Pinterest.com has emerged on the social media scene with a million and one uses, but one of the best ways to take advantage of this tech tool is for differentiation to build students' reading confidence and interest. When we face the challenge of having unskilled or reluctant readers in our classrooms, Pinterest.com can help us organize reading selections for individual students. Unlike other bookmarking tools, Pinterest.com is more visual. Imagine, a virtual cork board and the ability to have as many cork boards as you want. A teacher using Pinterest.com can create various virtual bulletin boards for as many topics as he/she would like, e.g. a board showcasing vocabulary definitions and examples, a board with links to pieces of literature, a board with non fiction selections or showing examples of grammar in context...you get the idea. After adding the Pinterest.com bookmarklet to your browser, as you browse the web and find content you like, you can "pin" the content to the Pinterest.com cork board of your choice.
For teachers, this means as you search for high interest content for reluctant readers, you can organize the content by category or even create personalized boards for each student adding content catered specifically for the student's specific learning needs.
What's even better about this site is the ability for users to "repin" content, which means that if a student enjoys a particular pin the teacher recommended, using his/her own Pinterest account, he/she will then be able to add it to his/her own pinboard. "Repinning" becomes a sort of virtual recommendation of content, and we all know students will listen to their peers' recommendations any day over ours. The trick is to find interesting content to catch students' attention so that then they will repin and promote the content to their classmates.
There's nothing trivial about Twitter! Twitter can literally transform your classroom, and your professional growth. I have created a Sliderocket presentation sharing 24 A through Z Twitter Tasks that support the High School English Language Arts Common Core Standards. In my next series of posts about Twitter, I will share tips for using Twitter in the elementary, and middle school classroom as well as A through Z suggestions for joining Twitter's Professional Learning Networks. Twitter is so much more than just sharing what you're doing, or what you had for lunch. Twitter is about joining a global conversation that will help you learn and grow. Hope you enjoy and share this presentation with others!
How do we build a community of writers and readers in our classrooms? How do we teach students to give, receive and apply feedback? Storymash.com can help students experience the writing process first hand!
First, students post their writing in the form of a draft. Each draft posted is considered a chapter regardless of the genre. Storymash.com attaches a discussion forum to the post so any reader on the site can post feedback, or even provide extension ideas for the piece. Any reader can also choose a featured draft and take the storyline in a different direction or change the genre completely. Hence, the name storymash.com since all visitors to the site can potentially "mash" their stories.
Once a student receives feedback, students apply the feedback and repost the revised piece, making it available for further peer review and ranking, but best of all, for the possibility to earn MONEY!
In the draft stage of the writing process on storymash.com, only the student can edit the piece, but once the student has edited the piece, he/she will repost the piece as "published. As a "published" piece on storymash.com, writing can no longer be edited by students, but readers can still comment, and rank the writing. If the piece becomes popular, then students earn revenue for their writing through the page advertisements. Storymash.com also offer writing contests with prices over $500! (Please visit storymash.com for a more detailed explanation on how revenue potential works. I could definitely see how a school could create an account and use the revenue for school needs, or how students can create personal accounts with parent permission and see how they can earn money through their writing.)
Storymash.com helps students understand writing requires reflection, collaboration and revision. I hope writing will be a smash in your classroom at storymash.com!
(Disclaimer: This site is open to anyone, so teachers should ask for parent permission/school approval before registering since content of published stories will vary, and may include mature themes. Teachers can still use storymash.com to have students post their own stories, but monitor what stories students read on storymash.com.)
Soar to new heights with Storybird.com, a site that allows students to create, collaborate, read, and share their own stories. Storybird.com has thousands of art pieces arranged by themes. Students select a theme or piece of art to inspire them to write a story.
Students can invite collaborators to share the writing of a story.
Storybird.com also has a public library for visitors to read stories others have created.
Students can create reading lists of their favorite Storybird stories.
Best of all Storybird serves as a publisher! Students can publish their stories privately or publicly online or in hard copy. The site is entirely free, but for a reasonable price, parents can order soft or hard cover of books their children create, or you can order a PDF version of a story to read on an e-reader or iPad.
Storybird encourages collaborative writing and supports all aspects of the writing process. Its features are easy, intuitive and safe. There are endless possibilities for using Storybird to support reading instruction as well. Regardless of age or grade level, storybird.com's art work inspires anyone to be a connected reader and writer!
Teaching author's perspective, author's purpose, tone and mood, characterization and other literary elements are some of the most difficult reading skills for students to untangle. Because of time constraints, teachers often ignore discussing an author's life experiences as part of front-loading a text to be read. I have always been a proponent of less is more, so I make the time to let kids learn aboout a writer's life before we read his/her book, and we research the historical period in which the book was written. Both the author's life experiences and the historical period provide an invaluable insight that helps readers understand themes, allusions, plot events, characterizations, conflicts and other literary elements. Of course, now more than ever technology can facilitate teaching all of these reading concepts.
Using myfakewall.com, students can create a fake profile page `a la Facebook to explore the life of an author, a character, a historical figure, an idea, a process, an animal or anything students would like to personify.
Using Myfakewall to teach Author's Purpose
Teachers can assign students to create Myfakewall.com profiles and posts that reveal the author's purpose, i.e., why the author wrote a piece: to entertain, inform or teach, persuade or convince. Students can add "friends" such as other writers or people who influenced the writer to write a particular piece, or even characters, and have those influential "friends" post questions or comments on the writer's wall so the posts and the writer's responses to the posts reveal the author's purpose for writing.
Using Myfakewall to teach Author's Perspective
The concept of author's perspective can also be taught in the same manner by having students write posts revealing the writer's feelings or beliefs and how these views prompted the writer to create a particular piece of writing. High order skills are at work because students apply what they learned after reading a biography or autobiography about the author's life. To write thought-provoking posts and comments on the Myfakewall.com page, students must analyze and evaluate the author's life circumstances, choices, and beliefs and synthesize a post using texutal examples to reveal how and why an author incorporated his/her life views in his/her writing.
Using Myfakewall to teach Characterization, Historical Events, Tone and Mood, Connotation and more
Of course, Myfakewalls do not have to be just about a writer's life. Students can create fakewalls about characters to learn characterization. Posts could feature the characterization strategy S.T.E.A.L., which focuses on analyzing a character's Speech, Thoughts, Effect on Others, Actions and Looks.
Other fakewalls to challenge students to use critical thinking skills and textual support would be profiles for historical figures with posts that explore a famous or infamous decision, its repercussions, and the historical figure's controversial thoughts and conversations with his/her associates, friends or family. Imagine how primary and secondary sources could also be used to incorporate textual support on all of these pseudo profile pages.
As difficult as it is for students to identify the tone and mood of a piece, myfakewall.com can support teaching this concept if students are asked to create a profile using particular textual examples that reflect a specific negative or positive tone while comments could show reader's positive or negative mood after reading these text examples. Myfakewall.com could even be used to reinforce connotation if students create fake posts using negative connotations sharing them with fake users to see the effect words have on other readers and writers.
Myfakewall.com supports so many different critical thinking activities that allow students to step inside the mind of notable figures, use textual examples, primary and secondary sources, and their own creativity.
Whether students create fake pages that are serious or funny, they will be engaged in creating original content.
I would love to see what Myfakewall.com profiles students could create to explore the minds and lives of scientists, mathematicians, artists, and other noteworthy individuals or ideas.
I grew up a 20th century student reading physical books. I wrote in my books, dog-eared pages, spilled tears on breathtaking passages, borrowed them, and lost many classics to friends. Now, technology has asked me to rethink the efficiency with which I read introducing e-readers to contest my reading status quo. I struggle to make up my mind, and abandon one for the other because I love the reading experience they both can offer. But, as a non digital native, I’ve realized that today's students haven’t had the same reading experiences; therefore, they cannot have the same nostalgia for physical books like I do because they spend more time using digital products than paper ones. They were born into a society with an entirely different delivery system of information. It is the non-digital natives, like me, who will need to embrace new technology, like e-readers, if we are to fight illiteracy and aliteracy.
Ironically, the first e-book I read on my e-reader was Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. While reading this e-book, I was actually more connected to people than I ever was when reading physical books. My e-reader made it easy for me to adapt and for my students to engage with text.
E-readers allow readers to:
instantly share pages, short passages or quotes with anyone via Facebook, Twitter or email.
Books obviously can’t compete with these features!
E-readers also let readers instantly:
rate and post an online review of a book
share a reading status with friends on Facebook and Twitter so they know how far along readers have read.
bookmark pages
add notes about a page or passage
highlight key sections while the e-reader keeps track of it all.
search for keywords
touch a word to look up its meaning
adjust the size of the text or the lighting
Although e-readers’ features empower reading experiences, why do so many of us non digital natives still long for physical books?
We long for physical books because they are and were a part how information was presented to us to process and learn. Our brains got used to this type of delivery system of information. The 20th century learning experience lacked the level of stimulation and engagement that tech like e-readers offer today. Today’s students rarely engage with paper products, and the printed word in a physical book, no matter how well written, does not offer the degree of stimulation students are used to receiving through other media. However, just because we, as non digital natives, are not used to this delivery system, we cannot hold our students back from the benefits this technology offers them to improve their reading skills.
If your school happens to have e-readers, here are some ideas that could help change students’ attitudes toward reading:
Create a Class Facebook or Twitter page. This can be done safely giving access only to students and parents. As students read class wide or independent selections, they can use the e-reader’s Facebook and Twitter share feature to post their favorite quotes and thoughts to discuss texts with each other. (If students need coaching on how to select significant passages and write effective FB and Twitter posts, then I recommend modeling how to do this first using a high interest text all students will enjoy.) Schools could even connect with grade levels or other schools inviting them to add to the Facebook and Twitter feeds uniting students nationally or even globally in their reading experiences.
E-readers may even motivate students to take the time to look up unknown words while they read because the dictionary feature makes it virtually effortless. Students just tap on the unfamiliar word to see a definition in a pop-up window.
E-readers also reinvigorate the concept of the “book report” because the book review feature is limited to 3500 characters or less. Students benefit from learning how to write a succinct book review. Although there’s no guarantee an e-reader motivates students to write book reviews, the connectivity aspect of writing a review for an online community may attract more students to use this feature since they know they will be writing to a real audience of fellow readers. Determine what your students like to read: humor, mysteries, sci-fi, romance, etc. Allowing them to read books they like may encourage them to use the book review feature without a fight.
E-readers even facilitate annotation because it takes seconds to highlight a passage of interest and add notes to it. No more lost sticky notes, or illegible marginal notes.
Students can also lend each other books through the e-reader, and there’s been talk of apps enabling e-borrowing from local public libraries.
E-readers are not the panacea of illiteracy or aliteracy, but an e-reader’s features definitely offer a level of engagement physical books cannot. E-readers connect readers to each other in a way physical books cannot. We’ve tried using traditional strategies to fight illiteracy and aliteracy, and many of these have failed. Why not try the technology of e-readers where students not only interact with the text, but can also connect with an online community of readers.
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”.
