Monday, August 28, 2017

Technology Tools




The first tool that I looked at that is new to me is http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/.  I think students will really enjoy making their own comics.  One way that I could use this is to help students summarize a story, paragraph or chapter of something we read by having their characters talk about it.  They could use their comic to compare and contrast books that we’ve read.  This would also get them writing as they would have to type speech bubbles for their characters.  I think students would find this activity very fun and might not even realize that it’s work and also assessment to see what they retained from the story.  This goes along with what Anderson, Grant, Speck (2008), say in that students didn’t mind correcting their mistakes on their emails because they wanted their e-pals to understand what they are writing (p. 29).  This shows that when students are doing something they enjoy they will work harder to make it the best it can be.

The second tool that I looked at was https://www.slickwrite.com/#!home. The reason why I chose this is because I work with elementary students and they think that spellcheck is the catch all and will make their paper perfect after clicking on it.  By using this I can show them that spell check misses out on quite a bit of things and it never hurts to get another set of eyes or in this case program to check for mistakes.  I think it will really surprise them how many errors they will miss when editing someone else’s work or their own.  This can easily be used before, during and after the editing stages of writing.

  Anderson, R. S., Grant, M. M., & Speck, B. W. (2008). Technology to teach literacy: a resource for K-8 teachers. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.

3 comments:

  1. Eric,

    RE: "The second tool that I looked at was https://www.slickwrite.com/#!home. The reason why I chose this is because I work with elementary students and they think that spellcheck is the catch all and will make their paper perfect after clicking on it."

    This is so true! Helping students to self-diagnosis grammar and style errors in their writing will make them more independent writers. I also recommend having students run their writing through a plagiarism detection tool. There are many free tools available. Most plagiarism is not intentional. In this copy/paste world, the sooner they learn about plagiarism and how to prevent it, the better.

    Dr. Dell

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  2. Eric-
    I love your technology pieces. I think the makebeliefscomix is so much fun. I went on and played with it for a while and I can see how kids would enjoy using this tool! I also really liked the plagiarism tool! I think it's very important for students to start learning about how to prevent plagiarism early. I think that these tools can definitely make a difference in the classroom.

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  3. Eric,
    I think having your students learn to check their own grammar, especially as elementary students, will help them (and their future teachers) tremendously down the road. Slickwrite looks like a very useful tool for that.
    Even my high school students love making comics to showcase what they know. There are so many cool apps and sites to create comics. I'm not familiar with the one you shared but I will be glad to check it out. Good ideas, thanks for sharing!

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