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.
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.
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.
A few years ago, I had one of the most challenging groups of students and parents I had ever worked with in my entire teaching career. I must confess that Ray Bradbury helped me get through that difficult time because one of his stories in particular spoke to me and showed me I was not alone in what I was experiencing and feeling. I did a lot of soul searching that year about why I became a teacher, and if I even wanted to continue teaching. I thought a lot about expectations, especially what the "powers that be" expected me to expect from my students and from their parents. My decades of experience, and my National Board certification carried absolutely no weight. And, I found myself fighting against the dumbing down of quality teaching to make students and parents happy. Late one afternoon, as I scoured through old and new literature books, searching for the panacea to cure some of my students of their learned helplessness and entitlement, I literally stumbled across one of Ray Bradbury's gems "The Veldt". The minute I saw the name Bradbury, I knew the story had to be good. I also thought Bradbury's writing style might just help these students who resisted critical thinking connect to literature like no other piece they had ever read. Best of all, teaching "The Veldt" allowed me to express my civil disobedience of sorts by sending out the message loud and clear about our public school system's student, parent, teacher dynamic, that adults are often at the mercy of children's demands. "The Veldt" opened the eyes of some of the brightest students in my class, but as much as I hoped it would not, the story's true meaning went over the heads of my most rebellious students and their parents.
My students that year had been conditioned not to think and technology had been used to baby sit them, not to make them think. My high expectations and my attempts at getting them to think proved to be too much for them to handle because they were not used to being challenged. I realized their resistance to work was natural since no one had ever really expected much from them to begin with. Like Wendy and Peter, the children in the story, they had been used to doing what they wanted, when they wanted. And like Wendy and Peter, they naturally fought back when I threatened their status quo, imposed rules for the first time just like the parents in the story, or expected them to use their imaginations or critical thinking for the first time.
Reading "The Veldt" was like holding up a mirror for these kids and their parents, and yelling, "Hey, learn from George and Lydia’s mistakes! Stop enabling your kid to resist thinking and working in my class!" So it was natural, that the message fell on deaf ears. There was a small minority who did realize after our class discussions and activities, that the story was a social commentary about this type of dynamic between parents and children, and so much more. Their efforts to stay after class to converse and provide their own insights about the story proved to me they wanted to learn, and they knew what I was trying to tell the rest of them, but the rest of them interpreted the story at face value: children who think up the world of the veldt, a grassland in Africa so they can have their parents eaten alive by lions. What Bradbury wanted to convey through this ending was difficult for some students to swallow…pun intended, but in the end "The Veldt" fascinated all the students, making them think and wonder how someone had the nerve to write about children killing their parents. Akin to the children's character in the story, some questioned whether I had permission to allow them to read such a disturbing piece. (Luckily the selection was featured in the state’s approved text.) Unlike the parents in the story, I stood my ground, feeling successful at getting them to at least question why I wanted them to read this. And standing my ground, setting high standards, demanding that they learn and work, and produce original thoughts are what I realized students and their parents resisted the most. Like the children in "The Veldt", they threw tantrums whenever I asked them to think, and their parents, like George and Lydia, enabled the students to do the bare minimum, protecting them from ever experiencing failure, reaching their potential and expecting their children to earn As with little to no effort. If I refused to accommodate these needs, I risked unhappy parents and students.
For me, Bradbury's "The Veldt" poignantly captured my dilemma with these types of children and their parents, who as Bradbury characterized want to “do nothing but look, listen and smell…what else was there to do?” Shockingly for my class and for me, we learned Bradbury wrote and published the story in 1950. These behaviors, which I thought were part of a growing trend of insolence and indolence, I realized were not new, and were Bradbury's warning of future generations gone awry because of technology.
Although he wrote about the future, and described technological advances in prophetic detail, Bradbury criticized technology, i.e., television, cell phones, the internet, etc., and always warned us of the coming dystopia if we allow technology to replace our most human needs. My classroom that year was a glance into the future Bradbury warned about children, parents and technology. “The World the Children Made” as Bradbury originally titled “The Veldt” existed in my classroom. The children had in years past been allowed to make a world with rules convenient for them, allowed to use tech in ineffective ways, and there were plenty of adults who allowed them to enforce these rules.
But my students, like the children in the story were not blameworthy as Bradbury underscores in his story. In our public school system, as adults, sometimes, we try to protect children so much by expecting less from them. For a variety of reasons, students are often conditioned to do the bare minimum. We end up doing them more harm than good, stifling potential rather than encouraging it to develop. Like George and Wendy, the doting parents, we throw money at the problem, ignoring the root causes of the academic problems, as well as failing to educate parents about the importance of rigor and allowing students to learn from mistakes.
We all need to be more cognizant of academic expectations for children’s success in school and for later in life. Both teachers and parents need to constantly reflect on how we can most effectively implement technology at home and at school so adults do not lose children’s respect, and attention, and children do not lose their imagination and ability to think for themselves.
Bradbury's stories wanted us to think about all of these issues, our relationships with each other, and the price we pay in our relationships when we abuse technology. Technology can never replace the human bond we must make with our children. Technology, if abused, reduces us to a base state. The children in “The Veldt” lost their humanity and thought nothing of killing their own parents. Their parents’ attempt to provide the best life for their children backfired, and they failed to connect to their children.
Our attempts to make concepts easier for students to understand often backfires too, and we end up underestimating their true abilities and condition them to perform at standards below their true potential.
When it comes to technology, we must also be careful not to allow our desire to integrate technology to overshadow our need for rigor in our classrooms.
As much as I love technology, hence this blog, I know we must always maintain a balance between the analog and digital world and never ever ignore the human facets of teaching and learning. Some concepts are learned best without technology, and we can't ever lose sight of that.
The point of my entry is not only to write in memoriam of Ray Bradbury and express how much I loved his writing, but also to reflect on our expectations of students in the classroom, and our expectations of how we will use tech in the classroom to teach students how to think, not just play. If we don't, as Bradbury and the band deadmau5 who wrote a song based on the short story said, “this happy world of technology” we have designed for our children will end up consuming us and dehumanize them; if we make them "fall in love with the way they are", the children "will not ever want to leave", or try anything new but “looking, listening and smelling”, they will not want any authority figure unplugging them from their state of complacency.
Thanks Ray Bradbury for your bold imagination, for inspiring my civil disobedience and for teaching me to recognize when it's time to shut off the machine.
"The Veldt" - song lyrics by deadmau5
Happy Life, With the Machines;
Scattered around the room.
Look what they Made; they made it for me...
Happy Technology!
Outside, the Lions roam, feeding on remains...
We'll never leave, look at us now;
So in love with the way we are...
...Heeeere!
The world that the children made...
The world that the children made, Heeere!
The world that the children made, Heeere!
The world that the children made.
Every night, the World goes to sleep,
Digital Family!
Is it real? Or is it a dream?
Can you believe the machine....
Outside, the beating sun, can you hear the screams?
We'll never leave, look at us now.
So in love with the way we are.
[Chorus]
[Long Pause/Instruments, then a slightly less happy tone]
Happy Life...With the Machines,
Scattered around the room.
Look what they made, they Made it for me;
Happy Technology!
Outside, the Lions roam, Feeding on remains.
We'll never leave, look at us now;
So In love with with the way we are.
Heeere!
[Chorus]
If students learn to tweet in the primary grades, is it possible we may begin to see an improvement over time in students' writing skills and overall attitude toward writing? I believe Twitter, if properly implemented, can support writing and reading instruction and promote a love of writing. Twitter in the elementary classroom can be essential for establishing the mind-set for students that they all have something worthwhile to say in writing, and there are actual readers of all ages, i.e., parents, family, teachers, administrators and even other students, who are eager to read what they say. For various reasons, writing can be a difficult task for so many students, and for teachers it is often difficult to teach, but what if Twitter served as a teaching aid to motivate reluctant writers and thinkers. What if students had daily Twitter tasks to show them at an early age that:
writing allows us to express our thoughts, emotions, experiences, imaginations, etc.
writing allows us to connect with others.
writing does not have to be perfect; we can always correct our errors.
writing does not have to be a tedious, isolated activity, but can be interactive.
writing involves careful editing and revising.
writing involves careful deliberation of our words, grammar and punctuation.
writing impacts and influence others.
Twitter can become a teaching tool to instill a positive mind set about writing, and help young students internalize how writing is an essential aspect of communication, involving careful attention to so many language arts skills. Rather than assigning writing prompts with the teacher as the sole reader, Twitter can enable students to directly and concisely communicate in writing with an authentic audience and an unlimited number of readers. Although a tweet is 140 characters or less, tweets can serve as a springboard for lengthier writing tasks and with proper teacher modeling and coaching, students can see the impact, influence and power their words have on others as they create content and receive tweets. Twitter can revitalize writing instruction and inspire students to take on lengthier writing tasks if we use Twitter to build students' confidence in their writing skills. Twitter can also support grammar instruction if we use tweets to model mini lessons on specific grammar traits. No need to teach grammar in isolation anymore; when composing tweets, students see, revise and edit a specific grammar trait in action.
Please check out this insightful article: "Twittering About Learning" http://www.essentialschools.org/resources/451 where one teacher describes his experiences with Twitter in the elementary classroom. Read how this educator has created student Twitter opportunities to tweet audio clips using Chirbit.com to support reading instruction. Students practice their reading fluency, phrasing, intonation, and rate and record themselves reading a text. They record their read alouds using Chirbit.com, and then use Twitter to share the chirbit.com audio clips with their Twitter followers http://www.chirbit.com/room302. Check out his students' tweets and the many ways he uses Twitter Classroom Twitter: http://twitter.com/room302. I would love to hear how are you using, or how you plan to use Twitter in your elementary classroom.
Here are my A to Z twitter tasks for the elementary classroom, and a video by Elbert Chu on how Tots Tweet In Kindergarten!
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!
