Engagement: Pear Deck

Pear Deck is one of the online tools that I'm excited to use next year with a classroom set of chrome books. I've posted the beginning of a Pear Deck presentation that I'd use for short stories under "Useful Links." Each year I feel that, at least in ELA, we cover some of the same material that previous years have covered. Using Pear Deck as an online formative assessment, I hope to be able to gauge what students already know and what we truly need to cover. Plus, the presentations can be made available for review outside of the classroom.

Using Blogs in Education

Aside from having access from any where, blogs can benefit the classroom by providing authentic opportunities for students to respond to one another and have his or her voice her outside of the classroom and beyond the teacher. Additionally, students need to learn to communicate well in writing because future jobs will require communication with people around the world. In my opinion, which I admittedly read somewhere and don't remember the source, classroom education is outdated, but by integrating technology and blogs, classrooms can take on a larger presence in a student's life and become more engaging while increasing the potential for applying to future real-world situations. Classroom /class blogs have the potential to create safe-zones for students to posture real-world interactions while making mistakes and gaining confidence.

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Here's a video that explains various points of view in fiction. It's a useful video because different classes speak about point of view in different ways; it's a concept that visual aids support tremendously. An extension to this video, which would require students to use the information, is to use a blog for students to submit reviews of story and explain the point of view. Each student, for example, might be required to review a book on an assigned week, submit the post to a blog page for other students to read, and they would have the video to review if they needed extra help.  Plus, other students could read the same book and add responses to posts. It's an authentic activity that allows for student interaction through a monitored medium.