Tech Tips - for helping students get to the main idea and themes in a reading piece
Wordle
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
TagCrowd
TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud. In addition to websites, users can also upload documents to TagCrowd.
GreatSummary can summarize text from web pages or text pasted from another document.
Instructions for Inserting an Audio File into Word
1. Open the Insert Ribbon
2. Select "Object" from the Text tab
3. Select Wave Sound from the pull-down menu
4. Record the audio using your laptop's internal microphone or an external USB or line-in microphone
The focus of this model lesson is to illustrate how technology applications can be used as a literacy strategy.
The literacy strategy we are going to use is an anticipation/reaction guide. This strategy allows the teachers to help students focus on and pay attention to critical information and themes. It also helps to activate students' prior knowledge, invest them in the content, and forces them to evaluate their own opinions and misconceptions.
The technology tools we are going to use are Quia Web, as a home base online, and Google Docs, as the online anticipation/reaction guide. To learn more about both of these technology applications, refer to the links posted at the bottom of this page.
1. Identify concepts/themes you want students to learn from reading,
2. Create 4-6 statements that support or challenge students' beliefs and experiences about the topic.
3. Prior to reading, students react to each statement. You can modify this step by having students work in groups and reach consensus through discussion. You can also have students formulate a response and use it to defend their position to the group and/or class.
4. Ask students to read the selection. You can ask students to record evidence that supports/rejects each statement.
5. Have students revisit their original opinions and respond to them based on the content from the reading. You can ask students to justify their original opinions and evaluate their misconceptions based on the details in the reading.
What is the Benefit of Using Technology?
The use of technology for this lesson has several educational advantages:
--It forces all students to create their own opinions and justify their understanding
--It allows the teacher to gather data from all students
--It allows students to share their ideas with the class in a way that is non-threatening and provides for the extra thinking time required by some students
--It makes the sharing of ideas visible and, thus, discussable
--It creates a shared body of knowledge that the teacher and students can build upon for future learning
--The use of technology can be engaging and motivating for many students
The focus of this model lesson is to illustrate how technology can be employed for guided practice in a way that provides checks for understanding and a format for teacher and student feedback.
The Internet application we are using for today's lesson is Voicethread -- The model Voicethread is located online and is also embedded below.
You can upgrade your Voicethread account to Educator status by going to My Account and clicking Upgrade. Click on the K-12 Educator link at the bottom of the screen that opens to complete the Educator application form. You will receive notification via your district e-mail when your account has been upgraded. The Educator account allows you to create an unlimited number of Voicethreads.
