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Making Writing Come Alive with colAR

4/25/2014

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Augmented Reality (AR) is an exciting new tool for engaging students. "Like QR codes on steroids," (Thanks, Mark Blair), AR provides a live, direct view of the real world supplemented by computer generated sensory input. Still in in its infancy, the AR world is exploding with options.


colAR Mix is a free AR app for iOs and Android that causes specific coloring pages to come to life in moving, 3D images. colAR provides several free coloring pages, and then additional pages which can be purchased. 


This week, we used colAR to enhance our poetry writing and figurative language lessons. Students were given several picture options (free pages) and directed to write a poem about the picture, using figurative language - of course, instruction occurred! When they finished, the wrote the poem around the edge of the page, colored it in, and used the app to see it come alive.


Motivation levels were very high and students were excited to share with each other. Final work was posted in the hallway so that anyone passing by could see how students' poetry came alive!

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Flipped Lessons with Doceri

4/22/2014

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I have been using a wonderful software program/app called Doceri for several years now. It allows your iPad to mirror whatever is on your computer, and then acts as an interactive whiteboard and screencast recorder. 

If I want to show a website or a word document to students, I can open it on my laptop (connected to my projector) activate Doceri on my iPad, and my iPad will show what is on my computer screen. I can then annotate, drawing my students' attention to certain features, or pass my iPad to a student who can annotate for us.

In addition, Doceri has a recording feature that will allow me to develop flipped lessons. I can put together a slide show using Keynote or a similar program, run it on my computer mirrored to my iPad, and then annotate with my finger or stylus while recording the lesson and my voice. 

Doceri has a variety of annotation tools, is intuitive to use and has been very reliable. 



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Do your students need choices for accessing text?

4/13/2014

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Last week I attended the Council for Exceptional Children's annual conference in Philadelphia. There were hundreds of sessions to choose from and by the end, my mind was bursting with ideas.


One of the sessions I attended was on differentiating for gifted learners, led by Dr. Karen Megay-Nespoli. At one point she suggested that it can be beneficial to have options for how a student might access a text. While she was primarily referring to digital options, it got me thinking about how we might offer a variety of options, for students of all abilities, to access text in their own preferred style. 


Students are familiar with tic-tac-toe menus, so I chose this as the medium for presenting them with options. Here is the menu I created - feel free to edit it to fit your own needs!



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Can your students dig deeper?

4/7/2014

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Perhaps because it is snowing outside my window, I am feeling an intense craving for sunshine and the beach. Local stores seem to be stocking the shelves with the fun toys of summer, so I thought I would share with you a strategy for getting students to dig a little deeper.


Obtain a plastic beach bucket and a handful of plastic shovels. On the scoot of each shovel, adhere a piece of paper with one of the following higher level thinking prompts.

  • Do you see any patterns?
  • Can you take a different perspective?
  • Have you noticed any trends?
  • Are there any ethical issues to consider?
  • What relationships are obvious? subtle?
  • Can you make connections across content areas?

Place the shovels in the bucket and carry it with you as you wander the room. If you find a student who is finished early, or just needs some higher level stimulation, ask them to take a shovel from the bucket and
           dig deeper into the content.


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Informational Text Questions with a #Teaching Twist

4/1/2014

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Here's a simple challenge that can lead students to read their texts very closely. After providing your students with the assigned reading material, pass out sticky notes. Tell them that their challenge is to write a question about the topic that is NOT answered by the text. This causes them to read, and reread, and maybe reread again to make sure that the answer isn't in the text. Not only does this lead to interesting questions, but the repeated readings with a purpose lead to improved comprehension and retention. 

This photo represents all the questions students generated about the 3 branches of government. Before adding a question to the chart, they had to be sure that the text did not already answer it. Tomorrow we will explore finding answers to some of these thoughtful questions!


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    Anne M. Beninghof

    Anne's mission is to improve instruction through collaboration and the sharing of creative, practical ideas for educators.

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