Graphic Organizers & Strategies

Please use these page as a resource to assist with a variety of teaching strategies. Many of them are instructional resources to assist students in taking notes, creating questions, interacting with text, and reflecting on learning with content in any of the core classes. These resources promote differentiated learning, incorporate rigor, and apply higher order thinking skills.

Colorín Colorado

Colorín Colorado is the premier national website serving educators and families of English language learners (ELLs) in Grades PreK-12. Colorín Colorado has been providing free research-based information, activities, and advice to parents, schools, and communities around the country for more than a decade.

Read&Write

Read&Write lets everyone read, write and express themselves more confidently and independently. The easy-to-use toolbar makes documents, files and web pages more accessible. Read&Write is a big confidence booster for anyone who needs a little support with their reading and writing, at school or in the workplace. And its friendly literacy features help English Language Learners, as well as people with learning difficulties or requiring dyslexia tools.

Screencastify

Teachers make learning more personal in their blended and flipped classrooms by recording using Screencastify.

Pear Deck

Imagine if you could engage every student in your class, every day. What if you could instantly see who’s confused and who’s ready for more? That’s the power of Pear Deck. And now, with the Pear Deck for Google Slides Add-on, you can add the magic of formative assessments and interactive questions to your presentations right from Google Slides.

Flipped Learning

The Flipped Learning Network is all about Community. The “FLN” is the original non-profit online community for educators utilizing or interested in learning more about the flipped classroom and flipped learning practices. Initiated in 2012 by widely recognized pioneers including Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams, April Gudenrath, Kristin Daniels,Troy Cockrum, Brian Bennett and others, the FLN revised its mission in 2016 to focus more directly on being the online hub where educators across the world can share and access resources, tips, tools, and more.

GCSIT Resources

This page is designed to support Greenville County Schools teachers and administrators as they begin the challenging task of teaching students remotely during the current school closure. We will be posting video tutorials, quick tips and tricks, and, most importantly, success stories during this new adventure! Just a note: questions about procedures or protocols for GCS remote learning should still be directed to elearning@greenville.k12.sc.us. GCSIT's Resources by Topic

eLearning @ GHS

All eLearning strategies and tools into a one stop shop, eLearning @ GHS!

Share My Lesson

Share My Lesson is a destination for educators who dedicate their time and professional expertise to provide the best education for students everywhere. Share My Lesson members contribute content, share ideas, get educated on the topics that matter, online, 24/7.

Disciplinary Literacy Framework

Disciplinary literacy teaches students to move beyond the use of general reading strategies toward the use of specialized reading practices for making sense of the unique texts found within each discipline. Each discipline represents knowledge and the ways of producing and communicating that knowledge through the lens of professionals in that content area. For instance, when reading in science classes, students need to read informational texts as a scientist would with an inquiry approach. Social studies students read through the lens of an historian. Mathematics students read through the lens of a mathematician. English students read paying careful attention to the author’s craft. Disciplinary Literacy Framework

PDF Candy

PDF Candy provides users all over the world with absolutely free online and offline tools for working with PDF files (converting, splitting, merging, rotating, etc ). Great FREE tool!

One Wish

GHS teachers shared two stars and one wish using a new technology platform - Flipgrid. Here is a compiled list in alphabetical order that addresses their concerns and suggestions. One Wish

Data Nuggets

Data Nuggets are free classroom activities, co-designed by scientists and teachers, designed to bring contemporary research and authentic data into the classroom. Data Nuggets include a connection to the scientist behind the data and the true story of their research. Each activity gives students practice working with “messy data” and interpreting quantitative information. Students are guided through the entire process of science, including identifying hypotheses and predictions, visualizing and interpreting data, making evidence based claims, and asking their own questions for future research. Because of their simplicity and flexibility, Data Nuggets can be used throughout the school year and across grades K-16, as students grow in their quantitative abilities and gain confidence. Data Nuggets have the potential to improve the understanding of science in society while engaging and motivating the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Wizer

The Wizer worksheet builder compliments teachers’ experience and creativity by allowing quick creation of a wide variety of question types: open questions, multiple choice, matching pairs, fill in the blank, fill on an image, tables, etc.

Spotlight on Strategies

Spotlight on Strategies - Creative, research-based instructional strategies, presented by teachers for teachers. These simple instructional strategies incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways. Try a Strategy and leave a comment telling your peers how you used it with your students. You must be logged into your Google Schools account.

Social Studies, History or Geography Class

Use If/Then Adventure Stories to re-write history (and learn about cause and effect). Check out this student example about Napoleon at Waterloo.

Explore geography or design a site or landmarks tour with Guide to an Area.

Research Technology’s Role in Current Events and social movements.

Investigate Equal Access to Technology and its effects throughout the world.

Kami

Kami is your digital pen and paper where you and your students can learn, create, and collaborate.

InsertLearning

InsertLearning is a Chrome extension that lets you turn websites into interactive lessons. The toolbar is preloaded on the page so you can try it out without installing anything or signing up. Cost $40.00 per year.

Twiddla

Twiddla is an Online Whiteboard for the Modern Classroom. Mark up websites, graphics, and photos, or start drawing on a blank canvas. Browse the web with your students or make that remote tutoring session more productive than ever. No plug-ins, downloads, or firewall voodoo - it's all here, ready to go when you are. Browser-agnostic, user-friendly. Email Twiddla with school email for a free account.

Apps

Check out these apps that can help you with your social media efforts:

ChatterPix creates talking phots. 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.

Literacy Strategies

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! Article 1 Article 2

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.

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 your 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

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.

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.

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 Talks

Accountable Talks places more expectations on the student, but the student cannot be expected to perform without explicit instruction from the teacher. Accountable Talks makes thinking visible, helps construct more accurate understanding, and builds a learning community for all kinds of learners.

Accountable Talk Posters

Transitional Words

Accountable Talk Toolkit

Output vs Input

Four Corners Strategy

Accountable Talk Moves

Accountable Talk Functions Reference Sheet

Accountable Talk Learning Handout

Google Apps for Greenville County School District

Google Apps for Greenville County Schools is a new tool available to all teachers. Below are some video tutorials to help get started.

Notice - We have reach a storage limit with the Classic Google Sites. Please use Google Drive for storing your Classic Google Sites content rather than uploading it within the Classic Google Sites. This is not an issue with the New Google Sites. Please watch the New Google Sites Introduction and Tutorial Video .

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.

Movenote - Flipped Classroom

Movenote is a one-of-a-kind video presentation tool online and on your portable devices. Movenote is incredibly versatile and is being used in education for blended and flipped learning, in sales and marketing and in everyday messaging. Recording your presentations is easy and quick and everything is sharable online by email or social media with a simple link. Since everything is on a cloud server, you can access your videos practically anywhere and with the statistics tool you will be able to see who watched your video and when. Movenote videos can be watched on any device that supports video, no matter if they have movenote on them or not.

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 is 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.

Wanted 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.

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.

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

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