Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

It is that time of year where classroom teachers are in full test prep mode. We are about six weeks out here in South Carolina and a big concern in a lot of our schools is the TDA part of the test (Text Dependent Analysis). The TDA part of the test requires students to analyze a piece of text and respond to a prompt that where they have to pull evidence from the text to support their writing. Great idea, and certainly brings in those higher order thinking skills, but it is also a lot for students to process particularly if this is the first time taking the test or they are struggling readers and writers. I definitely feel their pain but sadly that doesn't make the test go away. This leaves me trying to think of ways to get these struggling students writing and reading as often as possible. Luckily the test uses shorter reading passages so I try to pull high interest articles off the internet, ReadWorks, Newela, Writable, Teachers Pay Teachers, etc - pretty much any place I c

I am following a Seesaw teacher's Facebook group  and one of the teacher's posted an animated avatar message she left for her students using Memoji which is available on the iPhoneXS, iPhoneXS Max, and iPhone XR. It was super cute but sadly unavailable to me with my sad iPhone 7. This got me thinking about other ways I could use leave creative messages for students if I was going to be out. I couldn't find another free avatar program that made a close approximation of my face so I branched out to messaging apps.  I made the two videos below using the Facebook messenger app (you could also use Snapchat as well). Both allow you to save videos to your phones camera roll. I put the Seesaw app on my phone and uploaded it from there but I could have easily emailed them to myself from my phone and uploaded it via my computer.  If you are looking for a fun way to leave messages for your students you might want to give these apps a try!    

If you have ever painstakingly highlighted each letter in a word to get a r a i n b o w effect you no longer have to! There is this cool add on into Google Docs and Slides that allows you to highlight an entire word and turn it r a i n b o w ’ i s h . From Docs or Slides you can also copy and paste your r a i n b o w e d word into Word, PowerPoint, and email as well. It sadly doesn’t copy and paste over to Facebook or Twitter (I’ve tried!). For this blog post I tried to make the title r a i n b o w ’ i s h but that didn't work. However, it worked when I cut and paste the text in from a Google Doc into the body of this post. It is still a cool tool regardless of its limitations. I used it for these cool Valentine's Day cards. If you find another great use...please let me know either in the comments below or on Twitter @atechcoachlife.