In the last couple of weeks that I have been in the classroom, I have been witnessing and documenting ways that Ms. Noltie has incorporated activities into her classroom to promote interaction and opinion of students. I have seen her use community apps where students can share answers and interact with the text. I have seen her use “agree” and “disagree” sides of the room to promote class discussion on issues. I have seen her even be avid about students sharing their daily warm ups so everyone can discuss their take on the question. I have really enjoyed how Ms. Noltie employs strategies we learned in teaching professions and seeing her do things that teachers before her have not done with the exact same materials. I found all of this really interesting and so for my blog post I wanted to research some more ways these strategies could be used and build some ideas, and maybe see if she ends up doing things similar throughout the year.
Apps:
One thing Ms. Noltie did was using technology to aid in reading the book and promote discussion. She used an app that let students project the presentation on their own iPads and respond to her questions individually so each student would still be interacting with the lesson. I researched some more apps via bookwidgets.com and tried to think of a few more ways you could use technology to promote understanding of a text. One app they discussed was Explain Everything, which helps students with multiple things. First, it records anything you draw or add to notes on their screens so they have access to any additional things you did not put in your slideshow and is a resource for students during assessments. In addition, it also provides an outlet for students to respond to a lesson with presentations, videos, or photos of their own creation. Another app they discussed was an app called Poll Everywhere, in which teachers are able to survey students on questions. I think this is a very simple app but you could build off of it with some really cool activities such as having them vote and then give reasoning in an interactive way, and you could even use it to evaluate what your students liked or did not like about a lesson so you can adjust it. You could even use this to evaluate how students are feeling and adjust your lessons to what they need more work on. There were countless other apps they discussed but the last one that caught my eye was an app called Popplet. When reading the book, it can be extremely difficult for readers to visual, especially if they are not auditory learners. This app allows students to add images and facts into a class diagram, which I think could be really cool for students. While reading you could ask students to stop and add a popplet to the diagram of what they are picturing within that chapter or about that event and it would hopefully help the book come to life for students.
Activities:
One thing Ms. Noltie has done really well is contrasting point of views on issues relevant to the book and asking students to discuss those view points in a civilized manner. I wanted to find other outlets for students to gain further understanding of the book so I researched activities to do while reading a book as well, and using literacyideas.com I came up with the following. One thing students always know the most about is themselves, so one thing I would like to incorporate is relating the book to themselves. House of the Scorpion is a book vastly different from today’s lifestyle so encouraging students to think critically about how this could connect in any way to their life would be so beneficial to them and give much more understanding. Another activity the article included was where students are asked to create a social media page about a character in the book. The page specifically cites Facebook but I think you could do it with any social media site, or even a video making app like Tik Tok and ask students to capture what they think their social media page would look like based on the book. There were several ideas in the article but the last one I really liked from the article was coming up with an alternate ending for two events from the book. This would probably have to be later in the book but you would have students to pick two events that stick out to them and ask them to write their own ending rather than what actually happens and explain how that might affect the characters later in the book. I think this a great way to help students understand how the events played out and contextualize the book.
These are only a few ways that I saw to help aid students in understanding the book. I have really admired the way Ms. Noltie has used some of these ideas and promoted an open environment that makes the book much easier to understand. It is vital that students have several different ways to read the book and you are not just hitting the auditory learners, so I think these strategies will certainly help with that.
Articles:
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