Teaching ELA with Tech

There is one skill that is absolutely valuable no matter the future goals and careers of our students.  That skill is the ability to be an effective reader, writer, and communicator.  Communication skills routinely top the list of attributes that employers seek in candidates.  While students are still in K-12, having sharp reading and writing skills will help them across all content areas.  And maybe, just maybe, those skills will help them to enjoy reading a good book for fun.

Teaching reading and writing is a daunting task given the complexities of language and the diversity of students.  Tack grammar onto that, and it gets even more arduous.  By their nature, these are difficult and time-consuming skills to teach.  Here comes technology to the rescue!

Quill is a powerful, but easy-to-use online program that teaches ELA skills in a personalized, adaptive, and real-world system.  Once teachers create their classes on Quill, they can assign units, lessons, and activities from ready-made materials that are CCSS-aligned by grade.  Teachers also can see the names and numbers of the standards to narrow down what they want to use.  If teachers already use Google Classroom, then they can create their Quill classes with only a couple clicks as Google Classroom is fully integrated in Quill.

Then, teachers can give diagnostics to their students to see which standards each student needs to address to become proficient.  Quill will then automatically create individualized, “just right” lessons and activities for the students to address weaknesses, but teachers can also assign materials themselves.  Besides creating their classes on Quill, teachers do not have to create anything else.  Instead of creating and correcting assignments, teachers can use their time to better understand their students' ELA skills and simply assign them the lessons they need.

The lessons and activities on Quill are adaptive, adjusting themselves in real-time to the answers of the students to provide personalized exercises.  Students also get immediate feedback, help, and multiple tries when doing activities.  Additionally, students can re-take lessons as many times as they want.

Teachers get detailed reports with in-depth information on their students’ performance on specific ELA skills and standards, showing their proficiency percentage on each one.  Teachers also see which lessons and activities their students completed and when.

I saved the best thing about Quill for last.  Quill teaches ELA skills they way they are supposed to be taught:  within the context of real literature and writing.  Quill does not teach these skills in an isolated, fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice form.  Students work with real written passages in order to gain an understanding of how language actually works and how context, word choice, and sentence structure affect the overall outcome.  For example, if students are working on subject-verb agreement, they not only have to correct errors, but they also have to re-write the incorrect sentence and make sure they use correct spelling and punctuation in the re-written sentence.  Other exercises like figuring out how to best combine many ideas into one cohesive sentence or re-wording sentences for clarity are what set Quill apart and make it a comprehensive and effective learning tool.  Quill provides an authentic, real-world, and personalized way for students to learn ELA skills, and it makes it quick and easy for teachers to use.

Quill provides five unique tools to teach ELA:

1.  Quill Diagnostic – "Quickly determine which skills your students need to work on.  The diagnostic covers vital sentence construction skills and generates a personalized learning plan based on the student's performance."

2.  Quill Lessons – "Enables teachers to lead whole-class and small group writing instruction.  Teachers control interactive slides that contain writing prompts, and the entire class responds to each prompt.  Each activity provides a lesson plan, writing prompts, discussion topics, and a follow-up independent practice activity."

3.  Quill Grammar – "Over 150 sentence writing activities to help your students practice basic grammar skills from comma placement to parallel structure.  Activities are designed to be completed in 10 minutes, so you have the freedom to use them in the way that works best for your classroom."

4.  Quill Connect – "Using the evidence-based strategy of sentence combining, students combine multiple ideas into a single sentence.  They then receive instant feedback designed to help them improve the clarity and precision of their sentences."

5.  Quill Proofreader – "Teaches students editing skills by having them proofread passages.  Students edit passages and receive personalized exercises based on their results.  With over 100 expository passages, Proofreader gives students the practice they need to spot common grammatical errors."

There is a free version that is comprehensive by itself.  The paid versions offer more features and are very affordable.  Below is pricing information and a video about Quill.

Using Edpuzzle to Create Engaging Video Lessons

Blended learning and flipped classrooms have been implemented in school districts across the country to much success.  Part of the blended learning/flipped classroom concept is that teachers create online lessons that are tailored to their learning goals, and these lessons can be completed by students at home or during a study period.  Additionally, these online lessons contain questions, quizzes, or some type of formative assessment so that teachers can gather data and feedback to create more targeted and relevant in-class activities.

The use of blended learning or a flipped classroom empowers students to learn at their own pace since they can slow down, speed up, pause, or even "rewind" a lesson.  Teachers can assign online lessons that cover fundamental or introductory content to free up time to teach material in class that is more responsive and in-depth.  Videos are a popular medium for these kinds of lessons, which leads me to Edpuzzle - a free tool for teachers to create interactive instructional videos.

First, go to Edpuzzle and create your free teacher account.  Once you create your account, Edpuzzle will walk you through an interactive tutorial on how to edit, customize, and assign a video.  Whenever you log in, you will see this page:

From here, you can browse the many great channels on the left, or you can search for a particular video in the search bar.  Also, you can copy and paste the link to a video you want to use into the search bar to begin customizing it.  Let's take a look at the steps to create an Edpuzzle video.

First, find and select the video you want to use.  I got mine from TED-Ed on YouTube, and you can see the video I created at the bottom of this post.  Then, you will be given the option to crop the video.  You can choose when to begin and end the video to make it the perfect length for your lesson.  Just drag the red crop bars along the time track to trim the video to any length you wish.

Next, you'll have the option to record an audio track or audio note.  Audio tracks can be used to layer your own lecture or explanation over the existing video.  Audio notes are short clips of information you want to include at certain points.




Finally, you can add questions at any point during the video.  Click on the green question mark below the time track to open the question menu on the right.  You can choose from a short answer, multiple choice, or comment.  You can also add a link or picture to the question.

Now, you are ready to assign it to your students.  If you use Google Classroom, this part is really cool.  You can assign the video to any of your classes in Google Classroom directly from Edpuzzle.  Also, you can set a due date.  The neatest feature may be the option to prevent students from skipping questions or skipping ahead in the video.  Click send, and it'll be sent to your classes.

In Edpuzzle, you can also see how your students are doing on your videos.  You can see how many students completed the video, how many times they watched it, their scores, your gradebook, and more helpful information to guide your instruction.  Additionally, you can post comments, feedback, and questions directly to individual students on their specific answers to give praise, guidance, or a follow-up question.

Here is an Edpuzzle video I created and assigned to a test class in my Google Classroom:



As we continue to innovate our educational practices with technology, tools like Edpuzzle will help tremendously to engage, empower, and enlighten students while making learning more individualized and interesting.  To learn more about Edpuzzle, check out these videos.

21st Century Worksheets

The worksheet - the old, but reliable, teaching material that we all know and love.  The worksheet has been maligned in recent years as we transform our classrooms into differentiated and dynamic student-centered learning spaces for the 21st century.  The paper-and-pencil and one-size-fits-all paradigms of worksheets are outdated.  However, the underlying concept of worksheets is still valid.  We just need to adapt it to our modern world, which leads me to Wizer - an educational service that enables teachers to create and share interactive and dynamic digital worksheets.  Let me give you a rundown of its features.

First, the service is free for teachers.  Although there are premium levels a teacher or school can purchase to gain access to additional features, the free version is still very powerful.  Teachers can create and share digital worksheets in which they can embed video, audio, images, links to websites, and much more.  Additionally, Wizer has a gigantic gallery of worksheets that other teachers have created.  You can search these by grade and subject, and all of them are free to use.

Second, there is a nice variety of question types to use:  open response, multiple choice, fill in the blank, fill in the image, matching, completing a table, etc.

Third, there are many creative themes and backgrounds to choose from to make a visually appealing and fun digital worksheet.

Finally, Wizer offers automatic grading of worksheets, and it integrates with LMS, including Google Classroom.  You can create a worksheet, and then send it to your students in Google Classroom in only a few clicks.

The premium versions offer more features, such as text-to-speech, differentiation, school repositories for all teachers to collaborate, administrative controls, analytics and reports, and intervention alerts.

To learn more about this great tool, check out these links:

About Wizer

Wizer FAQ

Wizer Blog

Wizer Video Tutorials