Blended Learning for Teachers
**Teachers - please visit my Google Classroom for Instructional Resources!**
Link to New MS Curriculum Maps: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14vV9_iiqXFO74da6TEtynet6HO-5HC2MNfA_HiNG83o/edit#gid=1086281837
These two articles will allow you to walk away with strategies that create engaging content reading material for our students. Both articles give you more engaging literacy strategies – helping students become college and career ready. Let’s continue to involve our students in reading complex texts in all classes!
S.O.S. for Developing Literacy (Discovery Ed)
Informational Text/Articles
The website has a variety of articles for each content area. Many of the articles have questions or writing prompts at the end. Informational text helps students gain a better understanding in each content area.
Apps
Check out these apps that can help you with your social media efforts:
- ChatterPix creates talking photos. Snap a picture, draw a mouth, record your audio and you have a talking photo.
- AutoRap allows you to become your own personal rap star by turning your words into a rap song.
- Hyperlapse is used with Instagram and allows you to create speedy time-lapse videos.
- PicFlow app lets you create a photo slideshow that melds photos with music.
Cacoo
Bring enhanced visual learning to your educational institution. Cacoo has hundreds of templates and shape libraries to help you quickly get started on your next diagram.
is a student engagement platform that can be used to amazing effect in the classroom. The concept is simple. Teachers can create presentations that can contain Quiz's, Polls, Videos, Images, Drawing-Boards, Web Content and so on. You can also access over 7K k-12 standards-aligned lessons.
Popplet
In the classroom and at home, students use Popplet for learning. Used as a mind-map, Popplet helps students think and learn visually. Students can capture facts, thoughts, and images and learn to create relationships between them.
NoRedInk
NoRedInk builds stronger writers through interest-based curriculum, adaptive exercises, and actionable data.
EquatI0
EquatIO makes math digital, helping teachers and students at all levels create math expressions quickly and easily. Easily create mathematical equations, formulas and quizzes. Intuitively type or hand write, with no tricky math code to learn.
Storybird
Storybird lets anyone make visual stories in seconds. It's a simple idea that has attracted millions of writers, readers, and artists to our platform. Families and friends, teachers and students, and amateurs and professionals have created more than 5 million stories—making Storybird one of the world's largest storytelling communities.
Formative
Formative allows teachers to transform their content in seconds and go paperless. Create incredible online assessments, classwork or homework.
ProCon.org
The leading source for pros and cons of controversial issues. Procon.org is a website that promotes critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan, primarily pro-con format.
Desmos - MATH!
Desmos wants to help every student learn math and love learning math. But “every student” is a lot of students so we create digital math tools and let the Internet take them to anyone who wants them.
*** DISCOVERY EDUCATION ***
Incredibly rich resource for differentiating learning, finding creative strategies for engaging students; searchable by subject or standards; includes links to the Teaching Channel and multiple resources on quick strategies to enliven your classroom.
SOS Top Ten for Developing Literacy
Graphing Stories will help students make the transition from one-variable representations (eg. number lines) to the TWO-variable representation of the coordinate plane. Students will watch 15-second videos and translate them into graphs with your help.
CommonLit
CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 5-12. The resources are: Flexible; Research-Based; Aligned to the Common Core State Standards; Created by teachers, for teachers. CommonLit believes in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why they are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever.
EDpuzzle
EDpuzzle is a site that allows users to select a video and customize it by editing, cropping, recording audio, and adding questions to make an engaging presentation or lesson.
YouTube Support Sites
KeepVid enables you to download an entire YouTube channel and playlist. With only one click, all videos in the playlist can be downloaded at one time.
Tired of heavy online ads and slow browsing? Opera will speed you up on the web and make sure ads don’t distract you from what matters.
Alphaboxes
Making notes using the Alphaboxes is a great way to engage students, allowing the student to jot down notes about topics or statements they want to remember - they are now organized alphabetically.
Nearpod
Text Message Dialogue
Students will be able to create a dialogue using a text message graphic organizer. There are a multitude of possible uses for these organizers across subject matter. In the ELA classroom, have students compare and contrast formal written language with informal text messaging, or provide copies for a writing learning center. In social studies or history, students could write a text message conversation between two historical figures. The open-ended graphics allow students to be creative with their writing, and they can decorate, color, or illustrate the page as well.
Accountable Talk - use a timer!
Accountable Talk places more expectations on the student, but the student cannot be expected to perform without explicit instruction from the teacher. The Accountable Talk tool makes thinking visible, helps construct more accurate understanding, and builds a learning community for all kinds of learners.
Accountable Talk Functions Reference Sheet
Accountable Talk Learning Handout
Level Up - Achieve It 360
Level Up Core is a teacher facilitated, classroom based character education and social emotional learning program for middle school and high school students designed to reduce school failure and dropout rate by enhancing school achievement, discipline, motivation and results. This program is for you if you do not need to have students use the program as stand alone in a lab, or roster in your class lists to view your grade book at a glance. Please email me if you are interested accessing all online tools.
Prior Knowledge Board
Assessing students prior knowledge is the proper entry point for instruction. Students come to the classroom with a broad range of pre-existing knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes, which influence how they attend, interpret and organize new information. The Prior Knowledge Board graphic organizer contains a variety of strategies you can use in the classroom. Students can complete the strategies as a tic-tac-toe board or just by completing one per unit.
Strategies for ESOL Students
This symbaloo has a variety of strategies for ESOL learners. Please let me know if you find a site I can add to the page.
Newsela - Nonfiction Literature
Newsela is an innovative way to build reading comprehension with nonfiction that's always relevant: daily news. Newsela is a leveled reading program for students in grades 3 through high school students. It begins with news stories that are rewritten to correspond to different levels of reading complexity. Each story is published at four different lexile reading levels as well as in its original form, for a total of five different reading levels. Students take short quizzes, aligned with Common Core standards and associated with the different lexile levels to assess their comprehension. If they struggle with the quiz, they can read the story at a lower lexile level (or similarly at a more complex level if they ace the quizzes). Because all students get a chance to absorb the same material, however, teachers can lead class discussions on the article topics with all students, no matter what their reading level. Because the articles are drawn from current news feeds, the topics are relevant and timely.
Build Your Own Graphic Organizer
This website allows you and students to think visually, work collaboratively, capture ideas, organize information, diagram processes, and create clear, concise written documents.
Writing Across the Curriculum
Writing is a great way to engage all of your students! You won’t just hear from the kids who are always throwing their hands up. Writing helps teachers monitor student progress and gauge their strengths and weaknesses. With regular writing assignments as part of your curriculum, you don’t have to wait for a big exam to see if the students are getting it. Writing across the curriculum can help you see gaps in instruction so you can adjust your teaching to insure that all of the students get what you’re talking about! Remember students learn best by writing!
A Postcard is a way to have students write about a topic. Don't forget, an absent letter to a friend is also a great way for to students to recall information given (and a great ticket out the door).
Think, Pair, Share Chart
Think, Pair, Share Chart is a graphic organizer for student note-taking during partnered classroom discussions. Each student gets a worksheet, and takes notes on his/her answers, as well as his/her partner's answers. The pair of students then decides what will be shared with the rest of the class. This graphic organizer alleviates the problem of having only one student "do the work." By looking over these worksheets, teachers can make certain that everyone in class is participating.
RAFT
RAFT is a writing strategy that helps students understand their role as a writer and how to effectively communicate their ideas and mission clearly so that the reader can easily understand everything written. RAFT assignments encourage students to uncover their own voices and formats for presenting their ideas about content information they are studying. Students learn to respond to writing prompts that require them to think about various perspectives:
- Role of the Writer: Who are you as the writer? A movie star? The President? A plant?
- Audience: To whom are you writing? A senator? Yourself? A company?
- Format: In what format are you writing? A diary entry? A newspaper? A love letter?
- Topic: What are you writing about?
Frayer Model & Fortune Teller: Vocabulary Instructional Strategy
These graphic organizers were designed to provide for a thorough understanding of new words. The Frayer Model, students are asked to provide a definition of the word, sentence using the word, examples, and illustration. This graphic organizer will lead students to a deeper understanding of a word and its relationship to their own lives. The Fortune Teller is used for multiple vocabulary terms and is a great way for students to study terms and definitions. Example of Fortune Teller.
Q-Notes: Notetaking & Summarizing Instructional Strategy
The Q-Notes method, a combination of SQ3R and Cornell Notes, is a system to assist students in taking notes, creating questions, interacting with text, and reflecting on learning with content in any of the core classes. The benefits of this method promote differentiated learning, incorporating rigor, and applying higher order thinking skills.
Fishbowl Discussion Strategy
Fishbowl Discussions are a great way to enable students to really engage with ideas or issues they find interesting. This strategy should allow you as a teacher to assess how well the students understand the ideas in a lesson. Students will also learn how to appropriately and respectfully present their opinions in a discussion context. Each student should have a chance to participate in the discussion.
While this activity could be used to get students to engage with ideas at any stage, this activity is specifically designed for use at a point when the students know enough about the context to make intelligent statement, but perhaps not enough to know what their final decisions will be. A good example would be after the students have read through Act III of The Tempest. The students have to know the characters in this example.
Steps to Set-Up the Fishbowl:
- Prepare. Preferably before class begins, arrange all the chairs in a big circle, with 3-4 seats in the middle. Also, be sure to give the students any assignments they need to complete (see Step 2) well in advance.
- Activate prior knowledge, so that the students can have an intelligent, discussion on the issues. You might do this in one or more of several ways: Have the students prepare for the discussion by assigning them to research a specific issue or two from the lesson/text, and come prepared with textual evidence to support their point of view.
- In a fishbowl, 3-4 people in the middle of the circle have a discussion while people on the outside listen and don’t talk. When someone wants to say something, they simply move to the middle of the circle, tap someone on the shoulder, and take their place. Explain the rules of the discussion:
- If you’re going to disagree, disagree agreeably.
- Allow people to comment at least once before taking their place.
- Model for the students the kind of comments they might make in a discussion like this:
- I see your point; however, I feel…
- In lines ____ of the text, it says… What do you all think about that?
- How do you feel that relates to…
- I’d like to shift gears a little. Is it ok with everyone if we talk about…
- Make sure each student participates. Give each student a Participation Form to fill out during the discussion (for points, of course), so that they remain engaged even when they are not in the circle. Also, stipulate how often each student must participate in order to have participation points for that day. .
- Invite the students to begin the discussion. You may need to direct a few particularly outgoing students to begin the discussion. Avoid being in the discussion yourself until you feel sure that your students feel safe disagreeing with you. You might occasionally jump in as a teacher to spur discussion if it is really lagging, but try to refrain from doing this as much as possible. .
- Bring the discussion to a close a few minutes before the bell, and allow students to finish their participation forms.
Cause & Effect
Cause and Effect diagrams, also called sequence of events diagrams, are a type of graphic organizer that describe how events affect one another in a process. The student must be able to identify and analyze the cause(s) and the effect(s) of an event or process. In this process, the student realizes how one step affects the other.
Jigsaw
Using the jigsaw method in the classroom can help students learn a great deal of content quickly. Each person becomes an important “piece of a puzzle.” Each piece of the information will need to be connected with the rest of the “puzzle” to have a full picture of the content.
Plus, students need to work together to learn the material. In addition, when the student becomes an expert on his or her piece of information, he or she must teach the rest of the group the content. In the end, the group needs to present its information to the whole class, which helps students to learn the information better.
One way to assess a student's work in the jigsaw activity is to use a rubric. The rubric shows students how they will be assessed before they begin the jigsaw. It also allows students to understand their deficiencies and strengths.
A few students may want to "slack" and avoid doing the work. Using a rubric will show students how to be successful and allow the teacher to assess students fairly. Plus, the teacher does not need to write notes to the student. The teacher can just circle or check the proper section.
Level 4
- Content written in notes was correct and highlighted the important information from the assigned part of the text
- Information shared or presented to the small group was clear and concise
- Student worked as a team player in the small group to gain information and to help others
- Presentation of information to class was organized, understandable, and accurate
Level 3
- Content written in notes was mostly correct and mostly highlighted the important information from the assigned part of the text
- Information shared or presented to the small group was mostly clear and concise
- Student mostly worked as a team player in the small group to gain information and to help others
- Presentation of information to class was mostly organized, understandable, and accurate
Level 2
- Content written in notes was somewhat correct and somewhat highlighted the important information from the assigned part of the text
- Information shared or presented to the small group was somewhat clear and concise
- Student somewhat worked as a team player in the small group to gain information and to help others
- Presentation of information to class was somewhat organized, understandable, and accurate
Level 1
- Content written in notes was not correct and does not highlight the important information from the assigned part of the text
- Information shared or presented to the small group was not clear or concise
- Student did not work as a team player in the small group to gain information and to help others
- Presentation of information to class was not organized, understandable, and accurate
In case you need a tutorial on the New Google Sites: New Google Sites Introduction and Tutorial Video