Group items tagged

"Student choice is not only a simple way to increase student engagement, it's also an essential factor in developing digital literacy while building 21st century life and career skills. Choice boards typically start with a specific learning goal, then provide students with a variety of ways to practice a skill, learn a concept, or demonstrate understanding." Site offers a variety of Choice board templates for your classroom use.

"ReadWriteThink.org's Word Mover student interactive can be used to supplement classroom instruction, reinforce concepts taught in class, offer increased student engagement, and promote out-of-school literacy. "Word Mover allows children and teens to create "found poetry" by choosing from word banks and existing famous works; additionally, users can add new words to create a piece of poetry by moving/manipulating the text." Use Word Mover to start a story or poem. Good writing activity from an exceptionally excellent educational site.

"We want our students to be active viewers. But why stop at comprehension? "Active viewing is great, but it isn't enough. When it comes to video, students shouldn't just get it; they should also have something to say about it. Students need to be active and reactive viewers -- comprehending and critiquing, reading and reacting, getting and giving knowledge. Below you'll find great tools, tips, and strategies for helping to foster both of these essential media-literacy skills." This page has a wealth of materials -- worksheets, video lessons, tips, etc. -- for critical thinking.

This page shows how a student website can be created and maintained. The topic is "digital health and wellness" or "digital citizenship" but can be revised and improvised on for other topics. The plan shows how teams are created, expectations for individuals within the team, grading, tasks, etc. Great lesson planning for a problem-based learning experience. T/H to J. Brueck on Diigo in Education.

"A little while back I saw a Netflix Template for Google Slides. It's essentially a template to replicate the screens you view when looking at episodes for a Netflix series. I immediately loved the idea of creating a Netflix series for a novel (displaying an understanding of plot, setting, characters, etc.). " T/h N LaFave

R. Stannard has created a tutorial for wallwisher.com, now called "Padlet" This tool is nice for creating a visually oriented board of notes where students can tell others what they are doing, for example, on a project; or to keep interesting photos and weblinks.

"DLIST is a cross-institutional, subject-based, open access digital archive for the Information Sciences, including Archives and Records Management, Library and Information Science, Information Systems, Museum Informatics, and other critical information infrastructures."

This blog entry has everything you ever wanted to know about storytelling: excellent resources and tools are listed, and it would take days and days to explore everything. Nice to have a whole semester's course in one place. The focus is on history as a subject, but the ideas and concepts could apply to any content-based work.

"Zeen is a free site (in beta) that allows you to gather your favorite pictures and videos from the internet and add your own text to create an interactive digital magazine that you can share with other people. Zeen is easy to use and your end product is a very dynamic and interactive publication. This site is a fantastic tool for school projects, invitations, online memory books, business portfolios, and advertising just to name a few options."

This won't work well with feathery hair or gauzy material. The computer imaging needs sharp outlines. But fun to try it out if you are into images/photography.

"Short videos from YouTube and other sources can be quite helpful in introducing topics to students and or reinforcing concepts that you have taught. Watching the video can be enough for some students, it's better if we can call students' attention to specific sections of videos while they are watching them. " R. Byrne discusses helpful tools for commenting on video. These can be great for flipped/blended classrooms as discussion starters.

R. Byrne: "Wideo is a nice tool for creating Common Craft-style videos. You can create animated videos on Wideo by dragging and dropping clipart and text in storyboard frames. You set the position and animation sequence for each element in each storyboard frame. When you have completed your storyboards Wideo generates a video for you. " Older students could, of course, create videos themselves to instruct others.

A cute infographic (?) of the what and why. Visual notetaking is encouraged for lectures and readings, and may help students make the material their own. I would recommend a combination with text notes, as students do need practice in all kinds of writing.

Stop-motion animation would be a great project for middle school and high school students. Teaches planning and patience.

The software iStopMotion is fun to use and suitable for kids. See other articles on stop-motion animation and the TED-Ed videos at Animation Basics 101: http://blog.ed.ted.com/2016/07/13/animation-basics-101/

A study on reading of Norewegian 10th graders on paper and on PDFs on a computer screen. The paper group had better comprehension because the paper group could spread out documents, while the PDF group had to tab back and forth while taking the quiz. Low resolution moitors also may have influenced the study. A high resolution screen would allow the reader to see all the pages of the article at a glance. This study is an interesting adjunct to my article on Reading Electronically.

An explanation of the history and development of the CC for English Language Arts.

This might be of interest for beginner ESl, as the Dolch sight words are used throughout the US education system.

Vance Stevens' course for the Petroleum Institute is filled with useful graphics and how-to information. Designed for EFL students, this is a great way to get your own course going, or it can be used as supplemental material.