Tech Tools Supporting C.R.I.S.S. Strategies

CReating Indepence through Student Owned Strategies has helped countless numbers of students improve their reading and writing skills. Today, teachers don't have to rely on transparencies, butcher paper and markers to model these strategies for students to begin applying and internalizing them. Using tech tools to teach many of the C.R.I.S.S. strategies make the strategies even more student friendly and applicable.

Project C.R.I.S.S. focuses on strengthening these literacy skills:

Understanding and Untangling the Author's Craft

Activating Background Knowledge

Active Learning

Organization for Learning

Discussion

Writing

Modeling and Explanation

Metacognition

Teaching for Understanding

Here are 5 C.R.I.S.S. strategies and tech tools which support each of them. 

C.R.I.S.S. Strategy for Active Learning

1.) KWL Charts- 

K-What Do You Know? W- What Do You Want to Learn? L-What Did You Learn?

http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/kwl_creator/

The KWL creator by ReadWriteThink allows students to save their work as they complete each step of the KWL chart. One of the best features of the KWL creator is students can embed links to show examples of what they learned.

Wallwisher is another tech tool which supports KWL charts since students can create virtual "sticky notes" for each of the KWL stages as well. Wallwisher also allows students to embed links  to show evidence of what they learned. How cool is that?! Goodbye poster paper and lost sticky notes!

2.) Graphic and Pictorial Organizers

Whether you need a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast two characters or concepts, a Sequence Map to track events, or steps in a process, a Free Form Map to help students organize information, or a Fishbone diagram to analyze cause and effect, Creately.com has every type of diagram template your students may need to engage in critical thinking tasks.  Creately.com frees teachers from the drudgery of copying graphic organizer templates, and empowers students to use graphic organizers not only to organize and retain information, but also to collaborate with a virtual global classroom! Hope you'll check out Creately.com and begin using it for all your diagramming needs!

C.R.I.S.S. Strategies for the Conversation of Learning

3.) The QAR Strategy- Question Answer Relationships - 

The QAR strategy - I created a short video to model this critical strategy: http://youtu.be/U0o2jUFRpXc If we want our students to have meaningful discussions, they must learn to generate their own critical thinking questions. The QAR strategy teaches students how to ask the right questions, how to answer different types of questions, and how to infer meaning from texts so they can generate thought-provoking questions and lead their own conversations about text.    

Collaborizeclassroom.com - is one of the best tech tools to help students internalize the QAR strategy and teach students how to lead their own discussions. With Collaborizeclassroom.com students engage in collaborative learning either with their peers inside the classroom or with students around the world. Students ask original questions about a specific topic to engage in deep conversations, and answer questions posed by other students. Collaborizeclassroom.com lets students safely apply the QAR strategy outside the classroom in cyberspace so they can have in depth conversations with classrooms only the teacher chooses to invite to discussions. Students can also embed text links, videos, images, and graphs as textual evidence to support their answers.  Collaborizeclassroom.com eliminates every excuse for not holding critical thinking discussions.  All students at every age of development should have the opportunity to pose original questions and learn to lead their own discussions. Both the C.R.I.S.S. strategy: QAR and Collaborizeclassroom.com can make this happen!     

4.) Think-Pair-Share - 

With Voicethread.com, students can watch, listen, or read already uploaded content or upload content in the form of video, images, documents, presentations, or any combination of these. Students then add their written or verbal comments to the media in the particular Voicethread.com file. The Think-Pair-Share C.R.I.S.S. strategy takes on a digital edge since students "think" about the featured content in the Voicethread file, "pair" up with another student or with a small group of students who have access to the same file, and all participants "share" their thoughts, questions, comments, arguments, opinions and more. Voicethread.com lets every student be an active participant in the conversation around any type of content. Think-Pair-Share is an ideal C.R.I.S.S. strategy to use with this tech tool since students collaborate with their peers to show what they know, or to ask what they want to learn.  

C.R.I.S.S. Strategy for Understanding Pattern and Structure

5.) Selective Underlining/Highlighting-

Diigo.com helps students understand how to properly find relevant content, underline/highlight that content, and then remember it. Diigo.com has add-on tools for a variety of browsers,  so students can collect specific content while browsing the web and then add it to the My Library Cloud in the Diigo.com server to be accessed again and again. When students find information they need, they can digitally highlight the text, add an interactive sticky note with their comments, or questions, and save it to My Library Cloud for future use.  Students can also bookmark a page and organize pages by tags. They can label a page mark to read later if they want you to approve the relevancy of the text first, and even archive a page so it's there forever. Diigo.com's facilitates active e-reading because of the annotation feature using e-sticky notes as well as the capture feature which lets students capture an image of a particular section of text, then use shapes, arrows or text for students to annotate. Diigo.com takes the C.R.I.S.S. strategy of selective underlining/highlighting to the nth degree because not only can students revisit their highlighted content using their computer, I-Pad or smart phone, they can also share their selected content with others for collaborative projects.

C.R.I.S.S. strategies have helped changed both teacher and student mindsets that students need to be taught how to learn, and once they learn how best to learn, they can be successful readers, writers, speakers, listeners and thinkers. As more and more tech tools emerge and evolve, we must continue to uphold this mindset, and find ways for using tech tools to help students discover how they learn best.

"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!

How Fake Facebook Profiles Support Reading Instruction and More!

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. 

Please check out these Myfakewall page profiles!

One Scoop or Two?

Building your own "sundae" of information is as delicious as a double scoop of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top! Scoop.It is the banana split of bookmarking when browsing the web because you get to choose and garnish an information "sundae" with content you find deliciously interesting.  You can share your scoops of information with a community of readers on various social media, and on Scoop.It.

Here’s how you scoop your way to a delicious "sundae" of information! 

1.) Pick a title for your topic, e.g., “Tech Tools To Improve Parent Communication”

2.) Enter a brief, but engaging description of the type of content your scoop will contain e.g.,   

     Connecting with parents in a snap using web 2.0 tools!  

3.) Identify the language the content will be in: English

4.) Enter keywords to describe your topic: parent communication, parent contact, etc.

5.) Upload an icon to represent your scoop if you’d like.

Then, watch the magic happen! Scoop.it scans the web to scoop up any relevant content related to your topic. Like an ice cream bar with unlimited toppings, Scoop.it presents you with content choices to add to your information sundae. You decide to add or discard the content depending on its relevancy and interest.  You can also decide on sources to locate your content. Adding a Scoop.it bookmarklet to your browser also makes it easy to scoop up content whenever you're browsing and come across content worth adding.

Once you have scooped up content for your information sundae, you can share your scoops on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wordpress and Tumblr, join a community of scoopers, follow their scoops or be followed.  Scoop.It is still in the beta stage, so I hope they will sweeten up to the idea of adding Blogger to their sharing options. However, you can add a sweet widget of your scoops to your website or blog! 

Students, teachers and parents are in for a real treat with Scoop.It because it’s a delicious way to organize content and taste each scoop of information one at a time to meet so many instructional purposes and needs.  


Different reasons for creating your own Scoop.Its:

• Disseminates information such as important articles, videos, links, and other content to parents, colleagues, and students
• Organizes resources for group projects for struggling students to save time and help students see various content that reveals a topic's focus or theme.
• Facilitates students' research efforts for projects. As they research a topic, students can scoop their sources and submit their scoop.it page to the teacher as their lists of works cited. 
• Supports reading instruction. Students can work individually, in pairs or small groups reading content the teacher has pre-selected and saved on Scoop.it. Students can analyze the differences in the text structure of each selection featured in the scoop.it page; they can set a purpose for reading each selection; identify key or difficult vocabulary in each selection; summarize each selection, and find connections among all of the selections on the Scoop.It page.  

Here’s a double scoop I created. I will be adding the Scoop.It widget to my blog, so you can always see new content I’ve scooped up, or you can get a taste on my Twitter page, Facebook, or by following my scoops on Scoop.It itself.