My class recently used Lucid chart to help organize an essay. Lucid chart is an app that is connected to Google drive that allows the user to create an online flow chart organizer. It has a variety of tools and shapes that can be used to customize a flow chart to fit with unique projects. This seemed like a great fit for my class since they were working on organizing an essay for their endangered species project. I told the class that this was in place of completing a graphic organizer and that they had the chance to be more creative this way.
I told the students that they needed to have five paragraphs laid out and each needed to have the four parts of an ACES paragraph (assertion, citation, explanation, and shift). I showed them how to connect to the app and then they really just ran with it. It is an intuitive program that the students were able to play around with and seemed to have fun using. One of my students even said that, "This is way better than a graphic organizer." My group read an article that described 8 examples using the SAMR model this week. This helped me to better understand what that model is all about and that I have used it several times without realizing it. When I used Lucid chart in my language arts classes I was probably at the modification stage of the model. When modifying a task, technology "allows for significant task redesign." (Walsch, 2015, p.1). Unlike using a graphic organizer, Lucid chart allowed the students to design the layout and organization of their thinking. The students were able to get creative using the different shapes and colors. They can also share their creations with me or other students to get feedback on their work. This is certainly a tool that I would consider using again. Once everyone figured out how to connect the app, it was really easy to use Lucid chart. If something can make writing an essay even a tiny bit more fun, I am all about it.
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Over the last semester I have used tons of instructional strategies. When I am struggling to think of something to do in my class, I look at my lists or charts of instructional strategies for some ideas. Most of them go really well, but some of them haven't. In the last two weeks I've used a chalk talk, goals, a human bar graph (this one was awesome), clear feedback, and a couple others from the list on Canvas. My goal is to make language arts suck a lot less than it did when I was in middle school.
It is super obvious when the students like an activity and when they hate it. in one of my classes, they pretty much hate everything, so I am not going to talk about them. One thing that I tried and I do not feel great about is modeling. I know it's supposed to be great and can really help students, but I have a hard time slowing down and really doing it correctly. I can feel the students' interest fading after a few minutes and I tend to rush through things. I modeled some annotations the other day and it clearly didn't go well. I went back over the students' work when I graded it and realized that a significant number of them didn't even write down the things that I wrote in my modeling. I thought that would be so easy for them, but I guess not. I think I need to slow down a bit more when i recognize that I'm starting to go too quickly through things like that. I'm bad about rushing through things that I think are probably boring even though they are important. I will certainly use modeling again, but I will take my time and really make sure the students are going at the same pace. |
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