A third grade teacher recently came to me wanting something her students could delve into for the month of October. We came up with the idea of skeletons. The next piece was figuring out WHAT to do.
At the #gafesummit in KC this summer, Kasey Bell (Shake Up Learning) had these awesome Tic-Tac-Toe boards she used for training sessions with teachers. Now, don't get me wrong, I totally know how to make a tic-tac-toe board for student use, but she really talked about how to make it beneficial to the teacher. There are two L's on a tic-tac-toe board.
Boxes 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all exploratory boxes. This is where students get their information. They can research, look at links, or anything else.
Box 5 can either be a required activity all students need or it can be a free choice of whatever the students want it to be that pertains to the activity. Boxes 6-9 are all "creation" boxes. This is where they can choose the activity that best fits what they want to produce. Many students will start with this box and work backward, which is fine. This is a way for students to have choice in what they create, but they are going to end up with a similar experience. We talked about how each of the activities will have a set of guidelines that are basically the same, but the presentation will be different. I like how the teacher worked to create presentations that accessed all her learners. She is going to place this into her Google Classroom and get started on it this week. We are looking at this being about a 1.5-2 week activity. This page was created in Google Docs. I then did File > Publish to the Web. For this, I am embedding it on my blog. You can also use the web address and link it. However you want! Feel free to modify and make it how you would like to use it!
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Have you heard of this website? If not, you need to go there ASAP! This is called Newsela, and it could be a game-changer in your classroom. Imagine you want students to read an article on space. You know that Student A is reading at a 400L (Lexile) and Student B is reading at a 1010L. They aren't going to read the article the same, and they are going to get different information out of it. What if I told you that Newsela can offer the SAME article at a student's reading level? You can customize articles to meet the needs of your students. Check out the graphic below where you can see just how easy it is to change the reading level. Mind blown, right? This article can be read by all students, getting the important information, but differentiated to benefit all students.
If you go to their site to sign up, sign in with your Google account, then put in the Hallsville zip code to choose your school. Then you can create a class. This is pretty cool...you can assign and quiz students over articles in Newsela. Pretty awesome! They can make notes when they are logged in to their account, too. There is a PRO version that gives more options as far as collaboration is concerned, but there are other ways we can work on that if you don't have the money to spend on this. It is also a Google Chrome app for Newsela. This is one of the most talked about apps at the conferences I have attended. This is great for grades 2-12. |
AuthorFifth grade teacher in a 1:1 iPad classroom, sharing my journey with technology in the classroom Categories
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March 2020
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