Tech EDGE: Mobile Learning in the Classroom Podcasts
For this week, we looked at Tech EDGE video tutorials. Tech EDGE is a program started by Guy Trainin, a professor at University of Nebraska - Lincoln. His goal is to create video tutorials to highlight apps and websites that are useful for teachers and students in the classroom. There are many episodes with many different topics to choose from. All of these tutorials offer great information and resources for any type of classroom. The particular video I looked at was Episode 8, Poetry Apps. This video focused on resources for students to be able to create and write their own poetry. I found this video very interesting and it has many great ideas for teachers to use when teaching poetry in their classrooms. Some of the resources mentioned were readwritethink.org, Word Mover app, and Acrostic Poem app.
Follow Guy Trainin on twitter: @tgite or contact him by email: [email protected]
One of the resources Guy Trainin talked about in this video was readwritethink.org. This website has lots of teacher resources on it in general, but the particular part he talked about was under the Student Interactive tab. This is part of the website that is student friendly and allows them to actually go in and create and form their own poems. The cool thing about this website is that it gives options to create many different types of poems. A few examples being acrostic, diamante, haiku, and theme poems. There is also lesson and unit ideas that these different tools would fit into for the teachers to check out, as well as parent and after school reinforcement activities. There are so many options and ideas that could be used with this website the possibilities are endless!
Pros:
Pros:
- No account needed to use this website
- Able to print, save to computer, or share your finish poems from the website
- Can be tailored to any grade
- Many different poem options for students
- Allows students to brainstorm ideas and words before starting on the poem
- Lesson and unit plan ideas for teachers
- Requires Flash Player to create poems (doesn't work on the iPad)
Another resource talked about in the video was the Word Mover app. This is a free app that allows students to physically move words around on the iPad to create a poem. There are predetermined word banks to give ideas or students can completely create their own word banks. They can also add words whenever they need them that aren't in the word bank! There are so many options with this app and it allows the students complete freedom to choose how they would like to write their own poem. This is a great resource for teachers to utilize when discussing poems with their students.
Pros:
Pros:
- Word banks options
- Students can make their own word banks
- No account needed to use this website
- Able to print, save to computer, or share your finish poems from the website
- Tactile learning: students able to physically move the tiles to create a poem
- Possibly too broad for students that need more instruction
One other resource Guy talked about in the video is the Acrostic Poems app. This app allows students to create a acrostic poem which is a poem that uses the letters in the topic word to start each line of the poem. Each line of the poem can be a word or phrase that refers to the topic word. This app also allows students to brainstorm ideas before starting their poem which can be helpful to getting their mind thinking of ideas. This app could also be useful for when learning poems in the classroom and allows the students to express their own creativity.
Pros:
Pros:
- No account needed to use this website
- Able to print, save to computer, or share your finish poems from the website
- Student friendly
- Allows creativity
- Only works for acrostic poems (very limited poem options)