Quick, Easy and Educational Ways to Visit Websites with Students

You've found the perfect website to (explain mitosis / learn about adobe's amazing thermal properties / etc.). Unfortunately, when the students file into the computer lab or pick up their iPads they can't get the web address right. Here are some strategies and tools for eliminating this problem:

1) QR Codes: It seems like every blog post includes some reference to QR codes. They're fantastic and if you don't know how to use them, you can learn all about them here (#1 explains how to use them for accessing websites efficiently). Take note: you need a tablet, phone or some other device with a camera and the right software. Desktops, laptops, ultrabooks and other computers don't usually have the ability to scan a QR code. That brings us to...

2) URL Shorteners: If you've ever used Twitter to follow Naomi Harm or Edutopia, you've probably noticed that the links are really short and kind of unusual. They usually end in things like ".ly" instead of ".com." That's because Tweeters use a URL shortener to economize their 140 characters. The value of a URL shortener is that it turns www.website123.com/index/subindex/documents/doc19/ref=7%8# into a far more manageable goo.gl/ABC123. There are many different URL shorteners, but I prefer goo.gl, since I use GMail, Google Drive and many other parts of the Google suite. Simply copy the URL of whatever website you want your students to visit, paste it on the goo.gl page, hit "shorten url" and write it on the whiteboard for your students to copy. This is the perfect solution for when you visit the computer lab.

3) Learn to use a Search Engine: It's really important for students (and everybody) to learn how to use a search engine effectively. One of my favorite ways to reinforce the skill is to find a webpage that I want them to visit, put it up on the digital projector and have them use their own search engine skills to find it. You can adjust this activity to suit your students abilities. If they're advanced search engine users they already know to type in the title of the page, a line of text in quotation marks, or the publishing date. For novice students who need more support you can write "Site: USA TODAY"; "Article Title: Stocks Soar..."; "Date Published" and other useful information onto the board. Maybe your students are somewhere between advanced and novice. In that case, close read the webpage as a group and ask them to point out useful traits and information.

4) HTML to PDF Conversion: Sometimes you want students to access a fantastic (but online) chart, article or picture during a field trip or a nature walk, but there's no internet. Maybe you found a great webpage, but there are a million distracting ads. Perhaps you've found the perfect article for a professional development seminar, but don't want to make lots of paper copies. If any of those situations are familiar to you, then the HTML to PDF converter will be very helpful. These converters can be found with a simple internet search and they allow you to enter the web address of a site, hit convert, download as a PDF and share with students and colleagues. My favorite is http://pdfmyurl.com/ because it loads quickly and has a clean user interface. It takes less than a minute to complete this process and when you're finished students can mark up their documents anywhere using Notability.

Complex Texts and Technology

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and 1-to1 initiatives are, in my opinion, positive changes. However, it's sometimes difficult to know which way is up with these two major changes taking place concurrently.

One of the major changes of the CCSS is the move towards complex texts and literacy skills. Instead of having students read one leveled text after another, the students will read more difficult, high-quality texts. While this change receives the most attention from administrators and Language Arts teachers it is important to remember that reading and writing skills should be developed in all content areas.

When it comes to reading complex texts, technology can be a great ally to teachers and students. Today's post focuses on some free technologies that can be used to make reading fun (and assessment easy).

Notability: If you don't have this app, go and buy it. It is hands-down the best deal in educational apps. It's the Cadillac of note taking apps and it works seamlessly with Google Drive, Dropbox, PDFs and many other formats (regrettably, not Kindle). Anyways, it's awesome for close reading a text (there are tons of good PDFs out there and you can always make your own) and annotating because it allows students to do everything they would with paper. They can underline, highlight, add sticky notes, draw charts, and add pictures. Let's put those features into context.

This quarter we are reading Crispin: Cross of Lead and it's the story of a recently orphaned peasant in medieval England. It's a fantastic piece of historical fiction and explores the complicated (and completely unfair) social and political structure. One of the book's minor's characters, John Ball, was a real person and was executed for his role in the 1381 Peasants' Revolt. To help students understand the connection between Crispin and the Peasant's Revolt, we read this PDF about the revolt. So, what did we do with these two texts and Notability?

• Text-to-text connections:  There were lots of connections to be made between Crispin  and the PDF. Students could photograph sections from the book that were connected and place those photographs right into the PDF. Sometimes there wasn't a single passage that connected to the PDF, and then they could add sticky notes and text boxes to explain the connections. 
• Shared our Ideas: Because Notability is such a well-connected app, students could share their annotations with me and with their classmates at a central location. In this case, it was a communal Google Drive folder.

What else could we do?

• Text-to-world connections: We've talked about the social, economic and political structure of Medieval England as it relates to Crispin. Students used information from the text to determine where various characters would fall on a a social pyramid. The PDF references many different people and groups and these too could be placed on a social hierarchy. These in turn could be compared to other social, political, and economic structures.
• Cause and Effect: There were several causes of the Peasants' Revolt, first and foremost was the mistreatment and oppression of peasants by the upper classes and nobility. The iniquity is central to Crispin's plot and the book is set four years before the revolt, so students could easily make cause-and-effect connections using the PDF to study effects and Crispin and the PDF to study causes.

Grid Lens: Grid Lens is an app that allows the user to construct a photo collage by adding photographs to various frames. This app can be used in a variety of ways. For example, graphing out the beginning, middle and end of a story. Photographing important text features, like thesis statements, titles, sub-headings, graphs, maps and pictures. It can also be used by students to highlight what they believe are the most important parts of a text. By using the zoom and screenshot or camera features, students can select the three, four, five, etc. most important paragraphs or sentences from a text. Then they can use Grid Shot to easily put the images together and share it with the teacher. Summarizing is an important skill, and being able to point out the most important parts of a text can be tedious, dull work. However, we all know that good readers look back on a text and ask, "what do I need to take away from this article." With Grid Shot they can put this all together and then email it to their teachers. It isn't glamorous, but it's an easy way for students to say, "this is what stood out to me."

Using Google Presentations as a Textbook

The most valuable aspect of a 1:1 program is the technologies ability to assist with differentiation. iPads and Chromebooks allow for a dynamic learning experience that can change and react to the student's needs. As time goes by this capability is going to become more sophisticated, but that's a topic for another time.

One of my favorite ways to customize the learning to student's various needs is to use Google Presentation (it's like Powerpoint) to create an interactive textbook. The interactivity isn't fancy; there aren't any ancient Roman artifacts  that can be manipulated in three-dimensions. What it does do is allow students to work at their own speed and, in most cases, learn in a variety of ways (read it, hear it, watch it, share it, etc.). Using Google Presentation means that students can access this material from any web-connected device and I can make changes to it depending on student needs. If students don't understand the difference between a subject and object it is very easy to add another page of examples, link to another website, embed a video, or post on a classroom discussion board.most importantly, it answers the easy questions (what's an adjective, etc.) and frees me up to work 1-on-1 and in small groups to improve the difficult things (voice, word choice, etc.).

Here are some examples. As you look through them you will notice there are some websites I link frequently. For instance, TodaysMeet.com gets used almost every week as a formative learning assessment. There are often links to Purdue's Online Writing Lab or other websites that might help reinforce a concept.

Unit 1: Science Fiction
Week 1 and 2: Complete Sentences
https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1pD69ymQI_1ZkY2MIhJqPjF_MR6JuGGNmw-eSkDBMoK4/edit#slide=id.g10483fe87_0135
Week 3 and 4: Building Science Fiction
https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1fYqDtkYk4RStqhLwoc4cd3Ftj6vzmpHFPTM91lCfCNE/edit#slide=id.g106c04f09_053

Week 5 & 6: We reviewed some concepts from 1-4, took a field trip on Friday, and got caught up on missing work. Look for Week 7 & 8 soon!

Week 7 & 8: Creating Your Science Fiction Story: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eUo7iEV4GOUPALrqN7dkFcwRKAwlV3_HogvaPbqUtl8/edit?usp=sharing

Unit 2: Business World
Slideshow 1: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1LZ-98WOJ-hvJ_TBp--7A6mF0zi-S8NrCIlv9eMLV3ec/edit?pli=1#slide=id.p

Unit 3: Medieval Europe
Etymology Project: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1NJGMrwT_H37qh8HwK4HVi_fVY4h9CxtPgxFAe13SQEY/edit#slide=id.g2b5f71dbf_111  

Similes and Metaphors: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/1XSWLs89VyP49UFzrJhzyBF6RxZHl_FX_wo-zC9gnny4/edit#slide=id.g1c7b6216c_015 

Imagery: https://docs.google.com/a/spooner.k12.wi.us/presentation/d/11W1l-j9s6AW4WlFPFBQdQNojuKC0j1ljO4MYI-ItlOc/edit#slide=id.g2c2e2072e_011