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.

Developing Digital Citizens

Although the Internet as we know it has been around for over 25 years, it will always be a brave, new world to the latest generation of children.  The younger generations are labeled as “digital natives”, having grown up with computers and the World Wide Web at their fingertips.  Yet, we must not assume they are native digital citizens.  The digital world has its own rules, expectations, and customs that can only be acquired and mastered through the guidance of those who know how the digital world works.  That’s us – teachers, guidance counselors, parents.  We must welcome these new, young citizens to our digital land, and help them to safely and successfully navigate its strange terrain.

Since this week is Digital Citizenship Week (October 16-20), it is the perfect time to begin the journey to help students become respectful and responsible digital citizens.  We do not have to go this journey alone as there are excellent resources to help us teach digital citizenship.  Since many K-12 schools already use G Suite for Education, I will focus on Google’s Digital Citizenship resources since they are easy to use and integrate.

Google wants students to Be Internet Awesome.

The core principles that shape the lessons and activities of the Be Internet Awesome program are:

Be Internet Smart – Share with Care

Good (and bad) news travels fast online, and without some forethought, kids can find themselves in tricky situations that have lasting consequences. The solve? Learning how to share with those they know and those they don’t.

Be Internet Alert – Don’t Fall for Fake

It’s important to help kids become aware that people and situations online aren’t always as they seem. Discerning between what’s real and what’s fake is a very real lesson in online safety.

Be Internet Strong – Secure Your Secrets

Personal privacy and security are just as important online as they are offline. Safeguarding valuable information helps kids avoid damaging their devices, reputations, and relationships.

Be Internet Kind – It’s Cool to be Kind

The Internet is a powerful amplifier that can be used to spread positivity or negativity. Kids can take the high road by applying the concept of “treat others as you would like to be treated” to their actions online, creating positive impact for others and disempowering bullying behavior.

Be Internet Brave – When in Doubt, Talk It Out

One lesson that applies to any and all encounters of the digital kind: When kids come across something questionable, they should feel comfortable talking to a trusted adult. Adults can support this behavior by fostering open communication at home and in the classroom.

The Be Internet Awesome program offers a free, ISTE-aligned curriculum with well-designed and detailed lessons and activities.  There is also a very fun and engaging game that reinforces the lessons.

Here are some other great resources for Be Internet Awesome:

Classroom Poster

Student Pledge

Paper Cut, Fold, and Glue Activity

Finally, Google offers a free Digital Citizenship and Safety Course for teachers to help them better educate their students on staying safe and secure online.  This course takes approximately 75 minutes to complete.

The Internet is a brave, new world for our children.  It is paramount that we take the time to teach them how to respectfully, responsibly, and safely explore this world that is becoming a bigger part of our lives each day.  The Internet is a community like any other, and the better citizens we can be in our community the better we all will be for it.

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!