Increasing Accessibility with Google Read and Write

Misty is our occupational therapist. In her role, she helps our students with disabilities in a variety of ways. She provides sensory regulation support such as exercises, weighted vests, and focusing techniques. She helps student develop fine motor skills, and also provides flexible seating options like wiggle cushions and yoga balls for students needing movement.

Misty also provides technology support for our students with disabilities to make our standards-based curriculum more accessible.

With an increase in accessibility to the web, our students are becoming extreme consumers of content. They can connect to the web and easily read or watch infinite sources of information. While many teachers are beginning to rely more on digital texts, there is a great extension for Google Chrome that can make reading and writing more accessible for our students with special needs.

I’ve been using Google Read and Write for the last few years with my students. Until recently, I was only using the basic reading and writing features. After chatting with Misty, though, I’ve learned some other great features of this extension that will be so helpful for my students.

Reading

In its simplest form, Google Read and Write will read any web-based text aloud. You can even control the rate at which it reads. Readers just click where they want to start reading, press the play button on the toolbar, and the program will highlight each sentence as it reads. Students can pause or replay at anytime.

Google Read and Write also has a tool called the Screenshot Reader. It’s intention is to read any text on a student’s screen once they draw a box around it. This allows students to access text in images, PDFs, and online textbooks. Misty has been working to get this feature available for our students, but due to a glitch on our end, we are unable to use it at this time. Instead, Misty has been using Snapverter to convert PDFs into a format that will work with Google Read and Write. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of time to do all the converting for students, so we are still hoping to get Screenshot Reader to work soon.

The read aloud feature is such a powerful tool for students who struggle with reading because they can still access online text, even when a teacher is unavailable to read aloud to them. This tool allows students to build independence and gain confidence in their online reading comprehension.

Writing

It also provides word prediction for writing. Students who are using this feature can begin to type words, and the extension will automatically provide word choices for the students. This is especially helpful for students who struggle with spelling.

Google Read and Write predicting words

Google Read and Write also has a speech-to-text tool, allowing students to use a microphone to create written text by simply speaking. The tool automatically converts the speech into text, including punctuation. Students can stop at any time and use the reading tool to check their work.

"I like using [the speech tool] because it helps me get ideas
out. When I write, my words get stuck sometimes."

So Much More

Google Read and Write also has some great research tools. While reading online, students can highlight text that they find important. When finished, students can choose to collect their highlights. This feature pulls all of the highlighted text into a new Google Doc. If the reader chose to highlight in various colors, perhaps to signify which text they found the information in or what main idea the information supports, then Google Read and Write will sort the highlights by color in the Google Doc. How awesome is that?

One other feature that I just learned about is Voice Notes. It’s similar to making comments in a Google Doc. Rather than typing a comment or note, the user can leave an verbal note. Instead of translating into text, Voice Notes remain in audio format, allowing the listener to easily hear comments and notes. I really like the idea of this feature for leaving specific feedback for my students. In the past I sometimes hesitate to write comments for some of my students because I know they will struggle to read my feedback. Voice Notes solves that problem. Students can even respond with their own voice note to form a running conversation of questions or comments.

As you can imagine, these features of Google Read and Write are a game changer for my students with disabilities. They can access text online and write much more fluently. Organizing notes from research is quick and effortless, and students can understand teacher feedback through voice notes. What a great tool!

Upgrading Literature Circles

Hayley is a sixth grade teacher. She has been using literature circles with her students as a way to encourage student discussion of independent reading. In the past, she has used tech-free literature circles, but this year she has made a few changes to incorporate technology in order to increase learning, organization, and accountability.

Building Background Knowledge

Some of the typical roles that students take on in Hayley’s literature circles involve explaining key vocabulary, making connections, summarizing the text, and directing the discussion. In the past, she has also had an investigator. This student would choose a topic related to the reading to research and share with the group. Unfortunately, students seemed to get in a rut in which they would only choose to research the author week after week-defeating the purpose of building background knowledge and increasing comprehension.

To address this issue, Hayley has chosen to incorporate webquests into her literature circles. Students will spend time each week investigating a teacher-chosen webquest that relates to the story they are reading, building their background knowledge in meaningful ways while being guided by the webquest. Hayley is choosing webquests to deepen understanding of themes, settings, and social issues faced by main characters.

This student is exploring a webquest about dyslexia in connection with his book, Fish in a Tree. When asked why he was learning about dyslexia, he said, “The main character has a learning problem. Reading about dyslexia helps me to understand the character better. Then I understand why she does what she does.” That sounds like effective background knowledge to me!

Another student was using a webquest to learn about Arizona, the setting for his literature circle book, Stargirl. He is shown here searching the web for images to show the land features in Arizona. Meanwhile, another student was completing a webquest to build background knowledge relating to fairy tales for her chapter book. While their tasks and content were very different, all three students were engaged in meaningful learning that will extend their understanding of their chapter books.

Managing the Paperwork

I’m really impressed with Hayley’s overall organization of her literature circles. Students follow a set monthly calendar, showing reading assignments and roles for each week. All the calendars are shared with students through Google Classroom, so students always have a clear reading goal for the day.

Providing copies of role sheets and managing completed student was a challenge in the past. Students were turning in multiple pages of work per week for Hayley to organize, assess, and provide feedback. This year she has moved all of her documents to digital folders. Teaching her students how to make a copy of the role sheets they need was a quick fix to increase organization. They never run out of paper copies, students can’t misplace their work, and Hayley can access digital student work anytime, even before they turn it in.

Listening to Student-Led Discussions

Student led discussions can be so powerful! They can also get off topic pretty quickly. One struggle for any teacher is ensuring on-task learning while students are working without a teacher. In Hayley’s class, students participate in literature circle discussions while Hayley is teaching small group lessons, meaning that she is usually unavailable to really listen in to every conversation.

This year Hayley is planning to use the video recording feature in our learning hub to record group conversations. Not only will students have increased accountability, it will also help Hayley to have a clear idea of how to best support the learning of various groups and students. She can better plan her small group instruction and correct misconceptions to make her literature circles as meaningful as possible.

Overall, Hayley’s shift to digital literature circles has allowed her guided reading time to become more efficient and effective. Thanks for these great ideas, Hayley!

Student Interviews with Flipgrid

Student interviews are a great way to get a clear idea of what your students know. Many teachers use these informal assessments to inform their instruction. Unfortunately, they take a considerable amount of time. As a teacher, I rarely use interviews as an assessment, despite the benefits, because I can’t justify the time it takes to sit with each of my students on a regular basis.

Kamaren Cross is a third grade teacher at my school. She is starting her second year of teaching, and she has found a great solution to the biggest drawback of using student interviews. Rather than sitting with each student during class hours, she is multiplying her time by having her class create video summaries of their learning using Flipgrid.

These short videos are a great way for Kamaren to check each student’s understanding without eating up lots of class time. She can even set a time limit for students so that each video is a reasonable amount of time. Students are highly motivated to create meaningful videos because they enjoy producing original content for their peers and teacher to view. Another benefit is that each student gets to have a voice in the conversation. Everyone is included and has a chance to explain what they think.

Flipgrid allows teachers to create a free classroom account. After students join using the class code, they can begin creating videos to answer the prompt that Kamaren has posted. The flipgrid interface is very visual- making it extremely easy for students of all ages to navigate. After only two days of using flipgrid, Kamaren found that most of her students could use the site independently to respond to her prompts. During my visit, each student used Flipgrid to record their learning within a 10 minute window.

While Kamaren’s third graders are nearly proficient at using Flipgrid, their first experience took a considerable amount of time. Providing appropriate modeling, examples and non-examples, along with adequate support to create initial videos took more time than she initially expected. Kamaren also had to problem solve when it came to the noise level when having all her students recording at the same time. Her solution is to have students tuck themselves away in small spaces around the room, such as under desks or near their cubby, to provide a bit of space.

Here’s what Kamaren’s students have to say about using Flipgrid:

“I like it because everyone can see my work.”

“I’m nervous when I have to answer in front of the class, but when I’m making a video I can do my recording over if I make a mistake.”

“It’s easier to explain what I’m learning when I’m talking.”

“I like adding stickers to make my video fun. It can look unique like me!”

“It’s fun hearing what my classmates say.”

Kamaren isn’t the only teacher in our building using verbal responses. A number of my colleagues from grades Kindergarten through sixth are are beginning to use this method through Flipgrid and our learning hub to allow students to respond to questions, create projects, and reflect on their learning. Students are excited to create video content, and they are accountable for their work because they have a genuine audience.

So far, Kamaren has used Flipgrid video responses for reading and writing lessons. She’s looking forward to trying it out with math content as well. She also plans to have students begin to collaborate by responding to peer videos, and in time, she hopes to have students pose their own questions for the class to answer.

Technology and Differentiation: Meeting Instructional Needs

This is my teammate, Toby. One of the things that most impresses me about his teaching style is that he is always willing to try something new to make his classroom run smoother. He is forever challenging his fourth graders to think critically and flexibly. Over the past year, he has discovered a really smart way to use technology to better meet the needs of his students.

Our fourth graders review prerequisites and previously taught skills for both math and language arts each day. Typically, students practice independently and then review with the whole class. This sort of repetitive practice allows students to maintain their math and language skills. As you can imagine, some students need more support than others with these skills. While some kids are truly reviewing previously mastered content, others need to be retaught. This is difficult to do in only about ten minutes in each subject, so Toby thought of a new way to review with his class.

Differentiation Through Technology

Toby's students have about 30 minutes of independent work time each day during math. During that time, they are given a variety of review tasks to complete including correcting their math and language review, practicing multiplication math facts with Xtramath, and reviewing recent math skills through IXL. During this independent time, Toby is using technology to meet the needs of his students.

Toby takes about ten minutes a day during his prep to record himself using his document camera. He solves each math problem and reviews the language concepts for the day. Students who need to simply check their work access his Youtube video through Google Classroom and follow along. They can pause it to correct their own work or watch parts multiple times to ensure they understand each question. They can also access these videos from home to review with their parents before the weekly quiz.

Students are also encouraged to use the comment feature on Youtube to ask questions about problems they do not understand. This helps Toby know who may need more help face-to-face. This year he is also thinking about encouraging students to answer the questions that their peers asked through comments, allowing students to help one another as well.

While the majority of the class is reviewing online, Toby is able to work with a small group of students and reteach the skills they are struggling with the most. He sees an average of about 8 students each day for intense reteaching. At times, students choose if they need help, and other times he calls up specific students.

The major drawback of this system, according to Toby, is that he must be very conscious of each student’s progress so that students don’t slip through the cracks. To do this he uses weekly quiz results and weekly reports through IXL to determine who needs help with specific skills.

The benefit of his system is that he can meet each student’s specific needs, while also promoting independence. He has essentially used technology to clone himself and teach two groups at once, providing differentiated instruction to meet the needs of his students. How cool is that? Thanks for sharing this great idea, Toby!

Increasing Student Participation with Nearpod

This week I visited my colleague, Dautie. She’s a fifth grade teacher who enjoys trying new apps and tech tools in her class. She introduced me to Nearpod. It’s a platform that helps teachers create engaging lessons to increase student participation and interaction. Teachers can set up a free account and create content to use in their classrooms. There are also pre-made lessons available for purchase.

During the lesson, students use their Chromebooks to visit www.nearpod.com and enter a code provided through the website. This allows students to join the live lesson and participate by answering multiple choice, true/false, short answer, or poll questions the teacher has created. When students respond, all student answers display on the teacher’s screen. When projected for the class, students are able to see what their classmates are thinking.

This teaching tool is great for helping teachers to get instant feedback on their students’ learning throughout the lesson, allowing them to adjust their teaching. Students are motivated and excited to see their answers displayed for the class to see, increasing participation and accountability. Moreover, every student is able to participate and answer every question, improving engagement and thinking.

Lesson Examples

Let’s take a look at few of Dautie’s lessons. This week she used Nearpod along with a novel study. Students completed the selection of reading with Dautie and highlighted the text looking for explicit information to answer questions. This was followed by a second read of the same text with a partner.

Using Nearpod, Dautie posed different implied questions in which the students had to find the evidence in the text and make an inference. Students were able to chat with a partner and then respond using Nearpod. Dautie created a variety of question types including poll, multiple choice, short answer, and extended response. She made sure to draw attention to exemplary responses to use as a model for future questions.

Short answer question

Poll question with percentages

Extended response question

Last year, Dautie used Nearpod during a lesson in which students used multiple texts to compare point of view and how events in a text are perceived. She designed this lesson to require students to deepen their understanding of point of view, beyond simple identification. Dautie has also used Nearpod for her math instruction to allow students to explain their thinking and their process when solving a problem.

Student Perceptions

I asked a handful of students what they thought about using Nearpod. Many of them stated that they like typing better than writing with paper and pencil. One student even said that she was able to type faster than she would write. While observing Dautie’s students, I noticed that every student was engaged and working hard to complete their answers in the given amount of time. Not all students were typing correctly, but I would say that most of them were typing faster than they would have written.

A few students also mentioned that they like being able to answer every question from the teacher. Rather than waiting their turn, and making their arm tired from raising it all the time, each student answers every question. By projecting everyone’s answers on the front screen, everyone can have a voice in the lesson.

Two students stated that they like Nearpod because they can see what everyone else is thinking. They can interact with other students, even if they are not sitting right next to them, because they can read their work on the screen.

This student is reading her peers' responses and commenting

Reflections

I initially thought that Nearpod would mostly allow for basic, low level questions, but Dautie has created language arts lessons that require her students to analyze and compare texts, make inferences, respond to peer answers, and justify their thinking with textual evidence. Her Nearpod math lessons allow students to explain their thinking and the processes they used. What a great way to use this technology tool to improve instruction.

I’m looking forward to trying Nearpod in my classroom soon. Thanks for these great ideas, Dautie!

Encouraging Classroom Collaboration

I work with some pretty amazing teachers. I am continually impressed with their dedication, hard work, and innovation. Lately, I’ve been chatting with my colleagues about interesting ways they use technology in their classrooms. I plan to share a series of posts with you highlighting their awesome work throughout the school year.

This week I sat down with Anita Earl, a second grade teacher, and had a conversation about how she uses technology in her classroom. Through our discussions, she explained how she uses Google Slides to help her students organize their writing and promote whole-class collaboration.

Using Google Slides is a great way to allow all students to work in one space, even when they are not online at the same time since Anita’s students typically use their devices in stations.  Students who need peer modeling can check work done before them for examples, and partners can easily provide feedback during peer conferences.

Whole Class Collaboration

Anita uses Google Slides to create class books. One such book that Anita has made in the past was inspired by the book, Tomorrow’s Alphabet by George Shannon.

This alphabet book is unusual because each letter is identified in a challenging way.  For example, A is for seed- tomorrow’s apple. These word puzzles encourage students to think critically about cause and effect relationships.

Anita reads this book with her students and challenges them to think of their own cause and effect relationships. Each student is assigned a letter, and they collaboratively make an alphabet book using Google Slides. This higher-order writing activity challenges Anita’s second graders to apply their understanding of cause and effect while also creating a book. By assigning each student their own slide, every student can make their mark as they collaborate to author a story.

If you’re interested in learning more about collaborative story writing, Read Write Think has some great lesson ideas to get you started.

Organizing Writing

One of the benefits of using Google Slides rather than Google Docs is that it provides natural divisions for main ideas. This can help students who are beginning to learn about organizing their writing. It can be used as a step between a graphic organizer and paragraph writing.

Anita first helps her students brainstorm various main ideas for a given topic. Then they are prompted to use a different slide for each main idea. This process guides students to learn how to group like ideas together in their writing, allowing them to organize their ideas and present a clear message for their audience.

A big thank you to Anita Earl for allowing us to take a peek in her classroom this week to see the great ways she’s using Google Slides to improve her instruction and increase classroom collaboration.

Starting Math Workshop

One of my personal goals for this school year is to transition to a math workshop model. As much as possible, my co-teacher and I try to teach math in smaller groups for a number of reasons.

First, we have an inclusion classroom, so we have a wide range of needs. Teaching in small(er) groups allows us to work more closely with each student. We are able to gain a clear idea of the skills each student has mastered, and who needs more support. That data helps us to differentiate our instruction, making sure all students are progressing toward our objectives.

Next, we have a large class. Right now, we have 31 students and 2 teachers. Working in smaller groups ensures students are engaged and on task. Moreover, our time is much more efficient because there are usually fewer distractions.

With our 31 students we can split the class to parallel teach (teach the same lesson at the same time) and each have about 15 kiddos, but we don’t really feel like we experience the benefits of small group instruction with such a large group. We also use alternative grouping, where one teacher leads a whole group lesson, while the other teacher teaches a small group of 5-6 kids. Unfortunately, we still have a very large group of students with one teacher, and they are not benefiting from small group instruction.

Last year we sort of stumbled into a grouping method that finally seemed to make a difference. Half of our students would work independently on a review task, assessment, or project while my co-teacher and I would split the remaining students, effectively allowing us each to have a quarter of our total students for small group instruction. We could also set up 3 rotations, allowing each teacher to meet with a sixth of the class. After replicating this grouping system as often as we could, we started to have serious discussions about making this a regular part of our future teaching. This year, we are intentionally moving toward a math workshop model for our instruction in order to take advantage of these small group possibilities.

Math Workshop Explained

Math workshop generally consists of a short mini lesson for the whole class and centers or stations in which students work independently for a time and then receive small group instruction with the teacher. The blog post Differentiate Math Instruction with M.A.T.H Workshop at The Core Inspiration is a great explanation of the different aspects of math workshop. I found it helpful in thinking through how I might create meaningful work for my students when they are working on their own.

One of the main reasons I hadn’t tried math workshop in the past is because the idea of creating multiple center activities and directions for students every day seems so overwhelming. Not only that, but our students need consistency. Learning a new math game or trying a new activity every few days would be a disaster. What I like realized after reading various blogs is that consistency can be a part of math workshop, and thanks to our technology resources, it doesn’t need to require excessive material preparation.

Here’s a list of activities I’m planning to use for independent work to start off this year:

• Multiplication fact fluency with Xtramath or multiplication partner game
• Independent skill review and practice with IXL
• Partner skill review and coaching with paper and pencil worksheets
• Number work (building number sense with “number of the day” type activities)
• Assessments including pretests, quick checks, and tests

Eventually, once we have the hang of the procedures and expectations of math workshop, my goal is to incorporate some online learning. A station rotation model of blended learning would work really well here. To create the online content, I’ll make my own teaching videos using a document camera (check out my Donor’s Choose grant to help make this possible!) and using Khan Academy materials.

Logistics 

This article from Math Tech Connections helped me to wrap my mind around various ways to organize our math workshop. It outlines three different ways to create groups and rotations-plus there’s free planning resources!

For our class, we will have two sections of whole-group time including daily math review and our daily mini lesson at the start of our math block. Then we will split into three main groups for our stations. During our stations, students will have about 15 minutes at each station.

• Teacher Instruction: Focused and differentiated instruction will be provided for students related to each day’s whole group mini-lesson.
• Independent Review: This will be mostly fact fluency for now. Eventually, it will become the online learning portion of our stations.
• Partner Practice: Students practice recent skills with a partner for support and collaboration.

Workshop in Action

Today was our first day using the math workshop model. We taught our mini lesson and took some extra time to discuss our learning expectations during independent work time. This left about 40 minutes for instruction. Our students completed two or three stations today. We left the third station as optional for our early finishers.

Independent Work: students completed a pretest for an upcoming unit.
Skill Review (optional): students practiced math fact fluency online. 

Teacher Stations: students practiced rounding on a number line.

Winning with Workshop 

Let’s reconsider the problem of large groups. With this model, students would ideally get 15 minutes of differentiated teacher instruction in a small group of only about 5 students. FIVE! With 31 students, that’s 10 in each of the three groups. Since there are two teachers for the teacher instruction station, that’s about 5 with each teacher if we divide groups strictly by number of students. Does that seem amazing to you? Because it seems really amazing to me!