Responding to Texts - by G. Boyles

This tool would be one used by teachers as their students respond to texts. Teachers could use this tool to provide detailed feedback in the form of typed comments or recorded verbal communication that students can playback to hear the teacher's voice as they are revising their textual analysis. This would be less time-consuming for teachers and easier to understand for students.

StudySync is a great tool that students can use to respond to writing prompts and answer questions related to different texts, from short stories to speeches. Teachers could use this tool in a thematic unit in which students read and respond to multiple genres of text with the same general theme. Student's responses could be comparisons/contrasts of the texts.

Text annotation is a literacy strategy that has been proven to support student comprehension of all texts, whether they are simple or challenging. This is a tool students can use to digitally annotate texts. They can collaborate on a text with classmates and send annotations to their teacher. Teachers could use these shared annotation as formative assessment and as in-class modeling of appropriate or inappropriate annotation techniques.

Usually, students are assigned an essay to display their understanding of a larger text. This can become repetitive and redundant in an ELA classroom. Another way to assess students is through web tools like Animoto. On this site, students can create narrated presentations that they could use to capture and respond to an argument found in a text. They could also display text passages while using voice narration to explain their analysis of the text.

Newsela has a large collection of articles on multiple topics, from greek mythology to finance, written at four different Lexile levels. This makes it possible for teachers to differentiate instruction by assigning students in each group the same article written at a different Lexile level. There is a short quiz paired with each article, and teachers can include writing prompts and text-dependent analysis questions for students to answer after reading the assigned text.