Useful Literacy Tools in the Classroom
This summer I had my first real "crisis" as an educator. After working 12 years at a high school teaching World History and 6 years teaching AP World History I was voluntold that I would be moving down to the middle school in order to teach American History with only a couple weeks left in the year. As you can expect I was not exactly thrilled and my real crisis was that after 12 years I had become a little to content and way too comfortable doing what I had been doing for a long time. In retrospect I don't know that I had grown much as an educator in the last 4-5 years and was probably well on my way to the dreaded condition of teacher burnout.
Where are you going with this you are probably wondering. Well after the move was finalized I had to begin to reexamine the way that I taught my students (or perhaps reflect on the fact that I mostly taught AT my students) and it was in this moment that I realized this move was just the opportunity I needed to jump into a new curriculum with a new and open mind. I decided I wanted to try something new and since my district had moved to 1:1 I was free to begin to explore my many new and exciting options and that is what I intend to share with you.
My first tool that I am extremely excited about is Diigo. Diigo is a fantastic bookmarking application that teachers as well as students can utilize in order to keep track of all various sites that they visit. Doing any research on the internet in the past was often a very annoying process of locating information jotting some quick notes down and moving on before realizing that you forgot something on that one website in that one place that you saw two maybe three days ago. If only I could have all that time back that I spent looking for a piece of information that I had accessed and then forgotten about. Diigo lets you bookmark websites that you find useful but it is so much more useful than that. Another wonderful feature is the ability to annotate a webpage or article. How amazing is that? I find an article I want to use for an assignment and then I bookmark it so I don't lose it. After I review the article I can then annotate and highlight useful information that I want to refer to later. A great feature of Diigo for teachers is the ability to create an outliner with a variety of sources available that may or may not have been annotated and supplied to the students from the teacher from a shared link. This is extremely useful for guided research assignments in which you want to limit the amount of information students have at their fingertips. Why would you do that you may ask. Well for one it allows the teacher to provide a list of articles that has been vetted. Another reason may simply be due to time constraints. In a globalized digital age where information is easily accessible Diigo is a great resource.
Another great resource that educators can use to enhance literacy in the classroom is Kahoot. This application is highly engaging for students and is a great tool for drilling new information and vocabulary for students. Students often light up the moment that the Kahoot theme music begins and students immediately begin queuing up for this activity. One bit of warning however, be sure to monitor your students names or you will find that you have seven Harambe's like I just recently experienced... (I think my favorite was Harambesrevng). Kahoot is essentially a trivia app that works the same way as a trivia game at your favorite local hot wing establishment that pits the students against each other. Whether you are teaching new vocabulary to students or reviewing for that summative assessment they are taking on Friday Kahoot will definitely get the students engaged and my favorite benefit to the instructor is the instant feedback that the instructor receives regarding the students mastery over the content. Although I really do enjoy using Kahoot in class I would agree that its use would definitely fall under the category of drill-and-practice and is thus unsuitable for introducing new information or for advancing higher order thinking skills (Anderson, R.S.,et al., 2008)
These are just two of the many of tools readily available online for the low low price of free. We all know that as educators that free is a magic word because all to often it seems that we nickle and dime ourselves because in the end we all want an engaging learning environment for our kids. I am still aggravated at a colleague for recently showing me the site Teachers Pay Teachers... only then to have her come in my room two hours later and inform me that there were actually free resources on the site as well. As more districts begin to embrace 1:1 access to and understanding these tools will help us to create the classroom environment that our primary and secondary teachers could have only dreamt about.
Anderson, R. S., Grant, M. M., & Speck, B. W. (2008). Technology to teach literacy: a resource for K-8 teachers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.
Scott,
ReplyDeleteVoluntold- great word! :-) I think every teacher has been voluntold at least once! Change is good and it sounds like you have embraced the opportunity.
Kahoot and Diigo are both great tools and both are very popular. I recently had a conversation with a group of educators that Kahoot has been so popular for the last three or four years that EVERYONE uses it and students are started to become kahooted-out. If that happens with your students, there are many other great formative assessment tools. Socrative, Plickers, Quizizz, Formative are just a few for you to investigate.
Dr. Dell
A lot of our kiddos are definitely kahooted-out. However, they love Quizizz and it is one of my absolute favorites. We've used Plickers for a long time, as well and luckily, they still love it too.
DeleteScott,
ReplyDeleteI absolutely love Diigo. It has saved me many times. I started using it during one of my courses (can't remember the exact class) for this degree. I used it to keep track of the many things that I created online along with the username and password that I used. Just having it to keep track of my usernames and passwords has been amazing. I tell all my students about it and have seen lots of them use it when working on reports. I have also used and loved using Kahoot with my students. I also use Plickers with my students which is someone similar to Kahoot and the students love that too. I use Plickers as a test review and a quick formative assessment at times. If you like Kahoot you will probably really enjoy Plickers. Plickers is super easy to set-up too!
Eric Summers
Scott -
ReplyDeleteHow overwhelming and exciting at the same time. I have been teaching the same grade for 15 years and the same topics for most of that time too. I do excited every year and have great plans to change up my class and blow my student's minds, however, I do get into ruts and do the same old thing year after year. You have picked two great tools.
I do love Diigo, but I must admit I haven't used it much in my own classroom, but for my MET degree. It is one of those things that I have put on my list to start working with in my class, but haven't figured out just what to do. After reading your post, I think I may try to include it in my research paper assignment.
I also love Kahoot - it is a great tool to use with the kids to get them excited and practicing. Have you used Quizlet? It is like Kahoot, but they can play in teams and they have to find the correct answer on either screen or one of their team member's screen. We used this today and to make my kids think a little more, I had it set up like Jeopardy and gave them the answer and they had to pick the correct question. Great way to wrap up a lesson or day.
Stephanie