The Best Laid Plans. . .

My freshmen have been working on short stories for a few weeks, reading and analyzing a story and then writing their own fictional narratives.

Today I wanted to go back and review the short story elements and give a short quiz to assess how much my students had really learned the elements after discussing them in context rather than just as vocabulary terms. I created the quiz in Canvas and planned on using Socrative for whole-class review.  I quickly realized Socrative was not going to cooperate for some reason.  The room login page was black and half the students didn't get the response box when I opened a question.  After a couple minutes of trying to figure out the problem, I had to switch gears.

I told them to close Socrative and open Doodle Buddy or any other app that gave them a blank whiteboard to write on.  I then did the same review activity using the iPads like individual whiteboards.  As we reviewed, I overheard a student tell his neighbor, "This is fun. I'm glad she didn't just give up on reviewing when the app didn't work."

I think this part of why iPads are working so well for me and my students.  I am willing to try anything and I have realized that with technology, the best laid plans may not work in the middle of class.  I have to be willing to stop and say, "This is not working, let's try something else."

This doesn't just apply to the use of technology.  Too many teachers stick to their plans no matter what is happening in class.  Half the class can be asleep or completely lost and they just plow ahead because they "have too much material to cover."  I don't even know what that means.  What does "covering material" mean to a student?

Short Story Topics in Record Time

Fictional Narratives are a major writing standard in grades 9-10.  It is also the only genre my students are relatively adept at.  They spend a lot of time with this type of writing in the earlier grades.  Expository writing is a completely different story.  Although I have seen a huge improvement in my student's narrative writing in the last few years, there are still a few steps that trip them up.

The first obstacle is always coming up with a character and topic they can develop into a whole story with all the elements a short story needs to include.  I have tried a lot of different strategies for helping students come up with topics, but I've never been completely happy with any of them.  Then I stumbled upon this site when doing research on archetypes for my seniors:

http://archetypewriting.com/muse/idea_generators.htm

I added this link to my daily agenda:

Archetype's Plot Scenario Generator

and showed my students how to click refresh to randomly generate a new topic.  I love that the topics give them a protagonist, a situation, and a secondary character who brings their own complications.  Each topic has plenty of information to give the students a good starting point.

I had 120 freshman decide on topics and start developing the details for their protagonist within 10 minutes.  I also heard a lot of really interesting conversations about where they could go with their stories, so I am excited to see how these stories turn out.

Reteaching with Student Screencasts

This idea came from Gini Pierce-Cummings and originated with the math teachers at Desmond Middle School in Madera,CA. She explained it to me at a CoffeeCUE meeting where we discussed lots of edtech goodness. As soon as she explained it I said, "I have to try that. I think I will tomorrow!" As I stated in a previous post, I am guilty of wanting to try everything I hear about. In this case, it was a brilliant idea.

The concept in a nutshell: students create a screen cast of a vocabulary term or concept, email the video link to me, I turn it into a QR code, post it on the wall, students scan the QR code and now have all their classmate's videos on their iPads.

I decided to try it with my honors freshman class to gauge the difficulty. My instruction included:

• telling them to find a partner
• having them choose one of the 8 parts of speech we had been working with
• giving them 3 minutes to play with their screen casting app (at the time we used Screenchomp, but I like Educaeations better)
• giving them 20 minutes to create their screen cast with the understanding that all freshmen would be using their videos to study

The next day I had the QR codes posted and they went around the room scanning them all. There is nothing more rewarding than hearing teenagers say, "Wow, this is cool!", especially in a classroom. . . My non-honors classes scanned them as well and we discussed which videos were most or least helpful in preparation for creating their own for the next unit.

 

The best thing about this idea is that it can be used in ANY subject, which is rare in high school.

 

Posted with Blogsy