Engaging Digital Discussions

Class discussions are one of the better ways to help students develop the valuable skills of creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.  Discussions enable students to ask probing questions of each other, listen to and respond to classmates clearly and appropriately, challenge ideas and expand upon observations, and view topics with a circumspect lens.  The benefits of class discussions are numerous; however, there are some obstacles to productive discussions.

One is time.  By their nature, class discussions can take a while to develop.  Oftentimes, the most interesting parts of a discussion are discovered long into the examination of a subject.  A related obstacle is equal time for all students.  Some students speak a lot, and some speak a little, and some might not even get the opportunity to speak.  Also, some students may just be reluctant to speak in front of their peers.

Digital or online discussion boards have been used to mitigate these obstacles, but they can often lose focus the longer they go on and the further they become removed from the discussion topic.  Discussion or message boards make it difficult to retain the context of the conversation at hand simply by the user-interface of the board itself.  This brings me to an excellent solution:  NowComment.

NowComment is a free (yes, free) web app that allows for dynamic and engaging discussions of online documents, articles, videos, and more.  What sets this educational tool apart from the others are its unique user-interface and features.

NowComment uses a brilliant two-pane user-interface that contains the article or video on the left side of the screen and the discussion of it on the right side.  The article or video can be marked with annotations that link to specific discussions and comments about that particular sentence, paragraph, or section.  NowComment keeps everyone on literally the same page, and the discussions become more relevant and engaging.  Here are two short videos that demonstrate NowComment's awesome features.

Bringing History to Life

Finding interesting ways to bring history to life and make it relevant for students can engage and intrigue almost any learner.  One of the more exciting ways to do this is through the use of primary resources, such as documents, photos, videos, and maps.  The National Archives has a fantastic online resource that provides digital copies of these first-hand resources as well as pre-made activities you can use with your students.

DocsTeach is a service provided by The National Archives that curates, organizes, and supplies digital primary resources and activities to teachers and students for free.  Once teachers register for a DocsTeach account, they can find, modify, and save pre-made activities as well as create their own from the thousands of primary resources available.  The National Archives adds new resources all the time.  The resources, documents, and activities range from lower elementary to high school.

Documents and resources are organized and grouped by historical eras, which are the ones included in the National History Standards.  When searching, you can browse by era, media type, or search with keywords.

DocsTeach also provides seven tools that are designed to strengthen particular critical thinking skills.

1. Finding a Sequence:  Putting documents/resources in chronological order
2. Focusing on Details:  Doing a close reading and analyzing details
3. Making Connections:  Exploring the relationship between events and the concept of cause-and-effect
4. Mapping History:  Gaining a geographical context of history   
5. Seeing the Big Picture:  Matching resources that are related to one another in a concentration style game
6. Weighing the Evidence:  Evaluating the strength of resources in proving a point
7. Interpreting Data:  Assessing the source of a document

With DocsTeach, teachers and students can explore history and geography by bringing it all to life with interesting and interactive primary resources and activities.  Here are some helpful guides from DocsTeach:

DocsTeach Overview

DocsTeach Guide to Creating Activities

Booktrack Classroom Hits the Right Note

Sound may be one of the more captivating, moving, and dynamic stimuli.  A certain song can instantly bring you back to a special moment in your life.  A specific sound can make you calm or alert.  A soundtrack can heighten the emotions and ambience of a film.  I’m a big fan of the composer Hans Zimmer, who has scored many movies.  When listening to his scores, I can create a crystal clear mental picture of the movie scenes while also experiencing the mystery or suspense of those sequences.  I discovered an online service that uses the power of sound and music to create an immersive, engaging, and creative reading and writing experience.  It’s called Booktrack Classroom.

Booktrack Classroom is an online service for teachers and students.  It provides a library of e-books that contains soundtracks and sound effects to amplify the reading experience.  As you read, the score, ambient sounds, and sound effects perfectly complement what is happening on the page.  I found it absolutely immersive as the sound sparked my imagination to better visualize and experience the story.  Booktrack has smart technology that automatically adjusts the score and sound effects to adapt to your reading pace, but you can also manually increase or decrease the reading speed to ensure the sound seamlessly matches the story.  Additionally, you can adjust the volume, pause it, and start the audio back up again by double-clicking on a word if you want to re-read it or if you lose your place.

Teachers can get a full-version account for free, but it’s only available for a limited time.  I checked today, and this offer is still valid.  Once teachers have an account, they can create specific classes within Booktrack Classroom, add students to it, assign individualized books to each of their students, monitor and track their progress, and much more.  These classes also integrate with Google Classroom, so teachers can send anything in their Booktrack Class to their Google Classroom.  Booktrack Classroom also keeps track of books you or your students want to read, are reading, or have read in “My Bookshelf”.  According to Evidence-based Educational Outcomes in Literacy by the University of Auckland and NYU, contextual soundtracks helped students increase comprehension by 17%.  This study also found students read for 30% longer and reported 35% higher satisfaction when reading with a Booktrack.  Now, here comes the coolest part of Booktrack Classroom.

Students and teachers can create their own Booktracks for any book in the Booktrack Classroom library.  For example, teachers can have students create their own Booktracks for a chapter out of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  It gets even better.  Students can create their very own e-books on Booktrack Classroom.  They can write their own stories and choose from hundreds of professionally made music tracks, ambient noises, and sound effects to match the mood and setting of their stories.  Additionally, they can create a book cover and then publish it for others to read and enjoy.  There is much potential here for the four Cs (critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication).

I encourage you to read a book on Booktrack Classroom yourself because the experience gave me a huge “Wow” moment.  When my eyes came to the part in A Christmas Carol when the bell in Ebenezer’s bedroom mysteriously rings, and then the sound of a bell rang while eerie music played in the background, I was as shocked as Scrooge but in a good way.

Booktrack Classroom works on any computer, and it has an app for Android and iOS.  You can learn more about it with these videos:

A Super Citation Tool

If academia had a scarlet letter, it would be P.  Those who dare to claim somebody else’s work as their own or even leave sources uncited would be branded with a gasp-inducing red P.  If you haven’t guessed it, I’m talking about plagiarism.  All kidding aside, people have lost jobs, students have been expelled, and publications have lost credibility because of plagiarism.

In my day, we had to pore over citation manuals or just memorize how to cite common sources in the most popular styles to write our research papers and works cited pages.  Only for the styles to change the next year!  Now, there are a few tools out there that will do all this work for you…and do it flawlessly.  The tool I’m going to focus on is one I think does it the best and offers additional useful features.

If you’ve heard of or used RefME before, then you should know that it has changed its name and all its services to Cite This for Me.  You can create your free account on its website.  The first neat thing about Cite This for Me is that all your references, citations, work cited pages, and notes are stored in the cloud, so you can access them from any computer, tablet, or smartphone once you sign in to your account.

Cite This for Me has a great Google Chrome extension that allows you to cite, quote, and save any reference you access online through Chrome to your account.  You can get this extension by clicking here.  Once you have the citation information, click “Add to bibliography”, and you’re done.  Here’s what that looks like:

Cite This for Me can do citations in MLA, APA, Chicago, and Harvard styles.  You can see all of its features for creating a works cited page below:

Cite This for Me provides many other great features, such as topic ideas, a plagiarism checker, and a spelling/grammar checker.  Also, it has an add-on for Microsoft Word, so you can seamlessly import citations and works cited pages from Cite This for Me directly into Word.

Now, you can go forth and live an academically sinless life!

Scholastic Book Wizard is Magical

There is an online literacy tool that is simple, powerful, and truly magical.  I'm talking about Scholastic Book Wizard.  Finding something that fits perfectly is a wonderful thing.  Just ask Goldilocks.  The same goes for books.  Instilling a love and appreciation of reading and books in children is vital.  Finding the perfect book to match a child's interest, age, and reading level helps tremendously to accomplish that important goal.  The magic of Scholastic Book Wizard makes that happen.

Scholastic Book Wizard is free for parents, children, and teachers to use to help children find the right books for them.  It offers lesson plans, author studies, videos, discussion guides, booktalks, and many other great resources.  It provides fully featured and dynamic search parameters to find good books for even the pickiest of readers.  You can search by title, author, keyword, genre, subject, age, interest, and reading level.  The ability to search by reading level is probably the most helpful out of all the search options as it helps children choose a book that will feel just right for them.  As you can see below, you can search by Guided Reading Level (Fountas & Pinnell), DRA (Development Reading Assessment), Lexile Measure, and Grade Level Equivalent.

Scholastic Book Wizard provides much detailed and useful information about any book.  You can see below the information and resources you can find when looking up a book.

There are also subpages to the left that offer pertinent information and resources depending upon who you are.

Finally, there is a free Scholastic Book Wizard mobile app available for Apple iOS and Android.  What is really cool about this app is that you can use it to scan the bar code of any book and instantly get detailed information about that book, such as reading level, age level, genre, themes, page count, similar books, etc.  Students can use this app while they are browsing in a store or library to help them find the perfect book for them to read and enjoy.

To learn more about Scholastic Book Wizard, click here.  To learn more about its mobile app, click here.

An Extension to Extend Vocabulary

Learning and understanding words are essential life skills that help both children and adults.  In the past, if we came across words we didn't understand, we had to interrupt our reading flow by finding a dictionary, looking up the word, reading the definition, figuring out how to pronounce it, checking synonyms to gain context, and then go back to whatever we were reading.  Now, there is a tool that doesn't interrupt reading flow and provides comprehensive information about a word instantaneously.

Meet the Google Dictionary Chrome Extension.  Once it is installed, if you double-click on any word while browsing in Chrome, a bubble appears above the word with its definition and an audio file with its proper pronunciation.  If you click the "More" link in that bubble, a new tab in Chrome opens with more information about the word, including part of speech, other forms, alternate definitions, and more.

Finally, you can store words to your own personal dictionary to study later by clicking the Google Dictionary extension icon (a red book) in the upper right of Chrome.  Click "Options", and then check the box next to "Store words I look up, including definitions."  You can return to this "Options" screen to download a history of your stored words.  This is an effective tool to help both children and adults learn and understand any word they come across in Chrome as it makes almost anything they read accessible.  Here's how to install it in Chrome:

1.  Open Chrome and click this link.
2.  Click the blue "Add to Chrome" button in the upper right.
3.  The extension will install, and you'll be good to go!

Now, you'll be able to understand this sentence:  In a few days, I can't wait to be absolutely farctate!  Thank goodness for Thanksgiving!

   

Keep It Simple

Isaac Newton wisely said, "Truth is ever to be found in simplicity."  Quite right, Mr. Newton.  With Internet access at our fingertips, we now have the collective knowledge of the history of the world on demand.  Although we have access to all that information, it isn't always accessible - especially for students.  Wikipedia isn't perfect; yet, it really is an excellent source of information.  However, it's not always simple.  Here's a quick and easy way to simplify any Wikipedia article, so it is more understandable and accessible.

Let's say you want your students to read about volcanoes.  Here is the Wikipedia article about volcanoes.  As you can see, even the introduction is complex:

Yet, we can make a change to its URL address to simplify it.  In that long, white box at the top of the browser where the website's address is (the URL), you will see "en." before "wikipedia".  Take these steps to simplify this and any other Wikipedia article:

1.  Highlight the "en" in the address.
2.  Type "simple" in its place.  The address will now be https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano.
3.  Press enter or return.  And that's it!  It's been simplified!

Here's what the simple version looks like:

To make this even simpler, just go to https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page to search for any topic.  Everything you search for there will automatically be in simple form.

Enjoy the simple things in life - including this Tech Tip!