Technology Takes the Bite Out of Grammar!

One of my pet peeves about the teaching of grammar is hearing educators complain year after year that students can't spell, punctuate, distinguish a verb from a noun, write a sentence...
yada, yada, yada. Educators pass the blame from grade to grade, yet many students reach the 12th grade with below average grammar skills unable to write or speak coherently.    

The truth is if students don't have plenty of opportunities to practice and apply a particular grammar skill in context, a million grammar handouts or workbook exercises will not help them retain the basic grammar skills necessary to be an effective writer, speaker, reader, and listener.

If even above average readers who often exhibit an innate ability to decipher language rules struggle with grammar, many of our below average readers just give up on ever learning proper conventions and mechanics because grammar is often presented as a BORING, futile exercise with no real world application. When teachers use grammar as busy work in their emergency substitute plans, or even express their own fears about teaching grammar or writing, we send the message to kids that grammar just bites! 

We can't avoid teaching grammar! We must learn to teach it through writers' workshop, mini lessons, and every chance we get for students to connect the fact that grammar is part of writing, speaking, reading and even listening. We have to find ways to show kids how proper grammar is essential for communication, and how society perceives those who don't speak properly. We must teach students how to carefully analyze written and spoken language in search of those incidental "Teachable Grammar Moments" which exist all around us if we pay attention. Take the AllState insurance commercial slogan with the dangling modifier: "Dollar for dollar, nobody protects you from mayhem, like AllState!" and their older slogan,"You're in good hands". Both of these slogans are real life examples of grammar gone good and bad, and present the perfect occasion to discuss the confusion caused by dangling modifiers, and the most commonly confused contraction and adjective in the English language. Discussions about slang are also a great way to analyze the social stigma improper grammar can create for a job seeker. Students can keep a slang book and find more fitting synonyms, or grammatically correct expressions. Role playing scenarios, such as filling out a job application and interviewing for a job using slang vs. proper grammar help students see that there's a time and place for different types of proper and improper language, and someday their livelihood will be affected by their use of grammar.

Texting and Twitter do not have to undermine grammar instruction. Instead educators can leverage the power of both to reinforce grammar skills since they require students use written language. If anything, I think in some ways students' writing skills have benefitted from the texting craze because they are forced to write, albeit, the writing may not always be correct, but it's our job to help students hone their skills using a technology they enjoy. Assigning students to send grammatically correct texts to each other in class, or translate text language is an excellent way to quash once for all the stereotype that grammar is BORING.    

If we ask students to pay close attention to how grammar is used accurately and inaccurately all around us in signs, ads, commercials, songs, conversation, basically whenever we use language, it's pretty neat to see how kids enjoy the job of becoming grammar police!  We just have to find and present these opportunities for them. Technology makes it easier for us to do so, and for students to create content so they can apply what they learn.

Grammar has been the victim of a smear campaign for decades because it's not taught properly. Students are not always taught to create original content so they can exercise their ability to use a particular grammar skill, but technology can change that. Whenever students create original content using a tech tool, there should always be a written component affording students grammar practice, editing, revision and ultimately, demonstration of mastery of the grammar skill in the final presentation/publication of the content.

Here are some excellent grammar sites for students. But remember, we want students to create content where they apply the grammar skills they are learning. Some sites offering grammar practice can become glorified substitutes of the routine handouts or workbooks, so we must be careful not to trade one for the other.

Grammar has had lots of positive publicity thanks to sites like:
Grammar Girl  

http://www.dailygrammar.com/

http://www.grammar-monster.com/

http://flocabulary.com/    Be sure to explore this site for all of the cool grammar videos!
Grammar bytes
http://grammarerrors.com
http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hme/k_5/quizzes/

Here is a LIVEBINDER filled with resources about teaching and learning grammar:


Also visit Cybraryman's page with dozens of grammar links.

Roxy from North Carolina follows us! 

Please follow @grammardogs on Twitter, and have students, parents, teachers and administrators tweet a picture of a pet(s) with a sentence showing application of a particular grammar skill. For example, here's Roxie from North Carolina showing us how to use state of being and action verbs.   

The goal is to create a gallery of pet photos, organize them by grammar skill, and share them so students can have fun reading and creating original sentences, applying grammar in a real life context! 

Buster, from Virginia follows us!  

Cats are welcomed!
Throw us a bone at @grammardogs 

because grammar doesn't have to bite! 

Check out our Picasa photo gallery! 
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos

Here is also an iPad app http://showme.com which allows students to create content and teach their peers.  Check out my "showme" on sentence types! showme.com/sh/?h=8ZtnPYO 

Credit: http://www.quickmeme.com/Condescending-Literary-Pun-Dog/?upcoming

"When You Wish Upon A Wall..."

No offense to Jiminy Cricket, but this time, we'll leave the stars shining in the night sky and make our wishes on www.wallwisher.com. This brilliant site will make every teacher's dreams come true! 

Wallwisher.com is a virtual bulletin board of sorts to post and share what you want--text, images, videos, and links. It's a great tech tool for informal or formal assessments at all levels of Bloom's taxonomy.

It's a free site with a no registration option, and it's easy to build a wall in minutes.  Teachers can build a wall by registering. However, if you do not register, you will not have editing abilities. Teachers will want to register to be able to receive emails for screening student posts and offer feedback for post revisions. Once registered, you are prompted to create a unique URL for your wall so you can share it, and determine who can view and post on your wall. Wallwisher.com allows you to personalize the wall by picking a color theme and image or uploading your own. Most importantly, you can add a title and subtitles at the top of your wall so contributors to the wall know what they should or shouldn't post. Titles and subtitles serve to state the wall's purpose, and can be in the form of questions, descriptions, thought-provoking quotes, or whatever purpose you want the wall to serve. 

Here's how I have used wallwisher.com:

1.) I have used wallwisher.com to practice vocabulary. I have asked students to post original sentences for their assigned set of vocabulary words, and include an image, video, or link to illustrate the word's definition and connotation. Since students see each others' contributions, it's great practice for students to click on each others' posts to read other original sentences and see the attachments illustrating each of the definitions. 

2.) I have used wallwisher.com to assess reading comprehension for pre-reading, during reading and after reading practice. At different stages of reading instruction, I have asked students to stop reading, reflect and post predictions, connections, inferences, personal interpretations, comparisons, cause and effect examples,  and more. Students have posted what they believe to be the themes of a piece; they have identified the tone and mood of a reading piece and then included a post with an image, video or link expressing that particular tone or mood.

3.) My students have used wallwisher.com to have virtual sticky note conversations by responding to each others' posts. Students have practiced how to elaborate, agree or disagree with each other and how to provide textual support for their arguments in the form of images, links, videos they attach to their virtual posts. 

A classroom wall can be theme based or can be used for brainstorming. Teachers can post content for students to edit on the wall, and students can always include additional links, videos, or images to elaborate, extend and support whatever they post. All posts are limited to 160 characters which also teaches students to be succinct. 

As a virtual bulletin board with unlimited postings, there are as many possibilities for wallwisher.com's uses as there are stars in the sky to wish upon.  Not only can wallwisher increase student engagement, but it is a great tool to encourage a sense of collaboration and community in the classroom.  

"When you wish upon a Wall, 

Makes no difference who you are 

Anything your heart desires will come to you..."  

As Jiminy always says, "Let your conscience be your guide" when you design ways to use www.wallwisher.com in your classroom. Feel free to share how you have used this stellar tech tool! 

Check out a video from eduTeacher on how to use wallwisher.com, and my Fearlesstech4teachers Wallwisher to post how you will use this tool in your class!

It's A Black Tie Affair With Tagxedo: List 5 Tech Terms All Teachers Should Know!

Smarten up with http:/tagxedo.com, and turn vocabulary lessons into a special occasion!  

Tagxedo.com is not your ordinary cloud generator. Students can upload websites, blogs, or any type of text, then choose the shape of their word clouds. There are over a hundred shapes to choose, and dozens of color schemes, fonts, and layouts.   Primp your vocabulary with Tagxedo.com's stunning visuals that turn words into works of art! Tagxedo.com imitates art! Word clouds can be saved as JPG or PNGs, and shared on Twitter and Facebook.

Again, I used wordstash.com to create List Five to maintain consistency with the way the lists look and can be accessed.  What vocabulary tech tools do you know about? Let's chat to compare teaching experiences with these tools.

Click on the link to see List Five or email or tweet me at fearlesstech4teachers@gmail.com, and @trendingteacher, and I'll send you lists directly.

http://wordstash.com/lists/39085-tech-terms-every-teacher-should-know-list-five

Here are my own works of "word art" using List 5 of Tech Terms All Teachers Should Know! 

List 5 Tech Terms All Teachers Should Know!

Tagxedo.com Word Cloud I created adding my Twitter feed @trendingteacher!

 Vocabulary Lessons Are Special Occasions With Tagxedo!
A Few Ideas for Using Tagxedo Word Clouds!

• Teach annotation. Add a significant passage from a particular text being studied, and choose an appropriate shape revealing text's meaning. Use another web 2.0 tool to add music to the word cloud suggesting text's theme.
• Teach tone and mood. Add text, and choose colors and shapes that reveal the text's tone and mood. Use another web 2.0 tool to add music revealing tone and mood of word cloud.
• Teach synonyms, antonyms, homonyms. Choose one key word and create word clouds featuring synonyms, antonyms of that word. Create homonym clouds too listing words that sound the same but are spelled differently.
• Teach connotation. Choose one word or phrase and create a word cloud with the word or phrase's multiple connotations.
• Emphasize connotation of words by creating positive, negative and neutral words clouds. Choose colors and shapes suggesting each effect. 
• Teach literary terms, figures of speech, or idioms by creating word clouds containing definitions and examples.
• Summarize a text. Have students write a summary, upload the summary and choose appropriate color and shapes to match text's meaning.   

Tagxedo's opportunities to dress-up language arts lessons will make-over your vocabulary instruction, making it versatile and memorable! 

We're Lucky To Have Tech, But Are We Any Wiser?

In the age before tech tools, a.k.a. the analog world, teachers had to find creative ways to engage students with difficult texts or concepts, and help them transition to more challenging reads and ideas, but it wasn’t always easy or even achievable in 180 days! And, naturally some teachers were better at it than others. Now that we’re lucky enough to have tech in schools, are we any wiser? What’s changed in terms of how we use our resources? How are we using tech tools effectively to motivate reluctant learners and help them make the necessary transitions to become literate, educated adults? 

If students reach the fourth grade without strong math or reading skills, how many of these students overcome their deficiencies in middle school, high school or even adulthood? How are we truly using tech tools as interventions to stop the cycle of illiteracy and aliteracy?  

Today’s tech tools proclaim to boost critical thinking and combat all types of illiteracy, and I believe they can...someday in the near future, not just yet! I visited a Title I school recently where thousands of dollars had been spent on lap top carts, yet no one had bought the software for the lap tops. How effective was that decision to buy the hardware without the software? How long will the lap top carts sit in a closet before students and teachers can take advantage of them? Like this school, not all of our nation’s schools have caught up and established the infrastructure needed to support complete tech integration, and in those schools that have, we need to ask if the tech is being used wisely to teach critical thinking. 

With good reason, there’s been a lot of buzz about the September 3rd, 2011 New York Times article revealing the stagnant test scores of the Kyrene School district of Arizona. Many pro tech educators, including me, claim these statistics don’t tell the full story. However, what is the real story? I am a firm believer that learning how to critically think, without ever teaching to a test, increases a student’s chances of scoring high on standardized tests. Of course, for some students, it’s just not that simple; there will be other factors that affect their test performance. But, on the whole, if there is an entire school who has been using tech wisely and meaningfully for several years, statistically wouldn’t the scores tend to be higher? So, the questions remain: With tech tools as support, what critical thinking skills do students need to learn from year to year, and how are all subject area teachers across grade levels working in vertical teams to achieve “digital” continuity from kindergarten to high school? How are teachers building on the tech and critical thinking skills students mastered in previous years? We need to reflect on our curriculum goals that integrate tech and identify exactly how these goals help students develop critical thinking, study habits, and mastery of concepts to progress to more rigorous thinking levels. 

  

However, if schools have struggled to achieve this continuity and consistency to build vertical teams and meet benchmarks when we first began to use pen, paper and books, what are we going to do differently now that we have tech?  Have we grown wiser? These are questions  I think we must continually ask:

• How are we using specific tech tools to effectively address illiteracy and aliteracy?
• How does my school or my district’s vertical team create continuity, consistency and increase rigor year to year? What conditions create successful tech integration?
• How are we using specific tech tools to effectively teach critical thinking year to year?
• How are we using tech tools to engage and build autonomy?
• How are we using tech tools to help reluctant learners transition from less challenging work to more rigorous academic levels?
• How has tech integration lead to increased academic achievement? 
• What specific tasks and roles are we assigning reluctant readers and writers when we use tech tools in the classroom? How we are we using tech tools to help build these students’ skills so that they can have an active role in our classrooms, and become independent learners?  

Tech in education remains undiscovered country for many schools, and our students exist as digital natives held back by an analog world. Many of our nation’s teachers remain afraid to abandon the analog world. The sooner we begin to coordinate our efforts, the wiser and luckier we will be.   

Please check my webdoc and share your thoughts! Thanks for reading!

Are They Talking Behind Your Back?

Whether you want to admit it, or not, there are two societies thriving in your classroom; one is in plain view which you take credit for leading fearlessly, and keeping under control,and then something very human begins to happen right behind your back. Whether we like it or not, an “underground” society emerges which you as the teacher are not privy to, a secret society inaccessible to you because of the role you play: “The Teacher”. Regardless of how cool you may think you are as a teacher, and how much you think your students admire and respect you, students do talk behind your back!

Todaysmeet.com is a service allowing us as teachers to enter the teen psyche and surreptitiously discover what they are talking about “behind our back” during a lecture, a discussion, a guest speaker, a viewing of a film, and so many other school activities requiring them to be a passive audience member. Todaysmeet.com EMPOWERS you as the teacher because students are held accountable for listening; they are no longer spectators, but participants in an interactive audience requiring them to hold their own by providing comments, questions, speculations, arguments, answers, solutions, evidence, opinions, explanations, reflection, analysis, application…the list of possibilities is endless and dependent on the criteria YOU set for the * “backchannel” conversations students undeniably have behind our backs. Obviously we cannot control the conversations students have outside of our classrooms, but Todaysmeet.com EMPOWERS us to control the conversations students are having “behind our backs” inside our classrooms.

* Backchannel is a term used by James Socol, creator of Todaysmeet.com. Socol says “backchannel” is “everything going on in the room that isn’t coming from the presenter… where people ask each other questions, pass notes, get distracted, and give you the most immediate feedback you’ll ever get.”

The temptation for students to pass notes, and have sidebar conversations is virtually eliminated with Todaysmeet.com.

Todaysmeet.com EMPOWERS you as the teacher to know exactly what students are thinking, and therefore instantly obtain feedback about a student’s depth and breadth of understanding during any type of presentation.

How does Todaysmeet.com work

Step One

Prior to any type of presentation, demonstration or listening activity, visit Todaysmeet.com to create and name a room where your students will be talking to each other while they hear the presentation.

• You can choose to have students talk to other students who are in the same classroom at the same time; or you can collaborate with another teacher to have two or more classrooms engage in a conversation by listening to the same content at the same time. Every student will need to have his/her own computer. If computers are available for every student in a school building to use all at the same time, an entire school can view a presentation and engage in conversation on Todaysmeet.com integrating subjects, grade and achievement levels, and encouraging cooperation and communication among all students and teachers.

Step 2

Decide when you would like Todaysmeet.com to delete the room, i.e., in 2 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours, one day, one week, one month, or one year. The type of presentation students will be listening to will determine the longevity of the meeting room. If you plan on having an on-going discussion, you may want to extend the time so you can return to the same room where the feed of previous posts will appear and serve as a recap of a prior conversation.

Step 3
Once you have created and named your “talking room”, provide your students with the URL of the room. For example:
Create a room
Name a room: Lab demonstration # 1
Delete a room: in 2 hours
Click on Create a room.

• Note: If the name you chose for your room is already taken, a red X will appear next to the URL under the heading of Name a room.
• Once you click on Create a room, the next window to appear will be a split page with two sides; “Listen” on the left and “Talk” on the right as well as a window for students to type their names.
• It is important to set specific norms regarding the names students will use. When working with middle school students who may hesitate to share their true thoughts and feelings for fear of how their peers may perceive their posts, a teacher can EMPOWER her students by asking them to generate a pen name, which only she will know. The teacher can keep a log of the student names along with the secret pen names. This will ensure confidentiality and afford students the piece of mind they will not be criticized for their posts.

At this point, the teacher will have a URL to provide her students once they enter the classroom and before a presentation. The teacher can write the URL for all students to see and enter once they each have their own computer. Upon typing and entering the unique URL of the teacher created “talking room”, students will see the split page of Listen and Talk and will need to enter a name and click join to begin adding their posts.

How can Todaysmeet.com EMPOWER you and your students

Students can use Todaysmeet.com to engage in conversation after listening and viewing a myriad of activities, such as a lab demonstration, a lecture on any subject, a guest speaker, a film, an audio recording, a student presentation, a play, a written exercise practice while learning how to write a second language, a debate, and so much more.

• You can even have a silent Socratic discussion after reading a specific text; instead of discussing the text out loud, both you and your students can post questions and responses on Todaysmeet.com rather than having an oral discussion. This may enable the more reticent and timid students to gain confidence in their role in the class since they can use their pen name to posts their thoughts and keep their posts anonymous.

How will you use Todaysmeet.com in your Empowered Class?                        Share your ideas

Teachers can use a Todaysmeet.com as an assessment tool in a variety of ways. Student posts offer teachers instant feedback showing a student’s understanding of concepts being discussed. Student posts can provide teachers with an instant assessment or even a summative assessment of concepts taught. The possibilities to use Todaysmeet.com as an assessment tool are endless. An Empowered Teacher needs to determine the content of what students will hear and/or see and identify how this content will help students meet the specific learning goals the teacher would like to students to reach.

Teachers can even use posts on Todaysmeet.com to teach students Self-Assessment. Teachers can use both teacher and student models as examples of quality posts. Teachers can allow students to experiment with the technology first so they can feel comfortable writing posts and then lead them in a discussion about posting etiquette and what makes for an acceptable and unacceptable post. Providing a rubric indicating the frequency and quality of the posts, and posting etiquette is a must! Before using Todaysmeet.com it is essential to explain norms for acceptable posts and provide specific examples of unacceptable posts. You may want to ask students to give you examples of what would be considered acceptable and unacceptable posts.

The Todaysmeet.com discussion can be used as a springboard to study and explore other topics, which will naturally come up in the conversations.

Allow and accept the natural digressions, which may surface away from the topic at hand since it is not unusual for people to get off topic if for a moment during discussions.

Assist students in evaluating and interpreting their posts and those of others; Teachers can print the posts(feed) and have a follow-up conversation out loud about the thoughts posted. Questions teachers can ask are endless such as, what were the patterns? What comments stood out? Who had the most insightful remark and why? The wittiest? The strangest? Evaluate the off-topic comments as well and discuss what effect they had on the conversation.

Always consider their strengths and weaknesses of your students and their varying degrees of ability regarding critical thinking, spelling, typing speed, etc. prior to the Todaysmeet.com session and after. The teacher should take time to self-reflect on what were the advantages and disadvantages for the different ability groups. What modifications can be made next time using Todaysmeet.com? What worked well and what needs tweaking? What did students appear to be confused about? What may have caused the confusion?

Bring your students’ hidden questions and thoughts to the surface of your classroom to promote conversation, critical thinking, and most importantly to determine the homogeneity and/or heterogeneity of your students’ thoughts. Todaysmeet.com lets you enter your students’ mind. Empower yourself in your classroom by guiding what your students are saying “behind your back”.