We used Padlet walls to show
our thinking, we drew pictures and wrote information digitally as I read aloud,
we used today’s meet to make our thinking visible. Using these different strategies kept my
students engaged and allowed their thinking to be seen by their peers and
myself.
Near the end of this past
year we began an inquiry on Africa. I find one of the most
challenging things about student inquiry is to find resources that are
interesting and at my students reading level.
One resource I use often is readinga-z.
Reading
a-z is a website that has more than 2,500
downloadable books (including English, Spanish, and French versions) and
thousands of teaching and learning materials.
I use to search for specific
topics and then match my students reading levels to the text. I would then print the various books out for
my students. This took a lot of time to print
and a lot of paper! I can usually find 2
or 3 different texts on the same topic in varying difficulty.
While I was searching for different
books on Africa, I noticed that the books could be downloaded in a PDF. This was a game changer. Having 32 iPads in my room, I was able to
save the book as a PDF and save it to Dropbox.
My classroom iPads all have the Dropbox app, which means:
- Students open the Explain Everything app
- Choose open file and download the PDF to Explain Everything
- The PDF opens in Explain Everything and now students can annotate, draw, highlight and record their voice right on the document.
- They can also save their work and go back to it for research purposes and it is a great way for me to assess their comprehension strategies.
You could also use this same format to have your students show non fiction text features like the example below: