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writing

Seven Best Writing Tools for iOS Devices

by Guest Blogger February 5, 2019

written by Guest Blogger

Recently, Apple decided to renew its focus on the educational market. The company may have lost some ground to Google and other companies when it comes to owning the educational space, but there’s no denying it’s still a major player. One of the reasons that iOS devices remain popular in educational settings is because there’s no shortage of apps and tools that can be used in the classroom.

Writing is one particular niche where iOS developers have really done an exceptional job. There are a host of apps that students can use to become better, more prolific, creative writers. Here are some of the best.

Simplenote

As its name suggests, Simplenote is a very simple tool for taking notes. These are automatically saved to the cloud and synced to other devices. This is a plus for students who tend to have papers disappear into the ether between school and home or who don’t have access to a stick drive. The tool works for iOS, and there’s also a browser version.

Simplenote is a text-only tool. Some people may see this as a drawback. However, its simplicity gives students a distraction-free utility for taking notes quickly and easily.

Canva For Education

Canva is largely marketed as a simple, graphic design tool for business. However, thanks to Canva’s education initiative, teachers and students can use this tool to create posters, presentations, reports, and more. There are over a million icons, photographs, layouts, and other images that students can access via Canva. This app is available for both the iPhone and the iPad.

Notability

Notability is a wildly popular tool among students and teachers for note taking and annotations. Students can create and share documents from Notability. They can also use the drag and drop feature to move images, text, and other files into the app.

One really neat feature is the ability to search for handwritten notes and convert them to text. When combined with Apple Pencil, students can use Notability to hand write annotations and draw directly onto their device.

This tool even works for students who are auditory learners. The app features allow you to record and play back audio. Even better, notes are synced with the audio recordings. This means that students who are reviewing their notes can also listen to a playback of the lecture

Microsoft Word

It may seem counter-intuitive to use a Microsoft App on an iOS device, but in reality, it makes a lot of sense. Many schools already subscribe to Office 365. It’s a word processing tool that many people already know how to use, and it’s easy enough for others to master. Whether your classroom uses iOS devices exclusively or you simply have a few students bringing their own, the Word App for iOS ensures that every student can access this powerful writing tool.

OmniOutliner

By creating outlines, students are empowered to organize their thoughts and create well-structured documents. This leads to better writing outcomes. It’s also a great way for them to organize large amounts of information for their own understanding. OmniOutliner is an iOS tool that allows them to create great outlines with ease.

Yes, students can use any word processor for outlining, but this tool is created specifically for this purpose. It functions especially well for students who need to create and organize lengthy outlines.

Terminology

Terminology for iOS isn’t a writing tool in the strictest sense. It’s a dictionary and thesaurus reference. Still, it has features that can most certainly help students to become better writers. The tool allows students to look up words, mark words as “favorites,” attach notes to words, and more. Students can also use the tool to look up definitions and other information on Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Google, and Wolfram Alpha. As a result, this tool not only improves writing, it can improve overall literacy.

Grammarly Keyboard

Grammarly Keyboard for iOS is a portable editor that students can use directly from their devices. It checks writing for mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Even better, it integrates with all other phone apps. As long as students have the Grammarly keyboard selected as their default, they have access to Grammarly insights. Even better, the tool provides easy-to-understand explanations for the suggestions that it makes.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve chosen iOS devices for your classroom, you’re in luck. There are a variety of tools available to help students take better notes, organize their thoughts, and otherwise produce quality written works. Check out a few of the tools here to help your students improve their writing abilities.

This is a guest blog by Daniela McVicker. Daniela is a passionate digital marketer who is interested in everything related to SEO and blogging. She collaborates with Topwritersreview and other websites where she shares her experience and helps marketers make their name in the online world.

February 5, 2019 1 comment

English Language Arts

Asking Questions and Envisioning Instruction for the ELAR TEKS

by Lori Gracey January 28, 2019

written by Lori Gracey

The K-8 ELAR TEKS (English Language Arts and Reading Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) adopted in 2017 will be implemented in the fall of this year. Educators are digging into the strands, the knowledge and skills statements, and the student expectations to ask critical questions that will guide the planning and delivery of instruction in 2019-2020 and beyond. Let’s consider practical approaches for reading and understanding the philosophies and intentions of the TEKS.

Reading Within the Strands

The seven strands should be considered individually to develop an understanding of the academic expectations related to a particular area of focus.

Example: Reading within Strand 3, “Response skills,” means reading the standards within the context of the knowledge and skills statement. Doing so leads to an understanding that students must engage in “listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking” as they encounter and consider “a variety of sources” and generate a range of responses, from describing “personal connections” to demonstrating “understanding of texts, including comparing and contrasting ideas” to applying knowledge gained from texts by responding “using newly acquired vocabulary.”

Questions to ask as you understand the standards within a strand:

What opportunities for learning must be offered for students to understand, apply, and master the standards?
Why is it important to keep the standards within a strand nestled with their knowledge and skill statements (versus cutting them apart and treating them as individual standards)?
Considering your current instructional approaches, what attention do you give to the areas of focus identified in the strands, and how might that focus change as you envision instruction of the new TEKS?

Reading Across the Strands

It is important to consider how the strands can be interwoven to create meaningful learning opportunities. The seven strands, when conceptualized as forming a whole, suggest that literacy development is most effective when the content-specific domains are integrated rather than isolated.

Non-Example: The “Composition” and “Research and Inquiry” strands are not to be pulled apart from the other strands and taught on certain days of the week or by “the writing teacher” down the hall. Teaching the ELAR domains in isolation leads students to regard reading, writing, speaking, and listening as separate acts.

Example: Teaching that integrates the ELAR domains means that students come to understand that the development of literacy skills is a cognitive process in which, for example, reading shapes and challenges our perspectives, speaking causes us to clarify our own thinking, listening to others’ ideas challenges our own thinking, and writing—modeled on our reading—allows us to explore craft and to add to our writing toolbox.

Questions to ask as you look across the strands:

How does instruction that moves across the strands, rather than isolates the strands as separate parts, provide students with opportunities to view literacy development as a cognitive process rather than as tasks assigned and graded by the teacher?
How do the knowledge and skills statements reveal the intentions of the strands, and what research-based best practices are they founded on?
Considering your current instructional approaches, how do you plan instruction that integrates the ELAR domains, and how might envisioning instruction that moves across the strands provide students with meaningful opportunities for literacy development?

Reading Across the Grades

Reading across the grades allows educators to develop an understanding of how the instruction of ELAR concepts and skills is logically sequenced as students advance grades.

Example: Reading the student expectations at the grade below the one being taught helps to conceptualize how instruction in the previous grade should prepare students for the literacy work to be accomplished at the instructional grade level. Reading the standards at the grade above helps to conceptualize the level of mastery of the current grade’s standards that will enable students to be prepared to do the work of the next grade level. Thus, reading below and above helps to illuminate the depth and rigor at which ELAR standards should be taught at the instructional grade level.

Questions to ask as you read across the grades to learn the strands, knowledge and skills statements, and student expectations:

How will the instruction planned for a particular grade level build on the literacy experiences students have had previously as well as prepare students for instruction students will receive the next year?
How does vertical alignment emphasize recursive teaching without needless repetition or overlap?
Considering your current instructional approaches, how do you leverage students’ literacy histories that they bring to your classroom, and how do you design instruction that enriches those literacy histories that students will take with them to the next grade?

Preparing to implement the TEKS means participating in a shared vision across the state for meaningful and authentic ELAR instruction that fosters students’ literacy development during the implementation year and beyond.

Written by CHARLES FUHRKEN

As an ELA writer for Mentoring Minds, Charles’ goal is to fully equip teachers with a toolkit that helps their students become critical, enthusiastic, and confident readers. Charles’s passion for education was cultivated during his tenure as a classroom teacher and then through his work earning his Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction. Visit Mentoring Minds at the upcoming TCEA Expo in booth #858, or online at mentoringminds.com.

January 28, 2019 0 comment

ESL/ELL Good Teaching Microsoft Tips and Tricks Reading Special Needs Writing

Supporting Bilingual Students with Reading and Writing

by Miguel Guhlin December 12, 2018

written by Miguel Guhlin

In the United States, over thirteen million children speak a language other than English at home. After English, Spanish is the most common language spoken (Source: Data Center). In 2016, there were 456,000 Texas students who had difficulty speaking English. What are some of the ways that schools can use technology to assist students who are learning English? In this blog entry, let’s review research, approaches, and tools for teaching reading and writing to English language learners.

Enhancing Reading

Microsoft’s Learning Tools and other digital text tools can enhance reading. Students’ experiences with digital texts include pictionaries, read alouds, and parts of speech. Each can help extend students’ vocabulary and support them in learning more about sentences structure.

One incredible Office 365 tool is the Immersive Reader. It offers various features such as:

Adjustable font size, text spacing, and background color
Splitting up words into syllables
Line focus
Highlighting verbs, nouns, adjectives, and sub-clauses
Choosing between several fonts optimized to help with reading
Reading text aloud with adjustable speed
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from print and pictures

These tools can help English Language Learners as they learn to break down words and phrases and improve their English literacy. Enhanced reading can also lead to enhanced writing, as my own story can attest.

Growing Up Bilingual

“How’s that book report coming along?” asked my dad. It was nearly noon on a Saturday. Balled up pages of handwritten text covered a corner of the hexagonal kitchen table. I smiled at him. “I’m on my fifth draft of a page-and-a-half book report.” The sheer exhilaration of putting words where I wanted to kept me wrestling with the ideas. Each time, I changed a sentence, I got an insight into the idea I was fishing for. I’d come a long way from my big fat “F” in reading and writing in second grade.

Research says a lot about children like me who grew up speaking and writing in two languages. Growing up bilingual? Some research says the following:

You may learn English words and grammar at a slower pace than monolinguals,
You tend to be better at multitasking than monolinguals.
You can pick out relevant speech sounds and ignore others in noisy environments. (So, my mom was right. I did have selective hearing as a teenager!)
Your verbal skills in each language are weaker than those of monolingual speakers.

Growing up bilingual, my dual language background enriched my writing style.

Improving Writing

From book reports to essays and then more book reports, I learned to write in sixth grade. Constant writing allowed me to refine my use of two languages. Some of the techniques that I rely on as a bilingual writer are as follows:

Create graphic organizers, semantic webs, and concept maps.
Summarize research and explain what another has said or written in your own words.
Chunk writing in blocks with headers.
Start with dialogue or a story.

Want to help your English language learners and bilingual/ESL students improve their writing? You can use these same techniques with the help of tech tools.

Blending Technology into Writing

Ready to blend technology into the four techniques I mention above? Today, we have access to a wide range of tools and resources. Here is a roundup of tools:

1. Create graphic organizers

Have a touchscreen device like an iPad, Windows 10 tablet, or Chromebook with a stylus? Use convenient apps to organize your nonfiction or fiction writing. These apps do well for note-taking. Find them available for iOS, Windows 10, Chromebook. Many types of graphic organizers exist online. Use them as a model to organize your work and model it for students. I grew up drawing concept maps for lecture notes and grabbing key ideas from texts. Until I internalized the process, I used them to organize my writing.

2. Summarize research in your own words

Summarizing is the process of keeping what’s relevant and discarding the rest. For bilingual brains, this is one strength to develop. As a child, I was assigned research papers. I had limited access to encyclopedias. If I wanted access to information at home, I had to take notes on what I read. I kept what was relevant to what I hoped to write. One way to encourage students involves focusing on the main ideas and supporting details. Get them to write, revise the information, and focus on the relevant. One tool that I use often is Hemingway Editor. It helps cut unnecessary words and shorten ideas.

3. Chunk writing with headers

Chunking splits information into small pieces. This makes reading and understanding faster and easier. Students may see a piece of writing as one long narrative. Teach them to write longer pieces. Each piece is assembled in short chunks. Students can apply chunking strategies with these methods:

Craft short paragraphs.
Keep sentences short.
Use bullet or numbered lists.
Create a visual hierarchy with varying styles of headings and subheadings (Source)

One easy way to model this for students is to write blog entries. Your students can write about anything. Practice chunking it. Begin with short pieces first. Craft longer pieces in time. A fun way to approach this could be to have students chunk an existing piece of writing, explaining why as they do it.

4. Start with dialogue or story

“When do you use quotation marks?” asked my son. I had shared my Dad’s approach to selecting books to read. He was wont to say, “I crack the book open. If it has a lot of dialogue, I get it. If it doesn’t, I leave it on the shelf.” This made my son want to create writing worth buying. “You use quotes around things people say,” I said to him.

“Quotes move a piece of writing forward,” I added after a moment’s thought.

Want students to use dialogue well? Have them create comics. Every speech or thought bubble is a snippet of dialogue, spoken or imagined. Using tools like Book Creator, students can make comics. They can highlight nonfiction or fiction information and ideas. Each exchange forces students to break concepts into smaller pieces. They use their own words, striving for natural speech.

Reading and Writing to New Heights

Writers can be like rock climbers. The cliff climber pits herself against the physicality of the rock. A writer clings to ideas, dangling from a precipice. Embrace strategies and technologies for reading and writing with your bilingual students, especially as they work to perfect their English. Give them the skills they need to express themselves in English as well as they can in their mother tongue.

December 12, 2018 1 comment

English Language Arts Writing

Unlock Your Students’ Stories with Tools to Support Creative Writing

by Susan Meyer November 20, 2018

written by Susan Meyer

Creative writing is the makerspace of the mind. A truly open assignment where students are free to follow whatever crazy directions their stories takes them? This is a priceless avenue for invention.

Right now, we’re nearing the end of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month). This is a 30-day period when writers around the world write like the wind. The goal is to produce a 50,000-word novel during the month. This writer has personally started and failed the challenge three times. But luckily, I never consider the undertaking truly a failure. After all, even if you don’t hit a certain number of words, there are always things to be gained from writing stories. Writing builds confidence, encourages creativity and self-expression, boosts the imagination and problem-solving skills, and helps you learn to clarify your thoughts.

I want to share some tools to get your students writing down their craziest, most outlandish, off-the-wall stories. Here are some ideas to get started.

Spark Inspiration

Writer’s block. Sometimes the most difficult task is overcoming the blank page. Here are some tools to help your students answer the question: What should I write about?

Thanks to the collective hive mind of the internet, there’s no shortage of writing prompt generators. These provide free plots ideas to start a narrative. This site lets you choose your genre and what type of ending the story will have. And this one from Scholastic lets you choose your grade level for age-appropriate writing projects. This Google Doc option doesn’t create full plots but instead offers imaginative phrases to get those wheels turning.

For your more visual writers, check out this Emoji Writing Prompt Generator. A few randomly-selected icons might spur your students to write the next great American novel.

Finally, if you don’t want a whole plot mapped out for you, there’s this fun generator that creates the first line of a story for you. This could be a fun classtime writing activity if you assign all students to write using the same first line and discover all the different directions their stories can go!

Write Online

Once they have their idea, the next challenge is putting pen to paper. Or, times being what they are, fingers to keyboard. Typing out a story has some distinct advantages. You can easily share it with others for collaboration. It’s often faster than writing by hand. And you don’t have to worry about your only copy blowing away or getting thrown in the fireplace or some other very literary scenario. Here are a few places students can start their next writing project:

Of course, it would be impossible not to include Google Docs. This tool makes word processing in the cloud simple. Changes are automatically saved and your students can also easily share their work with you or other students for comments.

Draft is another free tool designed for online word processing. It has some unique features that make it great for young writers. It provides a word count at the bottom of the screen and lets them know how many words they are writing per day. It also allows them to make “to do” notes in their stories so they can easily come back to things they want to elaborate on more.

Of course, there are also some downsides to writing on a computer instead of in a notebook. Namely: distractions. Calmly is a writing tool that tries to keep the writing process distraction-free. When you start typing, all of the distracting menu options disappear, so you have a blank canvas to work on.

Refine the Work

One of the fun things about creative writing is you can let all the ideas flow freely and not worry about editing. Those NaNoWriMo winners who get to 50,000 words certainly don’t end up with a completely polished, ready-to-publish piece in 30 days. While the goal of encouraging creative writing might not require polishing, you can still provide some tools if your students are happy with their story and want to take it to the editing phase.

Grammarly is a free proofreading extension you can add to your web browser. It will correct typos and grammatical errors in everything from your emails and social media posts to your creative stories and poems.

Hemingway App is a way for writers to improve the readability of their work. It highlights sentences that are hard to read and offers suggestions for fixing them. Depending on their personal style, your budding writers may or may not find this useful. If they enjoy figurative flourishes and are more of a William Faulker than an Ernest Hemmingway, this might not be the tool for them.

Go Forth and Create

In the same way that students can find value in makerspaces by creating things without strict parameters, so too is there great value in free writing. Allowing students to use their imaginations to whip up whole worlds from thin air is powerful. Do you have any favorite writing tools? Please share them in the comments below!

November 20, 2018 0 comment

English Language Arts Google Tips and Tricks

Creating Dynamic Digital Poetry Books

by Diana Benner April 9, 2018

written by Diana Benner

April is National Poetry Month and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate poetry than with student-created digital poetry books made with Google Slides. National Poetry Month was introduced in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets as a way to increase awareness and appreciation of poetry in the United States. Each year in April, tens of millions of students, teachers, and librarians rejoice in poetry’s important place in our lives.

Writing Poems with Google Slides

In the blog entry, Slide into the New Year with Student eBooks, I outlined four quick and easy steps on how to create an ebook in Google Slides. Your students will follow this same simple process for creating their digital book of poems.

The Poetry Marathon

In order for students to create a book a poems, they will obviously need to write more than one poem. Using a Poetry Marathon format to create a series of short poems around a common theme would work perfectly for this task. The goal of the marathon is to write one poem every hour, for twenty-four hours straight. The reward would be that you would have a collection of poems produced in one day. Of course, that might not realistically work in your classroom. Therefore, you would need to come up with your own rules for your marathon.

Types of Short Poems

Short poems are crucial for this kind of project as Google Slides will lend itself well to fewer words on a slide. This way, images can also be included to add visual representations of the poems. A few short poems you can explore are cinquains, shape poems, nonsense verse, acrostics, couplets, and haikus. Take a look at these few that I included in my very own book, The One-of-a-Kind Daisy Mae.

Cinquain Poem

Click on image to open the digital book.

A cinquain poem is a verse of five lines that do not rhyme. The cinquain poem was created by Adelaide Crapsey.

Acrostic Poem

An acrostic poem is where the first, last, or other letters in a line spell out a particular word or phrase. The most common and simple form of an acrostic poem is where the first letters of each line spell out the word or phrase.

Couplet

A couplet is a pair of successive lines of meter in a poem. A couplet usually consists of two successive lines that rhyme.

Dynamic Digital Poetry Books Are a Win-Win!

The end result of creating this kind of digital book is a win-win. Not only are students engaged in writing poetry in various forms, but they are also using technology to publish a digital book of their original writing. I hope this National Poetry Month activity will inspire you to keep celebrating poetry digitally all year long!

April 9, 2018 0 comment

Chromebooks Content Areas Google Tips and Tricks

Create Interactive Stories with Story Speaker

by Lori Gracey February 24, 2018

written by Lori Gracey

Coding is an incredibly important skill in today’s world and all students should have some practice with it. But sometimes, you want to create something amazing without having to spend time on writing code. A new Google Docs add-on can help with that. Story Speaker allows students to easily create interactive “choose your own adventure”-type stories that are then read by any Google Home device.

The Process

The teacher or Google administrator gives the students access to the Story Speaker add-on. Students go into Google Docs and select the Add-ons menu and choose Story Speaker — Open Story Speaker. They then write a story in Google Docs either on their own or using one of the two provided templates: Basic or Advanced (more about the templates below). The final step is to click Play Your Story and the story will be read by the Google Home. You can even export the story and save it to a class website or email to parents to listen to on their own Google Home or on Google Assistant on a smartphone. You can watch a short two-minute video to get the idea here.

The Story Speaker Templates

While you don’t have to use them, having the templates is a nice resource, especially for older students who are focusing on writing longer stories or when younger students are working together to craft a story. They provide a framework for their ideas. The Basic template comes complete so that all the students have to do is change what is provided to what they want to say. The Advanced template provides all of the features as the Basic one, but also adds the ability to:

Allow the story to skip to different parts by using the GOTO command.
Add Randoms to make the story different each time it is read. The student defines the potential random words (like dog, zebra, octopus, black widow spider) and Google Home selects a new one.
Add Saves so that information from the listener, such as his/her name or favorite color, can be integrated into the story.

The Built-in Coding

Throughout the story, there will be forks where the listener must make a choice. Fork options are written in bold, which shows what the Story Speaker listener must say in order for the story to move forward. Students can begin to learn about basic if/then statements in code and how to predict outcomes. They must think like the listener as they predict what words he/she might say in response to the story. And they must follow logical, branching concepts, all without realizing that they are doing it. In addition, students can put notes to themselves in bold in the writing, much like programmers do, as bold text is not read out loud.

From a Teacher’s Perspective

Most kids don’t like to write. Staring at a blank page can be very frustrating for them. With Story Speaker, there is no blank page, which makes it less intimidating. And the fact that their story will be read aloud by a cool tech device makes it more fun. However, to ensure the learning is real, I would make sure to do the following:

Define the purpose of the writing. What do you as the teacher want to emphasize? Is it action verbs, having a strong beginning and ending, building tension to the climax, or creating great dialogue? Make sure the students know what their stories must contain to meet the content standards.
As a class, look over the content found in the template and discuss what they see. Then have the students develop a list of components that they will need to include in their own stories to make the template work well.
Strongly encourage peer editing. There is tremendous power in having students help each other become better writers.
Allow time to hear all of the stories. This might be done during the last five minutes of class, every Friday, or whenever you have a spare moment. But it’s important that all of the students get to shine.

By the way, if you just want to have Google Home read out any text, such as the Declaration of Independence or a poem your class is studying, simply copy and paste it into a blank Google Doc and then have Story Speaker read it aloud without using the templates.

Over time, your students can develop a class library of stories to share with their peers and next year’s students. This is authentic writing for sure!

February 24, 2018 0 comment

Content Areas Google Tips and Tricks Writing

Improve Students’ Writing with WriQ

by Lori Gracey February 17, 2018

written by Lori Gracey

Helping students improve their writing can be an extremely difficult and complex task. There are so many variables present in a piece of good writing that must all work together. Grammar, spelling, word choice, plot, sentence construction, voice — how can a teacher help students improve all of these and still have a life of her own that isn’t consumed by grading? Enter WriQ, an add-on for Google Docs.

Designed for the teacher and not the student, WriQ is a tremendous tool. The system scores and keeps track of students’ spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors so the teacher can focus on the things that computers can’t score as well. This will save the teacher time and frustration in marking those common errors. You can view a good introductory video on the power of WriQ here. The system auto-scores students’ docs and tracks the following measures over time:

Correct word sequences score
Grammar error rate
Percentage error free
Punctuation error rate
Spelling error rate
Text maturity
Time spent writing

Image result for wriq

The teacher dashboard provides a clear, graphical view of students’ writing activity, and lets you track their progress over time. That is HUGE! The teacher can also submit individual feedback and comments.

Image result for wriq

There is a good FAQ page available here that will answer most, if not all, of the questions you have. WriQ is completely free for now, but over time, additional “premium” features will be added. For a limited time, as a thank you to everyone who scores 100 student writing passages to help them out, they’ll give you free access…for life! So get it added to your Google Docs today and start submitting your students’ writing. This is definitely a tool that you will want to continue using!

Interested in other add-ons for Google tools? Check out these blogs here and here.

February 17, 2018 0 comment

Good Teaching Leadership Professional Learning

The Voices of TCEA

by Guest Blogger February 9, 2018

written by Guest Blogger

I have attended TCEA for the past few years, and it’s always a time of learning, reflection, and growth. How exciting it is when educators converge on the great city of Austin to learn from each other, network, collaborate across districts, and get to eat lunch at a restaurant. We’re educators…this little thing is a huge perk.

When TCEA asked me to guest blog, I decided I would let the day determine what my message would be. It quickly became clear that the voices of TCEA impact me the most at this conference each year. From the kind lady at registration to the jolly security guard, from the fourth grade teacher I met walking from the parking garage, to the people I connected with on Twitter during my session…it is these voices that speak loud and strong. They speak words of kindness, hope, excitement, and reflection…all things I crave in my role as an instructional coach and in my life as a human. Allow me to share some of these voices with you.

Josh Strickland

I had the honor of meeting Josh Strickland on the way to registration. Josh is a fourth grade teacher from Anna ISD and is interested in blogging and coding. We got to visit briefly and later swapped URLs during separate sessions. I love when I can magnify my learning at conferences by looking through the presentation materials and tweets of the other educators around me. It definitely provides a broader learning experience and allows me to gain more than I would without a personal learning network. Connect with Josh on Twitter and let’s help get him motivated to blog!

Angel Bradford

The next voice I got to hear was that of Angel Bradford. Angel presented on Writing Workshop/Technology Mashup. As the co-director of the Central Texas Writing Project, I am always looking for ways to connect writing teachers with relevant, engaging resources, and this session had both! One of the fun things she talked about was peer editing. In my work with teachers, I have found that peer revising and editing always seem to be daunting to teachers since there are so many factors involved. This peer editing video was a fun way to introduce some non-examples of strong peer editors.

Jessica Torres

Mandy Taylor

For lunch, I had the opportunity to hear the voice of Jessica Torres. Jessica is an assistant principal in Waco ISD and she co-presented on a panel with me last year on personalized professional development. Jessica and I have only met in person twice, last year at TCEA and for lunch today right before our session. We visited about building teacher capacity, struggles and triumphs in our current positions, and how the connections we have forged through social media have impacted the work we do and our respective careers. She is a force to be reckoned with and I am glad she is in my corner.

Caleb Hudgens

Following lunch, we headed to Hilton Salon G (because that sounds very glamorous) for our #PersonalizedPD Game of Stories session with Caleb Hudgens. I worked with Caleb for several years before he left to be the Instructional Technology Coordinator at Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD. Caleb remains a great friend and my go-to for ideas on student publication, student voice, and all things Adobe Spark!

During this session, we facilitated a brief discussion of the power of #PersonalizedPD for educators. This idea is built on the concept that teachers are the best PD for each other, and providing opportunities for choice and voice in the professional development process always yields the greatest results with the most opportunity for ongoing growth. We then put the card game, Game of Stories, in the hands of the session participants where it really belongs. Tables quickly began using their deck of cards to share stories and swap ideas from their own experiences and their own classrooms. Learning was shared on a collaborative Google Doc and each participant left with the link that houses new Twitter connections, a treasure trove of extensions and tech tools, as well as ideas that I can’t wait to explore later!

I am thrilled I get to spend a few more days in Austin connecting and learning with a bright group of brave educators who are here to learn more about truly transforming the future through innovative learning opportunities. We need more educators willing to listen to their own voice and stand up for kids! I would love to connect with you if you’re here for the week or on Twitter if I don’t get the opportunity to meet you face to face.

Mandy Taylor is an instructional coach at Hays CISD and regularly blogs here. You can also reach her on Twitter.

February 9, 2018 0 comment

Good Teaching

Creating Six-Word Memoirs

by Miguel Guhlin November 20, 2017

written by Miguel Guhlin

“For sale: Baby shoes, never worn” wrote Ernest Hemingway. This six word memoir‘s brevity hints at a deeper tale. In my fifth grade Writers’ Workshop, helping students focus on one aspect of their lives could be challenging. Memoirs can be powerful when reduced to their essence. Let’s take a look at some ways six-word memoirs might find a place in teaching, learning, and leading.

Six-Word Memoirs in the Classroom

Memoirs are more than sad stories. One teacher describes the assignment for students:

My students had just finished a unit on the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. I asked my students to create six-word memoirs for the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. If people like Voltaire, Newton and Diderot only had six words, how would they describe their accomplishments? I made the project and requirements simple (source:Jonathan Olsen).

Jenny Rich (@jdrich219) suggests five ways to use six-word memoirs in the classroom. These include ways students can use them to:

Introduce themselves
Capture a fictional (or non-fictional) character’s perspective
Memorialize key aspects of a character
Summarize critical concepts in a lesson
Describe media (e.g. song, art, film)
Reflect on learning experiences

Let’s blend a few examples of technology use with the six-word memoir sentence structure (a.k.a. six-word structure) in the classroom that Jenny and Jonathan suggest.

#1 – Six-Word Blog Entries

“Memoir involves the whittling away of a whole lot of stuff that you have lived and a focusing on one slim section, full of power, that demands to be told,” says Lisa Dale Norton. Writing a blog entry is about whittling away the unnecessary. The writer plays the part of a marble sculptor, cutting towards his mental vision of perfection. Students can learn to write short, summarizing key concepts for a chapter or unit of study using the six-word structure. One way to publish summaries is in a classroom blog.

Some blog platforms that you may find useful:

Growing up reading textbooks in class, I soon developed the ability to focus on the essential ideas. What would I ask a question about on a test? What nugget of information was worth picking up? As a result, my grades improved. Writing blog entries in brief can become a game. Who can best capture the main ideas in brief?

#2 – Six-Word Memoir Music-Enhanced Images

Combine stirring images with six-word memoirs. See examples below:

You can create a slide show with music using Google Slides and a screencasting tool of choice, such as: PowerPoint with Office Mix add-in, Animoto, or Shadow Puppet EDU (iOS). You can find many examples of six-word memoirs as music-enhanced slideshows. Here’s one more from eighth grade students, the class of 2024:

#3 – SketchNote That Six-Word Memoir

Learn more about Sketchnoting with Microsoft OneNote

Sketchnotes are “…rich visual notes created from a mix of handwriting, drawings, hand-drawn typography, shapes, and visual elements like arrows, boxes, and lines,” says Mike Rohde, author of The Sketchnote Handbook.

Learn more about sketchnoting. Check out these TCEA presentations at the upcoming 2018 Convention & Exposition: Sketchnotes for Non-Artists (Vanessa Perez), The Art of Paying Attention with Sketchnotes (Peggy Reimers), as well as this premier resource, Sketchnoting for Beginners (Sylvia Duckworth).

Another fun idea includes sketchnoting the six-word memoir using a tool like Microsoft OneNote. See some more ideas about sketchnoting to assist student’s development of their memoirs.

Wrap Up

In this blog entry, we’ve taken a look at a variety of technologies you can use to create six-word memoirs, among them, blogs, audio/video apps, and digital drawings known as sketchnotes. How are you blending technology into six-word memoirs?

November 20, 2017 2 comments

English Language Arts

Three Tips to Blogging Author Chats, Part 2

by Miguel Guhlin October 21, 2017

written by Miguel Guhlin

Welcome to Part 2 of Three Tips to Blogging Author Chats. We will explore some easy-to-use technologies, as well as share some possible solutions.

Tip #2 – Blend in simple, easy-to-use technologies that empower your conversation.

“Ok,” you may think, “I know how to do Socratic Seminar. But how do I work technology into all this?” You can use technology in a variety of ways. One easy way is to establish an online space where conversations can take place. A perfect location for this is a web log, or blog. The blog organizes its latest entries–think of them as multimedia journal entries that allow for text, video, audio–in reverse chronological order, and allows people to leave comments. And these can be moderated to prevent inappropriateness.

Some blog platforms that you should consider include:

In addition to these four blogging tools, consider taking advantage of tools like the new Google Sites or Microsoft OneNote. Each allows for open-ended questions that students can respond to, or develop questions in response to a prompt. You can have these prompts available and roll them out for inner/outer circles to ponder and discuss, or, better yet, have the students create the prompts themselves.

Tip #3 – Take the Well-Worn Path to Success

Why not follow tried-and-true approaches taken by other teachers? If you can find a book author on Twitter, you have a great opportunity for initiating an online conversation. For example, I’ve easily connected with my favorite fantasy authors (Jonathan Maberry and Jonathan Moeller) via Twitter. They might be willing to join in on a conversation with students.

You can also invite other well-known educators, community members, university professors, and/or writers. Each can participate in conversations with your students online. The goal is to nurture a rich, free-flowing, wide-ranging, academically-focused conversation. This allows modeling for students as to how this happens in real life.

Adapt Socratic Seminar for a Blog

Here’s an approach you can take, adapted from the work of other educators online:

Read one chapter a week.
Students in center circle (in the fishbowl) lead the discussion.
Students in the outer circle (outside the fishbowl) listen to the inner circle and have their own conversation via the blog.
Invite adults learners from around the world to discuss chapters and leave comments.
At the end of the process, have the author respond to questions students in both circles have generated.

At the end of each session, have students share their reflections online in the blog or blog comments section. You could even use Flipgrid or LetsRecap to mange an asynchronous exchange with the author. Watch this 38-minute video of Arapahoe students and teachers sharing how they approached this.

Live or Pre-Recorded Author Chats Made Easy

Given the wide availability of desktop video conferencing solutions such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, Adobe Connect, and Appear.in, there’s no reason why your students couldn’t meet other adult learners and/or author(s) face to face for short discussions (15-20 minutes), discussing key concepts in the text. There are many ways to engage young writers and authors. Blogs and Twitter are simple ways to “shrink the world” and bring people closer together.

October 21, 2017 0 comment

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