about the content, and apply the information to their specific research topic.
BetsiePieBaker's YouTube channel, "Some Poetry For You," features stop motion illustrated readings of the poetry (and one short story - "The Gift of the Magi"...English I teachers!) listed below. I had the opportunity to see Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73" in action last week, and the students responded really well to the interpretation. They had already read and discussed the sonnet, and they seemed to appreciate the visual representation created by the stop motion illustrations. BetsiePieBaker's current offerings include:
"I am Nobody" by Emily Dickinson
"This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
"To a Friend who Sent Me some Roses" by John Keats
"who knows if the moon's" by e.e.cummings
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost
"Sonnet 73" by Shakespeare
"Discovery" by Elizabeth Keller
"In Defense of Seasonal Poetry" by Elizabeth Keller
"Shooting Stars" by Sara Henreckson
"Holy Sonnet 10: Death, Be Not Proud" by John Donne
Did I get you singing Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off," which seems to be everywhere right now?
This post actually has nothing to do with that song. (Sorry if it is now in your head...)
TED-Ed recently posted two Shakespeare-based lessons. Each lesson includes lesson ideas to go along with the posted video clips. The lesson segments are: Watch, Think, Dig Deeper, and Discuss. Educators can also take the TED-Ed lesson, customize it, and share it on the lesson site. (The first one currently has 27 versions shared; the second has 47.)
Poetry, Pentameter, & Pirates: Why Shakespeare Loved Iambic Pentameter (~ 6 min) This lesson focuses on the meters and references both Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.
The Great Conspiracy Against Julius Caesar (~ 6 min) For those opting to do Julius Caesar instead of Macbeth, this clip offers some insight into why the whole event happened.
TED is fond of posting thematic playlists, and I recently found this one entitled "Before public speaking..." This playlist currently includes the eight TED talks listed below. Perhaps one (or a few) could fit into your speech classroom?
"How to speak so that people want to listen" by Julian Treasure (~10 min)
"Your body language shapes who you are" by Amy Cuddy (~21 min)
"How I beat stage fright" by Joe Kowan (~8 min)
"Talk nerdy to me" by Melissa Marshall (~5 min)
"How great leaders inspire action" by Simon Sinek (~18 min)
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics" by Sebastian Wernicke (~6 min)
"Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking" by Megan Washington (~13 min)
This Sunday, some people will actually watch the Super Bowl for the game. These people will hoot and holler at the screen, perhaps rooting for the lesser of two evils because their team was not fortunate enough to make the game.
I am not one of these.
While I enjoy the Super Bowl, I have always been there more for the food. That's not entirely honest. Most of my Super Bowl Sunday enjoyment stems from the commercials. However, the food is typically what makes it so that I am actually in a room where the game is on the screen. If it weren't for the food, I would miss the commercials as they were strategically revealed throughout the game; without the beckoning of the food, I would most likely end up perusing them later on via YouTube.
Originally, I enjoyed Super Bowl commercials simply because they were often well-done and witty. Since becoming a teacher, however, I have also looked at them with a critical eye for the classroom and considered them a type of digital literacy. Most years, there is at least one commercial that is applicable to the classroom in some way, like the Kia Optima "One Epic Ride" from a few years ago.
I recently came across these two resources that can help educators utilize Super Bowl ads more effectively in the classroom.
The first, Super Bowl Ads archive, is simply an easier way to browse past Super Bowl ads.
The second, Teach Media Literacy with Super Bowl Ads, is a blog post by Frank Baker (creator of the Media Literacy Clearinghouse) where he encourages teachers to look at these expensive commercials as persuasive digital texts. He includes some ideas for application to classrooms across the content areas (including thinking like an advertiser), but you can also view some more lesson ideas for close readings of digital texts at the MLC website here.
