SymbolSupport. Choiceworks. Tech Tools That Have Transformed Learning With Dyslexia. Fifth-grade teacher Kyle Redford remembers with emotion the day she unwittingly put an iPad in the hands of one of her 10-year-old dyslexic students, a day she called “a complete game changer.”
While the rest of the class was working in a writers workshop, she handed the student an iPad and told him to try and experiment with its speech-to-text feature. With minimal expectations, Redford figured that the newness and the boy’s curiosity would at least keep him busy during writing time, which he usually found frustrating. While Redford described the boy as “very bright,” he “couldn’t even compose a sentence to save his life” because of his dyslexia.
Any classroom assignment having to do with writing made him moody. At first, it was difficult. “Some of my most brilliant kids in the class, put them on an iPad, and say, ‘Speak into this,’ ” she said. “I tell them, don’t ask this student to write something long, because he’s going to do a terrible job. The Rise of Technology Helpful Tech Tools. Literacy in the Digital Age: Five Sites With High-Quality Informational Text. Editor’s Note: Teaching Channel has partnered with Student Achievement Partners on a blog series about digital literacy tools and their effective use by educators. One of the most exciting shifts in the Common Core State Standards is the increased use of content-rich, informational text. Let’s think about this. As professionals, how often do we read texts that are outside of our comfort zone? Perhaps it was a legal document, a lengthy contract, or 16th Century prose. A lot of time, no doubt, was spent trying to decode the language used.
Our human brain only has a finite amount of working memory available at any given time. And when we’re reading, our brain is either decoding or comprehending. Preparing our students to be college- and career-ready is our priority. Below, we share five sites that will help you find these texts with ease and even differentiate the same article for the different learners in your room. 1. Newsela supports differentiation through interest and ability level. 2. Common Core in Action: Using Digital Storytelling Tools in the ELA Classroom. When students come to school each morning, they have tons of stories -- stories to share with their friends as they unpack or move through the hallways, stories to share with the class during morning meetings, or stories to share with a teacher about something that made them happy or sad.
In the classroom, writing can happen in many different ways, whether it's free writing in a notebook to gather ideas or publishing stories to share with the whole school. The Common Core State Standards expect that children across the grades can write for three specific purposes: Opinion pieces that persuade a reader and make an argument Informative writing that explains an idea and relays information Narrative stories of real or imagined events.
As students move from one grade level to another, the complexity of these tasks will change greatly. The persuasive writing that takes place in a second grade classroom will look very different than the work that a seventh grader produces. Ideas for Using iPads for Digital Storytelling. By Sam Gliksman The following is the first of a series of excerpts from Gliksman’s book iPad in Education for Dummies. The digital aspect of storytelling raises the art to a new level of experience. The emergence of technology and digital media has resulted in some significant departures from the traditional role of storytelling in education: Stories have become media-rich experiences. Billions of mobile devices are in the hands of people worldwide, and an ever-increasing percentage of those devices contain video cameras, still cameras, and microphones.
Whenever anything of personal significance happens, it can be captured and chronicled in digital media that we edit, process, and publish. Within minutes, that moment is available to friends and family around the world. Media has become the language of today. Reading and writing remain crucial educational components. Then we reached the information age. Students traditionally produced a product for an audience of one: their teacher.