Eclectic Technology

If you or your students use Google Docs they can quickly generate a word cloud when their document has 100 or more words. Richard Byrne provides clear instructions in this post as well as suggestions on how your students might use the word cloud to help them revise, to find words the may have over used and more!

Do your students need to practice with grammar and punctuation? Quill provides worksheets for students in Grades 1 - 8 that have spelling and grammar errors. Students have to correct the errors. Quill corrects the papers, showing students what they did correctly, or what needs to be corrected.

Create your own classroom, provide students a code to sign-in, and pick your assignments. Students work at their pace and you can view their work through the dashboard.

As Richard Byrne states in this post "Having the pre-made activities at your disposal and having the opportunity to quickly see how your students did on each activity will free up some of your time."

There is a video that explains the site in more detail, or you may go directly the the website: http://www.quill.org/

Harvard University has a website on visual thinking that is designed for educators and students. Silvia Tolasano, the author of Langwitches Blog, has taken a number of their routines and created visualizations that would be useful for students, visualizations that you might post on your walls or provide copies of for students to put in their binders. 
There is one twist to a number of these  visualizations...they are specific for blogging. The image above includes two of the visualizations. In the post you will find an additional five routines. You will also find an infographic of all the routines within the post available as an infographic

To go directly to the site at Harvard use this link: http://www.old-pz.gse.harvard.edu/vt/VisibleThinking_html_files/VisibleThinking1.html/. And if you are wondering why you might use visible thinking routines consider this statement from the website on visual thinking (at Harvard): 

"Visible Thinking has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning."

If your students have Google accounts you might consider having them use Google Slides to help them organize research. With the tools available for searching next to the slides it is an easy way for them to begin to organize their materials. Richard Byrne has created a video that walks you through what to do.

NoRedInk has made many changes to their website and if you have not looked at it recently you may want to travel over and check it out. The site is to help students learn writing and grammar skills. Now you can:

* Create assignments and quizzes without doing any grading

* Target Common Core skills using your students’ interests

* Provide students with unlimited help whenever they need it

* Track growth using our color-coded heat maps

To help students stay engage they "generate questions from each student’s favorite celebrities, hobbies, TV shows, and friends." When it is time for an assessment of student work  they will "drag in commas, click words to capitalize them, throw out unwanted punctuation, and edit the text directly" resulting in a more authentic assesment. And as we are asked to personalize instruction this site will help in the areas it covers.

To go directly to NoRedInk click on this link: https://www.noredink.com/

Check out this activity from The Common Core Writing Book by Gretchen Owocki. One of the activities she suggests is  using a 3-2-1 strategy to help students summarize text. The student must choose three key words, find two phrases that are important and also one quote. They can then share this with a small group, and move to sharing in larger groups. The post suggests that this may used for the following (quoted from the post):

1.  Summarizing text
2. Individual accountability for reading
3. Discourse facilitation
4. Low-stakes writing
5. Strategy for comprehending complex and lengthy text
6. Structure to enable "teacher as facilitator"

It is always interesting to read rules of writing that are written by authors. This list of 8 rules comes from Neil Gaiman, an author that some students may recognize. It also lets students know that published authors go through the writing process in a similar way to students.

Technology comes into play in that it provides students with a wide range of options to find and show their voice. This post looks at five areas:

* Writing

* Multimedia

* Speaking

* Performing and/or Direction

* Artistic Expression

Within each area there is a strategy listed, a number of tools suggested in four areas a short look at "terms of success."

Helping students find their voice through technology also provides opportunities for students to be creative and to connect with an authentic audience,  helping to build 21st century skills as defined through the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and Common Core.

Google has just launched add-ons, tools that provide more resources for you to use with Google Doc and Sheet. Over fifty are now available (and more are expected to be added). A few are listed below.

* EasyBib Bibliography generator allows you to search EasyBib and generate citations (MLA, APA and Chicago Manual)

* Open Clip Art provides quick access to over 50,000 images you can insert

* Kazena Shortcut allows you to provide audio feedback with Google Doc and Sheet

* LucidChart allows you to insert a mindmap, flow chart or diagram directly into your doc (and LucidDiagram is also available)

* ProWriting Aid - check for plagiarism, grammar and redundant phrases

The post includes a short video as well as listing some of the other tools available.

What would happen if you encouraged students "to think in pictures" as well as words? This post explores what happened in one classroom where the teacher decided to have students write in Lifebook Journals daily. Learn more about this activity by clicking through to the post.