Google Classroom
If someone wanted to get a good idea of what was going on in my classroom, the first place I would tell them to look would be Google classroom. If I could, I would link it into this portfolio, but it doesn't work that way. However, it does give me a place to publish resources for my students like videos and rubrics. It also gives me a window into my students' work. I can ask questions, give feedback, and make sure nothing gets lost all in one place. In the screenshot posted above, several recent assignments from my Endangered species unit are visible. One of the main documents is the research questions notecatcher. Each of my students is researching an endangered species which they will advocate for at the end of the project. In this notecatcher, they have several questions to help guide their research and build some of the controversies that are inherent in the Endangered species act and its enforcement.
Lucid chart diagrams
One tech tool that my students seemed to enjoy was Lucid chart. It gave them a way to organize their ideas for an essay without being confined to a graphic organizer. This allowed the students to do more out of the box thinking and get more creative in organizing their writing. Every student created their own diagram and each one was a little bit different even though they all contained the parts of an ACES paragraph.
Digital Posters
My seventh grade students used Canva to create digital posters. These were used to help discuss the themes in myths from around the world that all had a strong theme. Above there are three examples. They chose to work with different myths; The Flight of Icarus, Skywoman, and Bunbuku Chagama. Theme is a big part of the performance indicators for middle school and it is something that the students often struggle to understand. I explained to my class that we can convey theme by using simple symbols that get at the main message of the story. We looked at some minimalist movie posters for inspiration and that seemed to really motivate some of the stronger posters.
Tech Lesson- Lucid Chart
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Watch this video to see me teach a bunch of squirly sixth graders how to use Lucidchart. Sometimes it takes some direct instruction to get the students ready to go, but it can be hard to get students to pay attention for more than a few minutes.
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It can be very difficult to pick out bias in the news without a few helpful tools! Watch this video to see how my sixth graders did as they took some time to pick out biased and charged language out of two news articles from different sources.
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