Aptivities for the Classroom: Magnetic Poetry

Poetry Magnets are a great way to help with word choice and to get students in the habit of being descriptive without putting them in a situation where they have to come up with their own words. The problem with traditional poetry magnets are that they easily get lost or randomly manipulated by other students.

What it Does

The Poetry Magnets app lets students manipulate words from categories to create their own poetry.  There are different categories to choose from, including one called endings, which lets them add ed, ing, or s to words.

How I Use it

One of my favorite apptivities for poetry magnets is to have my students create a poem in this app as a reflection piece for drop discussion.  This allows them to be creative and active in their reflection, but gives them a chance to practice description and word choice.  They can share their poems from within the app or they can take a screen capture of their poem and send the photo by email.

Aptivities for the Classroom: Learning Vocabularu

Electronic Flashcards

Flashcards are probably the best way to learn vocabulary.  In my classroom, I have found that students also excel at vocabulary when they can pair words with images to represent them.  The only problem is, some of my kids can't draw.  My solution: a vocabulary App called A+ Flashcards for the iPad or iPhone.

Advantages of A+ Flashcards

A+ Flashcards lets students enter in words and definitions on notecards.

They can then add pictures from a Bing search or they can choose to sketch their own picture.





Once they have added all of the information for a stack of cards, the students can study and sort the cards based upon their knowledge.

                                             
  Students can share their cardstacks with their teacher to earn credit for completing their assignment electronically.
Students can

Other Uses

A+ Flashcards comes preset with common SAT words to help students prepare for their college entrance exam.  It also pairs with Quizlet to assist teachers in setting up vocabulary assessments.

       


 This is a great way to make studying vocabulary tech-savy and fun!

Apptivities for the Classroom: Vocabulary Games

Vocabulary is one of my favorite things to teach.  Students see value in learning vocabulary, and if I can make it fun, they get really engaged in what we are doing.  When reviewing vocabulary, I've tried everything from games with a ball to Bingo, to just giving students time to review with notecards.  This past year, I was fortunate enough to have a few students with access to iPads and iPhones.  As a result, I had a chance to experiment with a few fun apps. Storylines for Schools is my favorite FREE app for vocabulary review.

What it does

Storylines for Schools is very similar to the game, Telestrations. Students begin with a definition and pass the device around to sketch and eventually guess the word.  The apptivitiy works best for small groups of about 3-5.

How it works

Polyvore...Teacher Fashion

Fashion is My Passion 

It's no secret that I am addicted to fashion.  Keeping up with the latest fashion industry trends is one of my top 5 favorite ways to spend my time.  It's so frustrating when I hear that teachers are the worst dressed profession out there. In order to do my part in curbing this stereotype, I devote quite a bit of time to building my professional wardrobe to reflect my fashionista past time. My students absolutely love this!

Staying Organized 

How am I able to keep things organized? With Polyvore, of course! Polyvore is a site that allows users to create an account, clip images from store websites, and use these images to build outfits.  Users can also follow others, like their favorite outfits, and share comments and feedback with others.  

Here are a few of my favorite teacher outfits, including 2 casual Friday looks: 

 

Pinterest for Teachers

Unless you are living in some enclosed space without internet access or connection to tech savvy people like me, you've at least heard of Pinterest.  Maybe you've used it to find a recipe for a summer BBQ or gain inspiration for some DIY projects to spruce up your home.  Have you ever thought about using it to gain ideas for your classroom? 

What I've Found

I've seen everything from ideas to deliver content to organizational materials to some over-the-top student gift baskets that I would love to provide on the first day of school...if I didn't teach around 150 high school students. 

Here are some of my favorites that I've pinned over the last few days

Poetry Design 

My students could create their own designs, cut them out, and use them to create found poems from pages in our texts.  This adds a nice element of active learning to poetry and provides the opportunity to make poetry appeal to visual learners.

Pencil Dispenser

My students are always stopping me in the middle of class to ask for a pencil.  This might be a cute way to leave pencils out for students to take as needed.  I'm not 100% sure how well it will work, but it's worth a try. 

Theme Chart

This chart might a fun way to define each of our course themes for students so that they have a reference when I ask them to identify the themes of each novel we read and explain how the novel demonstrates the themes they chose. 

Objective Chart

My white board is always in need of a little bit of color.  I generally put the daily objective on my SMART Board, but it usually only stays for a few minutes before we need to use the board for other things.  These might be a fun way to integrate the to-do list on the board without using white board markers, which my students like to erase before class. 

Desk Organizer

This colorful organizer would be a cute way to organize all my desk materials while adding a little bit of color to my room.  White walls and neutral carpet always make things seem so sterile.  Just because I teach at a high school does not mean my students don't enjoy a bright, colorful atmosphere. Believe me, they notice!

 

This is probably my favorite thing that I found during my search.  I'm not usually a fan of little teacher sayings, but this canvas is simple, cute, and proves a point.  I love that it doesn't feature apples, pencils, letters, or any other stereotypical teacher clip-art.  I just might have to create one of these for my desk area, especially since we study the epic hero cycle and create our own super heroes during first semester. 




                                  Happy Pinning Everyone!

The Khan Academy

During my grad class this past week, my instructor introduced me to an amazing site that is definitely worth sharing.
Imagine managing a help study hall for students who are struggling with English.  This, I can help them with.  Now, imagine these same students have questions about biology or need a one-on-one review over solving linear equations to complete their math homework.  While I have some knowledge in this area, I am definitely not an expert. Enter, Khan Academy .

What's Khan Academy? 

According to their website the Khan academy houses over 3,200 FREE videos that offer instruction in algebra, physics, history, finance, and even calculous.  It even offers SAT prep sessions to gain some quick review without having to sit in a classroom full of other students.

The best part: students who miss lectures or are unclear about a concept from class can go on the site and watch a review tutorial of classroom concepts taught by an instructor.  They can stop the videos to replay the visuals over and over until they understand what is being taught.

Education of the future

Could this be the future for classroom teaching?  Is there a way for teachers to integrate these videos into their classrooms so that students can accelerate their skills or receive reteaching on their own time?

Not convinced? 

Check out this clip from 60 Minutes that shows how a school is using Khan Academy to in its curriculum.

Facebook With Students?

I'll start out by saying that I've never used Facebook with my students. At this present time, my district prohibits it. Like many other teachers out there, I've often wondered how it could be used to enhance my teaching. My student are on Facebook 24-7, so could it be used as a motivational tool to get them talking about classroom content? Could it provide them a better opportunity to ask for help or stay informed about classroom assignments? After hearing that my district is considering lifting the Facebook ban with some major rules attached, I approached a friend of mine who has been successfully using Facebook with her students for two years. Here is a link to one of her blog posts where she discusses how using Facebook with her students has impacted her teaching.

My students love creating Facebook accounts for the characters from our stories.  Not only does this make them think about relationships between characters and how they motivate the story, but it also gets them wondering who these character would be if they had real lives.  Creating Facebook pages for characters helps students look at characters deeper than they do when they answer study guide questions or participate in group discussion because they have to think about how each would speak and respond to others.  For the longest time, my students drew their own Facebook templates and used post-it notes or strips of paper to create postings.  While they really liked doing this, it was very time-consuming. It was important to my students to create pages that actually looked like a Facebook because they wanted them to seem authentic. During this past year, I discovered a website called Fakebook.  This site allows students to create Facebook pages by providing them with a user-friendly template.  It is definitely worth checking out. 

Learning about Tagxedo

My students love using Wordle! It's one of their favorite learning tools for describing the characters from the stories we read.  They also love using it to help them categorize different aspects of stories or poetry or for organizing their brainstorming lists into a presentation piece to share with the class.  Most of them think that computer generated word clouds are easier to create than the paper variety.
A few weeks ago, I discovered Tagxedo, another word cloud generator.  Like Wordle, Tagxedo allows the user to create a visual representation of words, phrases, quotes, or figures.

The difference is, Taxgedo takes it one step further by allowing users to transform these word clouds into images. Users are given the option to use one of Tagxedo's existing images or to insert one of their own.  There user can then change the colors or the word cloud and then export, print, or share their creation.  It is definitely worth checking out!

This may come as no surprise, but I love technology! I honestly could not function in my personal life without my iPhone, and am growing more and more attached to my recently acquired iPad. As dramatic as it sounds, I depend on my iPhone to alert me 30 minutes before every appointment, 1 day before every friend or family member’s birthday, and any time someone needs to send what is most likely useless information my way. If it weren’t for the voice navigation feature in my Mapquest app, I probably wouldn’t have made it home today. Technology plays a large role in my professional life as well. The only difference is, I’ve had to learn how to adapt and survive without it. 

The biggest problem with technology in my professional life is that there isn’t enough of it. Yes, we have access to computer labs and laptop carts at my school and quite often, they are in working order. But there are just so many days when my students would benefit from utilizing technology and they just can’t. Sometimes it’s because the lab is booked, while other days the servers are down or the laptops are broken. Don’t even get me started on fact that my students are missing out on all those fabulous apps I have on my iPad. What’s a teacher to do? Well, have them bring there technology!

Near the end of the school year I came across this article and thought, "well, why not?" I experimented briefly with allowing my students to work in groups on a QR code hunt using their Smart phones. While it wasn’t the smoothest day, they had a blast being able to use their phones in class and not be reprimanded. This is something I definitely plan on exploring further next fall.

Welcome to my blog!

This is a place for communicating about how 21st Century Skills effect the environment of a high school classroom, particularly in the fields of literature and writing. While I am far from an expert in the field of technology, it is a huge part of both my life and the lives of my students. Through my graduate course work, student recommendations, and a little bit of trial and error, I am constantly exploring ways to integrate some of my favorite elements of technology into my classroom. Thank you so much for stopping by to check out my blog!