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Eduaide: AI Lesson and Activity Generator

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Eduaide: AI Lesson and Activity Generator

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An integrated lesson planning platform

All your tools in one place

Source It

The act of using a Large Language Model to write the basis for a generative educational resource. Generating content is only the first step.

Shape It

Look at generated content as a sculptor might a block of marble. Shape the raw material to suit your unique context. Use our suite of personalization tools to more deeply differentiate instruction.

Share It

Cultivate expertise and collaborate with other users. Share your educational resources with a community of practice to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute to find what works best for students.

Take back your time. Master your craft.

Start teaching with Eduaide today.

1. Join us on Discord

Get help, ask questions, and interact with other Eduaide users and learn how they are using Eduaide.

2. Advisory Board

Learn more about our Advisory Board and how they are helping us build the best lesson planning platform for teachers.

3. Podcasts & Press

If you want to learn more about Eduaide, our philosophy, and our mission, check out our featured podcasts and press.

Copyright © 2024 Eduaide.Ai. LLC All Rights Reserved. Icons provided by Icons8. Site elements by Denys Koltovskyi - stock.adobe.com

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Eduaide.Ai is an AI-driven platform that helps educators create lesson plans, teaching resources, and assessments.

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A Pop-Up is a kinesthetic activity that increases physical energy while learners review material.

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Time sponge is a short, topic related activity that soaks up time that would normally be spent on non-learning things. Quick Start Sponges, Take a Break Sponges, Early to Finish Sponges

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This resource has complete modules ready to be taught.

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A quick sign up and you are ready to explore these great science lessons using inquiry and project based learning.

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Lucas Education Research AP Web Portal: Home Page

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Lucas Education Research is committed to the development and evaluation of rigorous project-based learning programs. We designed our web platform, Sprocket, to disseminate research-based PBL courses while building a professional-learning community for teachers to share resources and adapt courses to meet their needs.

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Great escape rooms, each has a junior version for younger students.

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FREE Digital Escape Rooms

We hope you and your students enjoy these FREE digital escape rooms! Below you will find links to each escape room along with the locks, answers and explanations.

If you and your students are new to digital escape rooms it might be fun to try one out as a class so that you can experience it together. After that, you can assign these escape rooms to your students in groups or individually by giving them the direct link to the digital escape room (they don't need a special copy). Click on the images for links to the escape rooms.

Here are couple of tips to help you and your students feel successful:

Take a look at what lock combinations you are looking for first.

Share the link to the escape room with students, but don't share this teacher pack!

Click everywhere, clues could be hidden inside of text, hyperlinked in an image or multiple links could be hidden inside of an interactive slide or picture.

Don't give up. It's supposed to be challenging! Those answers are there for you in case you need to give little hints though.

Watch this quick video overview of our Halloween Haunt Digital Escape Room to see what a digital escape room looks like.

You will notice that many of these escape rooms are created with Google and Microsoft tools. Some school/districts block Google sites created outside of their domain. However, the escape rooms created with Microsoft tools seem to work.

Still have questions? Take a look at our digital escape rooms FAQs page for answers to our most common questions and if you still have questions email Karly at social@ditchthattextbook.com.

🚀 Take learning to a whole NEW level 🚀

with the Getting Started with Digital Escape Rooms Online Course!

You'll get:
🔐 Video tutorials to guide you in getting started

🔐 PDF guides to help you plan

🔐 LOTS of example escape room ideas you can use as inspiration

🔐 25 digital escape rooms with lock combinations and companion resources in a downloadable PDF

🔐 A step-by-step companion website with templates to help you and your students create your own digital escape rooms

🔐 A resource locker FILLED with BONUS resources

Digital Escape Room Teacher Pack

Digital escape rooms bring the excitement of hunting for clues and the joy of solving puzzles right to your student's devices. Here are over 40 digital escape rooms to try plus resources for creating them yourself!

Upcoming Speaking

There are no upcoming events.

©2022 Ditch That Textbook by Matt Miller.

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FREE Digital Escape Rooms We hope you and your students enjoy these FREE digital escape rooms! Below you will find links to each escape room along with the locks, answers and explanations. If you and your students are new to digital escape rooms it might be fun to try one out as a class so that you can experience it together.

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What if students helped you build the HyperRubric?

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Sponsored by Listenwise and ISTE

I've always believed in the power of a good, clear rubric for helping students understand how their work will be assessed. As an English teacher, I can't even imagine assigning a writing task without a rubric. But all rubrics are not the same: Some can be convoluted messes that overwhelm students, while others can be far too vague to really be helpful. Ideally, all teachers would use the most effective rubrics all the time, but we're not quite there yet.

On this site, we've explored lots of rubric tweaks and iterations that make them more effective, and this post will add more to that work: A different way of developing and using a rubric that changes it from a tool for evaluation to a tool for marking progress and pushing students to keep moving forward.

Two English language arts teachers- Tyler Rablin and Jeff Frieden -developed this idea (first Tyler, then Jeff) and are calling it a HyperRubric. On the podcast we talked about how this style of rubric came to be and how it works. The full transcript is available above. What follows here is a summary of our conversation.

Part 1: Hitting Walls with the Traditional Rubric

This story starts with Tyler Rablin, a high school English teacher from Sunnyside, Washington. After working for several years with the traditional four-column rubric, Rablin found himself wanting more. "I know rubrics are important, I know there's value in them, but I'm not seeing them really impact my students in a way that I would like to see."

He identified two main issues with the traditional rubric:

1. Finality
The four-column rubrics Rablin was using did nothing more than describe student skill levels, and they did so in a way that discouraged future growth. "The earlier levels were often stigmatizing," Rablin says. "It was, These are all the things I can't do. I'm weak at this. The later levels were the better ones: Good is here and bad is here. When I was giving students that feedback they were not getting the message of, You're at the beginning stage in this learning process. They were getting the message of, You're not doing well at this. When you hand that to a student, it just, it crushes them, and there goes motivation almost right away."

2. Clarity
"The language was basically like, I kind of get it, I sort of get it, I mostly get it," Rablin says. "And for the student, what does that mean? Where do I go next?" For a student who doesn't really understand the concept, "they don't have a way into that learning. They don't really know where to start."

He started to envision a different kind of rubric, one that would actually help students make progress. It would spell out what they could already do in concrete terms, then show them the skills they needed to develop to move forward.

Part 2: Imagining a More Progressive Rubric

Rablin began experimenting with a new approach: replacing the static descriptors in his rubrics with language that was progressive. He referred to this style of rubric as a Learning Progression.

The image below shows the difference. To keep things simple, this example just focuses on a single row in a rubric containing criteria for using commas with coordinating conjunctions.

In the top rubric-done in a traditional style-the criteria vaguely labels the student's skills in terms of how many mistakes they make. It doesn't give them any information about what skills to develop and how to get better.

In the bottom rubric-done as a Learning Progression-the criteria is couched in terms of concrete things a student can learn to do, things that will help them improve.

Click image for larger view.

In this example, and in many of Rablin's other rubrics, those concrete demonstrations start at the lower levels of Bloom's, where students are simply defining and identifying, and move up to higher-level tasks where they apply, evaluate, and create with the target skill.

Part 3: Making the Rubric "Come Alive"

If the rubric is digital, teachers can also add an additional layer that hyperlinks the skills in the rubric to resources that teach the skill, thus enabling students to start making progress right away.

With the addition of these hyperlinks, the rubric now becomes a HyperRubric.

See the difference in the examples below, which assess students' skills in analyzing character development in a text. The top rubric is traditional, with vague descriptors of the skill at different levels. The bottom version, a HyperRubric, not only offers more concrete sub-skills students can work to develop, but also contains links to videos, articles, and models that teach the student how to apply those sub-skills.

Click image for larger view.

Part 4: Putting the Rubric to Work in a Real Classroom

Now that we're clear on what a HyperRubric is, it's probably obvious how much more useful it could be than a traditional rubric. Still, if we're only using it at the end of a learning cycle, as a tool to evaluate work that is already done, its value will still be limited.

Ideally, a HyperRubric will be used within a cycle of feedback, reflection, and iteration, where students can use it to actively work on their skill development.

One example of this is how Jeff Frieden uses it.

Frieden, a high school ELA teacher in southern California (and the person who brought us the ongoing conversations strategy in 2018), first heard Tyler Rablin talk about his new approach to rubrics on an episode of the Teachers on Fire podcast. As he listened, he realized that this different kind of rubric would be perfect for the shift he'd been trying to make with his writing instruction, a shift that moved assessment from the end of a writing piece to the middle.

"For 13 years, I had been assessing the final product," Frieden explains. "I had a (traditional) rubric and it tended to come at the end. So it was really just an impact on the grade. And full confession, I was using it to justify the scores I was putting on the papers. The hope was that it would transfer to their next piece of writing. But that's not really what happened. Maybe occasionally it would for a few students, but for the most part it was just me sort of covering myself just to make sure that everybody could understand why points were missing from the document."

Recently he shifted his approach, giving students a prompt for a writing task, having them do a first draft quickly, then planning his teaching around the areas of need he identified in the first drafts.

The new process, when face-to-face instruction was still the norm, looked something like this:

1. Students write first draft, then teacher assesses drafts to reveal trends in writing for whole-class feedback/instruction.

2. Students write second draft after receiving targeted mini-lessons in small groups through station rotation.

3. Students write third draft, followed by quality check through station rotations.

4. Submission and evaluation.

Pre-pandemic, this system worked well, but once students and teachers moved into remote teaching, station rotation became much harder to do. Frieden knew he'd need a vehicle that would enable students to self-assess, along with resources that could help them teach themselves the skills they'd need to progress.

In the midst of this, Frieden saw Rablin's rubric and knew he'd found the answer. Now his writing cycle follows a similar pattern to the one he was already working on, with the HyperRubric now taking the place of the targeted mini-lessons:

1. Students Write First Draft

Based on a prompt, students write a relatively quick first draft with very little instructional support from the teacher. From there, Frieden reviews the drafts for trends.

2. Teacher Builds HyperRubric

Frieden now builds a HyperRubric based on the trends he saw in the first draft, areas for growth that are common to many students. "At the maximum I would do three of these," he says. "If I really want this learning to stick, if I really want them to see it's valuable, then I will reduce it to the really high leverage items."

Within each cell of the HyperRubric, he links to mini-lessons that will help students reach that specific level.

3. Students Self-Assess and Write Second Draft

From there, students self-assess their work using the HyperRubric, clicking on links to the mini-lessons, and revising. "Right as they're learning the lesson," Frieden says, "it's impacting their draft as soon as they get it."

Here's an example of a HyperRubric for persuasive writing, where the focus is on organization. The student has identified their current level, has completed the mini-lesson on transitions at the next level, and has written a reflection about this process:

For an editable template that matches the style of this HyperRubric (on a different topic), click here.

Once the second draft is written, Frieden's students write another reflection on the changes made to their draft:

From there the cycle can continue with more self-assessment, reflection, and revision until the piece is ready to be submitted.

Other Questions About HyperRubrics
We're looking at examples of single skills on a rubric, but teachers are expected to teach many different standards. How does that work?
At Rablin's school, where they operate on the trimester system, he has recently begun focusing on about eight progressions per trimester, eight skill areas that he targets through various assignments over the course of the term.

"It was kind of a shift for me," he says, "because at first, that didn't sound like a lot. I'm used to if it's just I can analyze theme in a text, that feels like one thing that we're learning. But when I broaden it out and thought about it in terms of learning progressions, I had to recognize that every single thing I was doing, students were learning five separate skills. Does that mean this is all we're learning? Absolutely not, but in terms of the progressions I'm being really intentional with, I had to learn to limit it to a lot more than I was used to."

Frieden limits his use of the HyperRubric to certain types of assignments. "If you're a teacher listening to this and you're thinking, oh, that sounds like I have to set up an entire trimester geared towards that and I'm not ready for that. I'm actually using the HyperRubric as one point in a particular type of assignment."
What about grades? If these are meant to be progressive, how and when do you actually assign students a grade?
Rablin bases a lot of his grades on conferences with students. "Our conversations are centered around these learning progressions. There is an average of scores that results in their final grade. But I'm not averaging those scores over time. It's not necessarily that I'm counting your earliest attempts and your latest attempts (equally). We had eight skills; overall, what was your final performance or what was your most consistent performance with those eight skills? Your most consistent or more recent scores are what are going to determine your final grade for the course."

When he calculates grades with HyperRubrics, Frieden gives the most weight to student reflection. "The standard is the focus, and it's trying to move them along on this progression. But I'm very, very much going to be asking students when it comes to their letter grade, can you articulate to me how this learning that you had in the middle of this assignment impacted the second draft? And then that's where I'm going to focus all of our energy and importance and I guess the worth of the grade."

To learn more about how Rablin and Frieden use HyperRubrics, you can find them on Twitter at @Mr_Rablin and @SurthrivEDU.

Come back for more.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Over 50,000 teachers have already joined-come on in.

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Introducing the HyperRubric: A Tool that Takes Learning to the Next Level

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Unlike the traditional rubric, which serves mainly to evaluate, the HyperRubric pushes students to keep moving forward.

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Tired of your students reading from slide shows? Try a Pecha Kucha
Visual Representation presentation. This high interest idea allows students to use only 6 minutes and 40 seconds to create 20 slides that include ONLY one image per slide. The words come from their delivery. See the link below for an example and more information.

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Pecha Kucha is a method of PowerPoint that has changed the landscape of presentations. It's translated as "chitchat," designed and patented by architects Klein/Dytham in Tokyo in 2003.

A Pecha Kucha presentation utilizes imagery and efficient use of spoken word to create a seamless, memorable, meaningful and concise presentation. It's a great method for teaching students how to create their best presentations for class projects.

Designed to be completed in 6 minutes and 40 seconds, the rules regarding its composition are likened to visual Haiku. 20 images, 20 seconds each, and connected seamlessly with well-developed narration are your only rules. Certainly as both you and students acquire more skills, your messages can become strikingly unforgettable.

Here is a video on what Pecha Kucha is including a brief history and current practices:

Here is a video showcasing tips to help you make great Pecha Kucha presentations:

Guidelines for Your PowerPoint Templates

The process of setting up a template is quite simple and we're going to tell you how to get started. The rest of the creativity is up to you and your students.

1. Open PowerPoint. In slide view, right-click on the first slide on the left and select Layout and Blank. This creates a blank canvas.

2. Right-click again on the slide and select Duplicate. This creates another slide just like it.

3. Since the Duplicate command is already in PowerPoint's memory, use the shortcut Ctrl-Y to repeat the duplicate (or just right-click duplicate again) 18 more times, for a total of 20 blank slides.

4. Use Ctrl-A to Select all slides in the left, and then go to Animation, advance slide and set it to 20 seconds.

5. You can also select transition styles and speed here. Just don't choose Dissolve-the simplest is the best. Maybe nothing more than a simple fade.

Getting the Most Out of Pecha Kucha

Here are some tips for creating your presentation the Pecha Kucha way:

Insert images as usual, resizing them to your liking. Purists will say there should be no text, only images or images with superimposed text on them already (caption images). Best practice is to fill the screen unless using space for emphasis.

For stock images, check out our blog post on open source images.

Avoid writing out a script for your narration. Write a simple outline for the big ideas of each slide. The best situation is when you know your topic so well that you don't even need an outline. Use the outline for planning purposes, then impress everyone without it when you present in person.

Practice your masterpiece repeatedly until you get it just right. If you are new to presenting, use the narration the tool/rehearse timings in PowerPoint. The general word count is dependent upon your own pacing, but no more than 60 words per slide is a good start.

You can also record your narrations within PowerPoint for each slide. But be sure not to "save timings" when you're done, as that will negate the automatic 20 seconds you put in place previously.

Each Pecha Kucha can be a masterpiece, but don't let "analysis paralysis" grab hold of you. Jump in and give it a try. If you wish, you can use our simple PowerPoint template below, which includes 20 blank slides prepared to auto-advance every 20 seconds.

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How to Make Great Presentations the Pecha Kucha Way

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Pecha Kucha is a method of PowerPoint that has changed the landscape of presentations. It's translated as "chitchat," designed and patented by architects Klein/Dytham in Tokyo in 2003. A Pecha Kucha presentation utilizes imagery and efficient use of spoken word to create a seamless, memorable, meaningful and concise presentation.

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Two factors have given lectures a bad name: overuse and poor execution. Let's deal with both.

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A new way to look at art and culture. How can we use this to create engagement in the classroom?

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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

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Developed by the Right Question Institute, the Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, is a structured method for generating and improving questions. It distills sophisticated forms of divergent, convergent, and metacognitive thinking into a deceptively simple, accessible, and reproducible technique.

The QFT builds the skill of asking questions, an essential - yet often overlooked - lifelong learning skill that allows people to think critically, feel greater power and self-efficacy, and become more confident and ready to participate in civic life.

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What is the QFT? - Right Question Institute

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The Question Formulation Technique (QFT) is a simple but rigorous step-by-step process designed to help […]

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This hyperdoc connects to resources, know hows, and information for students.

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Strategies to implement in the beginning, middle and end of a lesson or presentation. Use these to help fill the 80 minute block and keep engagement high.

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Activities and strategies to get your students to dive into

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PZ's Thinking Routines Toolbox | Project Zero

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The Toolbox organizes the Thinking Routines into categories that describe the types of thinking the routines help to facilitate. Some routines appear in more than one category, and some routines have different versions that offer modifications for specific age groups or more specific conceptual challenges.

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Video creation for students. This is a great back to school idea and anytime idea. Students can create videos to introduce themselves, a summer memory, a learning experience, etc. This list goes on and on. Students are also able to spice up their videos, like others and also comment using video as well.

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Listen to my interview with Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis, authors of The HyperDoc Handbook ( transcript):

In many classrooms, a learning cycle looks something like this: First, we write plans for a series of lessons and a final assessment. We gather materials-handouts, websites, rubrics, video clips. Then we teach the lessons one at a time, to the whole class, at the same pace, distributing materials as needed. Finally, we end with a project, test, or other assessment.

It's a very teacher-directed model, which can limit learning in a number of ways:

Students don't feel much ownership for their own learning. Instead, they depend on the teacher to tell them when and how to learn the material.

Because so much of the teacher's time is spent in direct instruction, there's little opportunity to work one-on-one with students.

Because it's up to the teacher to adjust instruction for students with varied needs and levels of readiness, differentiation becomes one more thing to do.

ENTER THE HYPERDOC

A HyperDoc is a digital document-such as a Google Doc-where all components of a learning cycle have been pulled together into one central hub. Within a single document, students are provided with hyperlinks to all of the resources they need to complete that learning cycle. Here's an example.

In the above HyperDoc, all of the bolded words are linked to outside resources. The right-hand column is set aside for students to take notes and do other kinds of thinking and planning as they work through the lesson.

One of the earliest iterations of the this type of "hub" was the WebQuest, which guided students through a lesson using all online resources. Now that Google tools like Docs and Slides have become so prevalent, teachers are using these tools to create similar lessons, choosing and mixing resources that go well beyond simple web pages. Last year, we looked at something called a playlist, which teacher Tracy Enos used to organize her language arts lessons and differentiate instruction for her students.

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links; if you purchase from Amazon after going through these links, Cult of Pedagogy receives a small commission at no extra cost to you.

Meanwhile, teachers Lisa Highfill, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis were doing similar work in their own classrooms. They coined the term "HyperDoc" to describe their version of this, and in 2016, they published The HyperDoc Handbook to teach others their method for creating these lessons.

The book explains how HyperDocs work, why they have such an impact on instruction, and their model for how teachers can design HyperDocs for high-quality instruction. In the podcast episode above, I interviewed all three about their work. Here I will blend their expertise with some of my own thoughts about this exciting format.

BENEFITS OF HYPERDOCS

Fewer lectures. Teachers have been told for decades that we need to do less lecturing, to step away from being the sage on the stage and become more of a guide on the side. "I feel so bad for teachers when they hear that," Highfill says, "because they're like, 'Well, what am I supposed to do? I need to get information into their heads.'" A HyperDoc offers a solution by taking care of the direct instruction part of a lesson and offering a lot more as well.

More face-to-face interaction. A good HyperDoc runs itself, allowing students to work through it without needing you to guide them through each step. "Although it seems odd that you're putting a student in front of a device," Landis notes, "really what it's doing is freeing you up to move around and have increased face time with the students."

Flexibility. If one part of your lesson isn't working, you can just change it in the HyperDoc and the change takes effect immediately; no need to re-copy all your materials. Similarly, if each student gets their own copy of a HyperDoc, the elements can be changed on each to meet individual students' needs.

Multimodal opportunities. Because it is digital, a HyperDoc allows us to include all kinds of multimedia. "Living in this digital age, we're able to expose kids to different types of media that allows each child to access the learning or the content or the information in a way that's visually or auditorily appealing to them," Landis says. "I might be visual, and I might first study an image, then watch a video, and then I'm finally ready to tackle that article my teacher really wants me to read."

They don't know that maybe their text ... is at a different reading level," says Hilton. "Or they're able to use Privacy. If students' HyperDocs have been customized for them, no one else needs to know. "Read&Write for Google and just put headphones in, and that's just a little agreement between you and that student."

MODELS FOR BUILDING HYPERDOCS

Because HyperDocs are such adaptable tools, teachers structure them in many different ways, and you should experiment until you find a structure that works for you. Here are some options to consider:

Playlist: This model, explained in this article, follows a step-by-step sequence of activities that consist of learning activities as well as check-ins with the teacher and housekeeping tasks like setting up accounts on websites.

Self-Paced Learning: Explored in this post by math teacher Natalie McCutchen, this system lays out a path of lessons for a whole unit, along with links to review materials, pre-tests, and practice questions. Students decide how much practice they need and determine when to take the assessment for each learning goal. If they grasp the material quickly, they can test and move on.

5E Model: This first stage of this model is to Engage student interest. Next, students Explore the topic, Explain what they have learned, and Extend their learning by applying it in new situations. The last stage Evaluates student learning.

HyperDoc Model: The HyperDoc Handbook authors have developed a model that has some components of the 5Es above, but with some additions and adjustments. This template explains all 7 stages. One important component of this model is the first step, Explore. Highfill explains the value of this stage: "Kids are exploring and coming up with ideas and answers about a concept on their own, and it's engaging them from the beginning, instead of passively listening to a teacher explain something." During this time, while students explore, the teacher is actively gathering information: "I listen to my students," Highfill says, "I'm studying them and hearing to what level are they understanding a concept. I have the ability to pull a small group. I can work with my language learners during that time. The whole time I'm doing formative assessment in the classroom, which will then really be my basis for the next part of the lesson."

Agenda: This model, borrowed from the kind of planning done at a typical Montessori school, provides each student with a planner listing out their assignments for the week. Students decide how they want to use their class time each day, but are expected to complete all goals by the end of the week. Although these are traditionally done on paper, they could easily be converted to a HyperDoc format.

OTHER USES FOR HYPERDOCS

Building an extended lesson or unit is one of the most instructionally robust ways to use HyperDocs, but they can also be used for:

substitute teacher plans

video or podcast playlists

learning centers or stations

student-made HyperDocs

parent resources

departmental-, team-or grade-level HyperDocs to gather and share resources among teachers

TIPS FOR SUCCESS

Start with a template.
Rather than build your first HyperDoc from scratch, you might find more success by starting with a pre-made template, like the ones available for free on HyperDocs.co. You could also start with a completely finished HyperDoc that someone else created for their own classroom and modify it for your own use.

Build in participation, collaboration, and multimedia.
One risk inherent in HyperDocs is that they could simply become online worksheets, replicating the kind of work students could just as easily do on paper. Take advantage of this medium by including ways for students to participate actively, collaborate with others, and learn from a variety of media: video, interactive posters like ThingLinks, podcasts, online flashcards, and so on.

Offer choice...
HyperDocs are designed to allow students to work at different speeds and navigate learning in a way that works best for them. So when you can, offer choices: Give students options for the kind and quantity of materials they need to learn the material, how they will practice and apply it, and how they will demonstrate their learning.

...but don't "kitchen sink" it.
If you stuff your HyperDoc with every possible resource on a topic ("everything but the kitchen sink"), you'll overwhelm students. Choose resources thoughtfully.

Give students HyperDocs training.
Even if your students have used HyperDocs in other classes, your design probably has its own unique qualities, so take the time to demonstrate how it should be used. And within the HyperDoc itself, provide clear directions for its use.

So if you create a HyperDoc," says Hilton, "in the header or footer, say Collaborate with other teachers.
You do not need to do this alone! Thousands of teachers are sharing and collaborating on the HyperDocs.co site and using the #hyperdocs hashtag on Twitter. And be sure to give credit to the person who created the original: " Created by, and maybe link to your Twitter handle or your email, for yourself, and then if you make a copy of someone's, we encourage you to give that person credit by saying Inspired by or Remixed HyperDoc originally created by, just because we want an inclusive, appreciative sharing community."

Don't feel like you have to create a HyperDoc for every lesson.
"That's not something that any teacher should feel pressured to do," says Landis, "and it's not really realistic. We don't want teachers doing any one thing all the time, because then it becomes redundant for our kids."

HyperDocs Resources: How to Learn More

Book: The HyperDocs Handbook

Website: HyperDocs.co: The online hub for Landis, Hilton, and Highfill's work on HyperDocs. It contains helpful blog posts and the Teachers Give Teachers system where participants share their own HyperDocs with one another. To browse and borrow other teachers' HyperDocs, all you need to do is register.
Professional Development Social Media

There's more where this came from.
Join our mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half the e-booklet that has helped thousands of teachers save time on grading. Come on in!!

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How HyperDocs Can Transform Your Teaching

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HyperDocs make room for more interactive, personalized, and student-directed learning. Let's look at how they work.

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Want a quick and easy tool to get students more active and engaged with content? You'll find this with Chat Stations, a discussion framework so simple you can use it tomorrow to liven up your instructional routine. This video shows you how to do it

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A short video to guide you through the uses and ways that google keep can help you be more organized during the day.

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10 ways Google Keep can streamline your life at school

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This is a great brainstorming tool. Students can use this to work collaboratively at the same time to come up with ideas. Very reliable and free.

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Coggle is online software for creating and sharing mindmaps and flowcharts. It works online in your browser: there's nothing to download or install. Log in to start diagramming!

Whether you're taking notes, brainstorming, planning, or doing something awesomely creative, it is super simple to visualise your ideas with Coggle. Share with as many friends or colleagues as you like. Changes you make will show up instantly in their browser, wherever they are in the world

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The clear way to share complex information. Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping tool that helps you make sense of complex things. Create unlimited mind maps and easily share them with friends and colleagues.

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OneNote is like a digital binder, an online notebook where you can take notes on individual pages, then organize the pages within subject tabs. Because the binder is digital, you can also hyperlink text, embed video and audio, add drawings, insert images, and so much more. It is free for educators!

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This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own.

Imagine you're about to start a unit that will include the following activities:

Some direct instruction. This will come in the form of brief lectures from you, some videos, and a few PDFs that introduce key concepts.

Student note-taking from the direct instruction.

Guided practice and application of the key concepts and skills that were taught in the direct instruction. Some of this work will be individual, and some will be done in small groups.

A cumulative project that will require groups of students to gather research and create a multimedia presentation.

Now imagine doing all of those things inside a single digital platform, where you could share and deliver materials, access student work, and allow students to work together seamlessly at school or at home.

OneNote Class Notebook is that platform. It's completely free for educators and it's available everywhere: Windows, Mac, Chromebooks, iOS and Android devices.

Let's look at how Class Notebook works and how it can change the way you teach.

What is Microsoft OneNote?

OneNote is like a digital binder, an online notebook where you can take notes on individual pages, then organize the pages within subject tabs. Because the binder is digital, you can also hyperlink text, embed video and audio, add drawings, insert images, and so much more.

Class Notebook starts with OneNote and adds a few extra features for educators, allowing you to create a whole notebook for yourself, set up individual notebooks for your students, and then tie them all together.

This video gives an overview of how Class Notebook works:

What You'll Find Inside

A OneNote Class Notebook has three main components:

1. A collaboration space accessible to both teachers and students, where teachers and students can create or edit content, individually or in groups. Teachers can subdivide this section and set permissions for specific students, allowing access to these sections for working on group projects.

2. A content library where important course documents can be stored for student use. Teachers can give parents read-only access to this section.

3. A class set of student notebooks. Each student maintains his or her own notebook that is viewable only by the student and the teacher. Teachers can also give parents read-only access, so they can view their child's notebook.

If you are co-teaching or working with a specialist, you can also opt to share a whole notebook with another teacher or teaching assistant.

Key Features

Flexible, Personalized Learning

Class Notebook allows teachers to set up and store lessons in one online space, accessible to all students, which creates more opportunities for blended, flipped, and customized learning. These lessons can be used to customize learning for students who need extra help, flip or blend your classroom to allow more time for hands-on work in class, or help students catch up from an absence.

With Class Notebook, teachers can distribute files to students in just a few clicks-to an entire class, to small groups, or to individual students. And because teachers always have access to student notebooks, they can review student work at any time.

Aligned with Note-taking Research

I recently published a summary of key research on note-taking, and the tools available in OneNote are ideal for implementing the best practices highlighted there:

The digital inking capabilities in OneNote allow teachers and students to add handwritten notes or sketches, which have been shown to make a big difference in the effectiveness of notes.

OneNote's collaboration tools allow students to compare notes with each other, which has been shown to significantly boost the power of notes for long-term learning.

Because teachers have access to individual student notebooks, they can provide students with different levels of guided notes, offering more scaffolding for the students who need it. Because this is done digitally, it can all be private.

Providing instructor notes has proven to be a powerful strategy for student learning; OneNote's sharing capabilities would make this quick and easy to do.

Multimodal

Class Notebook allows users to type, write or sketch; add audio or video; and attach files. These options allow for a wide range of expression and make Class Notebook a fantastic tool for all subjects, including music, math, and world languages.

These multi-modal options also give teachers more flexibility in how they give feedback: Instead of just writing feedback by hand, teachers can give audio feedback, add a sketch, embed an instructional video, or link to a resource that can help improve student understanding.

Accessible to All

Earlier this year, I wrote about the different tools Microsoft offers to make learning more accessible for all students. Many of these tools, like Immersive Reader and the Dictate add-in, are embedded right inside OneNote. This means all of your students can access course materials and construct their own learning in ways that work best for them.

Great for Collaboration

The collaboration space in Class Notebooks gives students one central location for collaborating in pairs or groups. This is ideal for group projects, project-based learning, and co-creation between teachers and students. And because all of this happens inside the larger Class Notebook, you can pop in and out of collaboration groups at any time, making it easy to offer support and keep students on task.

Because Class Notebook is just one part of an Office 365 account, all users will already have the ability to collaborate online on Microsoft Word files, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets, which can all be linked to from inside OneNote.

Available Anywhere, on Any Device, Even Offline

Because OneNote is cloud-based, it can be accessed on any device, at school, at home, or on the go. That means you and your students can get things done at whatever time works for you. What's more, OneNote can even work when a user is offline, and the changes will sync the next time that user hooks up to the Internet. So even if students don't have consistent access to WiFi, they can still take advantage of OneNote's powerful features.

LMS/SIS Integration

Although the Class Notebook platform can function perfectly well on its own, it can also be integrated with dozens of established LMS and SIS systems, including Canvas, Edmodo, Google Classroom, Infinite Campus, and PowerSchool. Click here to view the full list of OneNote partners.

Free for Educators

Microsoft OneNote is free for educators and students who have an Office 365 Education subscription (which is also available for free).

How is a Class Notebook Different from Google Classroom?

So many schools are already using Google Classroom, I thought this question might come up. So let's address it head-on: What features are offered by OneNote that make it truly different from Google Classroom?

I think it comes down to these five features:

The micro/macro view: Because OneNote is visually set up like a real notebook, you can be working on one section, but still see all of the other sections and how they fit in with each other. That kind of hierarchical setup just isn't really available on Google-based platforms, because once you open a file, it opens in a new window and the big picture view goes away. In OneNote, you can simultaneously take notes and still view the whole structure. Something about that just feels better to me.

The blank canvas aspect: Taking notes in OneNote is physically very flexible: You can place items anywhere on a page and move them around, giving it the feel of a blank canvas. Being able to write, draw, and embed video and audio anywhere on the page (or add a ruled paper template in the background) make it feel as close to real paper as possible.

Accessibility tools: OneNote's built-in accessibility tools really give it an edge when it comes to meeting the needs of learners with different abilities. While Google probably has some parallel add-ins, I feel Microsoft has done a really thorough, thoughtful job of baking these features right in.

Parent access: Parents can get read-only access directly into their child's notebook and the Content Library. This gives parents a window into what's going on at school, allows families to do a better job of supporting students at home, and is especially helpful for parents of younger students and students with special needs.

Built into Microsoft Teams: Another robust, free tool from Microsoft is Teams, a platform built for group communication. If you are using Teams, you can have Class Notebook operate right inside of that. This will give you a seamless environment for note-taking, group communication, collaboration, and assignment management. Learn more about how Class Notebook operates inside Microsoft Teams here.

The good news is, you don't have to choose. If your school is already heavily into G-Suite tools and Google Classroom, you can still use OneNote for notetaking and collaboration, and you can actually link the two so that grades and assignments from OneNote can be imported into Classroom.

For more in-depth training on OneNote Class Notebooks, check out this free online course . And for a comprehensive list of OneNote resources, visit this page of helpful links .

Come back for more.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration that will make your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to our members-only library of free downloads, including 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, the e-booklet that has helped over 60,000 teachers save time on grading.

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OneNote Class Notebook: A Digital Binder That Will Change the Way You Teach

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This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own. Imagine you're about to start a unit that will include the following activities: Some direct instruction. This will come in the form of brief lectures from you, some videos, and a few PDFs that introduce key concepts. Student note-taking from the direct instruction.

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10 Sites for Differentiated Instruction.

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10 Sites for Differentiated Instruction.

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A variety of tools you can use from backgrounds, timers, noise meter, and clocks to help manage time in your classroom.

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Pear Deck is on a mission to help teachers create powerful learning moments for every student, every day - using the tools you already know and love.

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This activity boosts higher level thinking and pushes students to gather information to share. Like a museum curator, collecting and organizing information can be done in a lot of ways. Try "Best of," "Top 10...," "Recommended for you.." Use the link below to read more about this strategy that would work well in an 80 minute block.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
If no one has ever encouraged, pushed, or insisted that you build more higher-order thinking into your students' learning, it's possible you've been teaching in a cave.

Higher-level thinking has been a core value of educators for decades. We learned about it in college. We hear about it in PD. We're even evaluated on whether we're cultivating it in our classrooms: Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Teaching, a widely used instrument to measure teacher effectiveness, describes a distinguished teacher as one whose "lesson activities require high-level student thinking" (Domain 3, Component 3c).

All that aside, most teachers would say they want their students to be thinking on higher levels, that if our teaching kept students at the lowest level of Bloom's Taxonomy -simply recalling information-we wouldn't be doing a very good job as teachers.

And yet, when it's time to plan the learning experiences that would have our students operating on higher levels, some of us come up short. We may not have a huge arsenal of ready-to-use, high-level tasks to give our students. Instead, we often default to having students identify and define terms, label things, or answer basic recall questions. It's what we know. And we have so much content to cover, many of us might feel that there really isn't time for the higher-level stuff anyway.

If this sounds anything like you, I have a suggestion: Try a curation assignment.

When a museum director curates, she collects artifacts, organizes them into groups, sifts out everything but the most interesting or highest-quality items, and shares those collections with the world. When an editor curates poems for an anthology, he does the same thing.

The process can be applied to all kinds of content: A person could curate a collection of articles, images, videos, audio clips, essays, or a mixture of items that all share some common attribute or theme. When we are presented with a list of the "Top 10" anything or the "Best of" something else, what we're looking at is a curated list. Those playlists we find on Spotify and Pandora? Curation. "Recommended for You" videos on Netflix? Curation. The news? Yep, it's curated. In an age where information is ubiquitous and impossible to consume all at once, we rely on the curation skills of others to help us process it all.

In an educational setting, curation has a ton of potential as an academic task. Sure, we're used to assigning research projects, where students have to gather resources, pull out information, and synthesize that information into a cohesive piece of informational or argumentative writing. This kind of work is challenging and important, and it should remain as a core assignment throughout school, but how often do we make the collection of resources itself a stand-alone assignment?

That's what I'm proposing we do. Curation projects have the potential to put our students to work at three different levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:

Understand, where we exemplify and classify information

Analyze, where we distinguish relevant from irrelevant information and organize it in a way that makes sense

Evaluate, where we judge the quality of an item based on a set of criteria

If we go beyond Bloom's and consider the Framework for 21st Century Learning put out by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, we'll see that critical thinking is one of the 4C's listed as an essential skill for students in the modern age (along with communication, creativity, and collaboration) and a well-designed curation project requires a ton of critical thinking.

So what would a curation project look like?

Suppose you're teaching U.S. history, and you want students to understand that our constitution is designed to be interpreted by the courts, and that many people interpret it differently. So you create a curation assignment that focuses on the first amendment.

The task: Students must choose ONE of the rights given to us by the first amendment. To illustrate the different ways people interpret that right, students must curate a collection of online articles, images, or videos that represent a range of beliefs about how far that right extends. For each example they include, they must summarize the point of view being presented and include a direct quote where the author or speaker's biases or beliefs can be inferred.

Here is what one submission might look like, created on a platform called eLink (click here to view the whole thing).

Because they are finding examples of a given concept and doing some summarizing, students in this task are working at the Understand level of Bloom's. But they are also identifying where the author or speaker is showing bias or purpose, which is on the Analyze level.

Ranked Collection: Students collect a set of articles, images, videos, or even whole websites based on a set of criteria (the most "literary" song lyrics of the year, or the world's weirdest animal adaptations) and rank them in some kind of order, justifying their rankings with a written explanation or even a student-created scoring system. Each student could be tasked with creating their own collection or the whole class could be given a pre-selected collection to rank. This would be followed by a discussion where students could compare and justify their rankings with those of other students. (Bloom's Level: Evaluate)

Shared Trait Collection: This would house items that have one thing in common. This kind of task would work in so many different subject areas. Students could collect articles where our government's system of checks and balances are illustrated, images of paintings in the impressionist style, videos that play songs whose titles use metaphors. It could even be used as part of a lesson using the concept attainment strategy, where students develop an understanding of a complex idea by studying "yes" and "no" examples of it. By curating their own examples after studying the concept, they will further developing their understanding of it. (Bloom's Level: Understand).

Literature Review: As the first step of a research project, students could collect relevant resources and provide a brief summary of each one, explaining how it contributes to the current understanding of their topic. As high school students prepare for college, having a basic understanding of what a literature review is and the purpose it serves-even if they are only doing it with articles written outside of academia-will help them take on the real thing with confidence when that time comes. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for the summarization, Analyze for the sorting and selecting of relevant material)

Video Playlist: YouTube is bursting at the seams with videos, but how much of it is actually good? Have students take chunks of your content and curate the best videos out there to help other students understand those concepts. In the item's description, have students explain why they chose it and what other students will get out of it. (Bloom's Levels: Understand for summarization, Evaluate for judging the quality of the videos)

Museum Exhibit: Task students with curating a digital "exhibit" around a given theme. The more complex the theme, the more challenging the task. For example, they might be asked to assume the role of a museum owner who hates bees, and wants to create a museum exhibit that teaches visitors all about the dangers of bees. This kind of work would help students understand that even institutions that might not own up to any particular bias, like museums, news agencies, or tv stations, will still be influenced by their own biases in how they curate their material. (Bloom's Level: Understand if it's just a collection of representative elements, Create if they are truly creating a new "whole" with their collection, such as representing a particular point of view with their choices)

Real World Examples: Take any content you're teaching (geometry principles, grammar errors, science or social studies concepts) and have students find images or articles that illustrate that concept in the real world. (Bloom's level: Understand).

Favorites: Have students pull together a personal collection of favorite articles, videos, or other resources for a Genius Hour, advisory, or other more personalized project: A collection of items to cheer you up, stuff to boost your confidence, etc. Although this could easily slide outside the realm of academic work, it would make a nice activity to help students get to know each other at the start of a school year or give them practice with the process of curation before applying it to more content-related topics.

Most of the above activities would not be very academically challenging if students merely had to assemble the collection. Adding a thoughtfully designed written component is what will make students do their best thinking in a curation assignment.

The simplest way to do this is to require a written commentary with each item in the collection. Think about those little signs that accompany every item at a museum: Usually when you walk into an exhibit, you find a sign or display that explains the exhibit as a whole, then smaller individual placards that help visitors understand the significance of each piece in the collection. When students put their own collections together, they should do the same thing.

Be specific about what you'd like to see in these short writing pieces, and include those requirements in your rubric. Then go a step further and create a model of your own, so students have a very clear picture of how the final product should look. Because this is a genre they have probably not done any work in before, they will do much better with this kind of scaffolding. Doing the assignment yourself first-a practice I like to call dogfooding -will also help you identify flaws in the assignment that can be tweaked before you hand it over to students.

It's certainly possible for students to collect resources through non-digital means, by reading books in the library or curating physical artifacts or objects, but doing a curation project digitally allows for media-rich collections that can be found and assembled in a fraction of the time. And if you have students curating in groups, using digital tools will allow them to collaborate from home without having to meet in person.

Here are a few curation tools that would work beautifully for this kind of project:

Elink is the tool featured in the sample project above. Of all the tools suggested here, this one is the simplest. You collect your links, write descriptions, and end up with a single unique web page that you can share with anyone.

Pinterest is probably the most popular curation tool out there. If your students are already using Pinterest, or you're willing to get them started, you could have them create a Pinterest board as a curation assignment.

Symbaloo allows users to create "webmixes," boards of icons that each lead to different URLs. Although it would be possible to create a curated collection with Symbaloo, it doesn't allow for the same amount of writing that some other tools do, so you would need to have students do their writing on a separate document.

Diigo is a good choice for a more text-driven project, like a literature review or a general collection of resources at the beginning stages of a research project, where images aren't necessarily required. Diigo offers lots of space to take notes about every item in a collection, but it doesn't have user-friendly supports for images or other media.

I'm so excited about all the different ways we can use curation in the classroom, and I would love to hear your ideas as well. Please share them in the comments below. If you have links to student samples, share those, too! ♦

Curation is just one of the modules in JumpStart, my new online technology course created especially for educators. I thought carefully about what specific skills teachers need to make the most of classroom tech, chose 9 of them, and designed hands-on projects that will show you exactly how to use them.

If you're ready to take your tech skills from so-so to rock solid, this course will change everything for you.

Learn more about the course here.

There's more where this came from.
Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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To Boost Higher-Order Thinking, Try Curation

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A digital curation project is a fast way to engage critical thinking in any content area. Here's how it works.

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Next Lesson- search for real world, project-based learning. 

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Next Lesson- search for real world, project-based learning. 

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Connect learning to the real world with NextLesson! NextLesson engages students in real world problem solving through topics they care about. Find thousands of lessons, worksheets and projects for math, ELA, science and social studies that are aligned to Common Core and state standards.

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Students have deeper discussions about their reading in a variety of subject areas. Use this student led questioning and discussion strategy to increase engagement in the class and provide deeper comprehension at the same time.

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Listen to my interview with Marisa Thompson (transcript):
Sponsored by Peergrade and 3Doodler

Check out information about Marisa Thompson's Ultimate TQE Course at the bottom of this page!

So much of the learning we do comes from texts: articles, textbooks, novels, and all kinds of online publications. Sometimes, those texts come in less traditional forms; in fact, our use of the word "text" has broadened over time to include things like films, images, and even diagrams. Regardless of what form they come in, texts make up the bulk of how our students experience learning.

But too often, when we assign texts to students, we find that they don't experience them with much depth. One reason for that may be that we don't set them up to do that. In many text-based classes (English, history, science), the learning cycle often consists of (1) consuming a section of the text, (2) answering teacher-created questions about the text, (3) taking a test after several sections have been completed.

For years, high school English teacher Marisa Thompson followed this same programming, and got typical results: Some students did the required work, but never seemed particularly invested in the books themselves. Others completed the questions unevenly, sometimes not answering them all, other times copying work from their peers. And when students didn't do the work, they got calls home and office referrals.

As this pattern repeated itself year after year, Thompson became more frustrated: The texts themselves were wonderful, but students weren't experiencing them the way they were meant to be experienced. Instead, they had shallow interactions with them, doing whatever surface work had to be done to get a grade.

Finally, she started experimenting with a different approach, and the way she teaches texts now is completely different from the way she used to. Her current approach, which she calls TQE, is similar to Socratic Seminar, where students lead a discussion on a given text, but with a few twists. Since implementing this new approach, Thompson has seen her students reading much more than they used to, and with much more depth than ever before. They are having college-level conversations about books in class, and for the first time, they seem excited about the books they're reading.

On top of that, Thompson's prepping and grading work for these class sessions is down to almost nothing.

What I love about this method, and why I'm sharing it here, is that I think it could be applied in a lot of different areas, not just with the study of novels. In any class where students need to read a text in order to learn, something along these lines could be implemented, and I think you'll find that the learning in your classroom gets much richer as a result. So as you read about TQE, think about how you might be able to apply it in your content area.

The Problem

As an English teacher, Thompson found that her students were experiencing books in a very shallow, grade-focused way.

"(I would) send students home, maybe get them started on Chapter 1, and then, Hey guys, go home and read Chapter 2. Come on back and we'll talk about it, and here's your list of questions; you're going to have a reading quiz. I realized I wasn't really assessing their reading with homework and quizzes. I was assessing whether or not they did their homework questions."

This method not only diminished the value of the books students were reading, it also led to other problems. "It made reading seem like a hassle," Thomspon says. "I started getting a bunch of cheating. One year I had 10 kids copy off each other. It turned this amazing story-this beautiful novel that everybody should read and enjoy and love-into a discipline problem."

Early Changes

Knowing something had to change, Thompson decided to try grading students only on whether their participation in class indicated that they had read the book.

"I said, 'Look. We're going to read this book, and we're just going to read it and talk about it. You're not going to have study questions. You're not going to have any reading quizzes. But I'm going to know if you read or not. I'm going to know.'"

These early discussions were similar to Socratic Seminar, where students came with questions and Thompson mostly observed. When a student participated in a way that demonstrated that he or she had read the book, their names would be crossed off of a chart. "And that was it," Thompson says. "The standard says, Be able to read and analyze at grade level. And if they're doing that, I mean, yeah, cross their name off. Move on."

For students who scored low on the discussion or who weren't initially comfortable with active participation, Thompson offered alternative means of assessment. "I said, hey, if I'm wrong with your score, then we need to come up with some sort of alternative: They were used to taking annotations, taking notes on their thoughts while they read-you can show me those. You can sit down and have a conversation just one-on-one, or you can take a test. So if you got an eight out of 10, and you're like, 'No, I want the 10 out of 10,' I have a multiple-choice test on the book."

Most of the time, Thompson's initial score on the discussion turned out to be accurate. "I did have a lot of students who had a B for their assessment, and they're like, No, I want the A. Great. And they took the test and then it was cute, because they were like Yeah, I didn't really read all of it. So my assessment was, on average, about 3 or 4 percent higher than what they were normally getting on their tests."

Right away, Thompson started to see changes in how her students were reading. "I had students who started reading more than they were assigned, and they were finishing the book early," she says. Some were even reading ahead.

Over time, Thompson refined her approach, adding small-group time before the large-group discussions, offering scaffolding to help students develop better questions, and structuring student contributions so that the richest questions got the most discussion time.

These changes have so elevated the level of discourse that Thompson sometimes feels like she's teaching college class. "And that's exactly what I tell them: 'What we just did, that was a collegiate literature course. That was amazing. You could walk into a college course and have this discussion.' And you can see that they're enjoying it."

The TQE Method

Here is the approach Thompson uses now, step by step:

1. Students Complete Assigned Reading at Home

Usually, this will be a segment of a longer text, like a few chapters in a novel. Students who show up having not completed the reading are invited to finish up in the hall during small group discussion (step 2) to catch up. They are welcome to return to class for the discussion when they finish.

2. Small Group Discussions (15 minutes)

When they arrive in class, students get into small groups, where they have 15 minutes to share thoughts, lingering questions, and epiphanies (TQEs) they have about the reading. Early in the year, Thompson provides stems to help students generate these (see below), encouraging them to move from the more simplistic ideas on the left to the more complex ones on the right.

3. TQEs on the Board

By the time the 15 minutes is up, each group needs to choose their top 2 TQEs from the group and write them on the board. Although these are meant to serve as the basis for the group discussion, they are not necessarily used as is.

"If they put something on there that is not at the quality or as thought-provoking as we need it to be for the class to discuss, we'll edit it together, the 40 of us," Thompson explains. "So it becomes a writing lesson."

Thompson also insists that when discussing a text, students use the author's name. When discussing Of Mice and Men, for example, she started by having students repeat the name "Steinbeck" five times. "I love Lenny and George. I love Lenny," she told them. "but he's totally fictional. So when you start asking questions like, 'Why did George do that?' George doesn't exist."

Instead, she has students practice asking questions like, "Why did hat theme is Steinbeck have George do that?" "W Steinbeck trying to convey to the rest of us by having his character do that?"

"It's not about the character," she explains. "It's not about the character's motivation, it's the author's purpose in providing that motivation for the character."

4. Class Discussion of TQEs

Thompson then moderates a whole-class discussion of the reading, using the TQEs that have been written on the board. This takes about 40 minutes of class time-she teaches on a block schedule, so there's plenty of time to dig in. When the class is actively studying a novel, they will have these conversations in every class meeting.

As for grading, Thompson simply records when students participate, and that's it. "I have a chart with their little pictures," she explains, "and I cross them off as I go. So I'm not necessarily grading them every single day. My student Sally might have participated a ton one day, and skipped the next day. But my standard-based grading says she is reading and analyzing at at least grade level. I don't need to score each of my 40 kids every single day."

"And the amount of planning is nil," Thompson adds. " I'm not creating, I'm not copying, I'm not collecting, I don't need to waste my time. My prep is reading before bed every night."

What Student-Centered Learning Looks Like

"We have all these really great aphorisms, these quotes about, 'Students should own their learning,' and 'Empower students,'" Thompson observes. "And it's like, well that's great, but how in the heck do we do that?"

Since starting the TQE process, Thompson has seen true student-centered learning in action: Students are in charge of the content of the discussions, and the ability to participate fully has become its own motivator for completing the homework.

"The peer pressure of Everyone's discussing this book- that becomes cool. To have an idea, to have an opinion. So the student comes in, and all of a sudden it's, "Wait, I read that part, and I think this," you know? And you want to talk about empowering a student? You just turned that student into a part of the classroom community." ♦

If you are a fan of the TQE method and you want to take it further, check out Marisa's Ultimate TQE Course. This course will revolutionize your reading and writing instruction and assessment through student-led inquiry, intentional teacher guidance, feedback that is immediately useful to students while eliminating the need for at-home grading, even for essays, and a personable approach to teaching and learning that leaves everyone in the room energized and engaged.

Cult of Pedagogy receives a portion of the Ultimate TQE Course sales that come through the link on this page.

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Deeper Class Discussions with the TQE Method

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Want your students to have rich, complex conversations about the texts they read? This method leads to the kinds of classroom discussions you thought only happened in college.

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Math Resources that create Problem solvers

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Math Resources that create Problem solvers

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My growing list of free real world problem-based lessons for grades 2 through high school. Includes links to download multimedia and teacher guide.

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"ClassHook is the creative piece I've been looking for YEARS!! Anytime I see a clip in a movie that I could use, I try and make a mental note but usually have a hard time accessing the movie. Because I teach anatomy, there are SOOOO many possibilities. This is a fantastic site."

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ClassHook | Educational TV and Movie Clips

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Make learning relevant with educational scenes from TV shows & movies.

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Miriam Bogler, founder of the award-winning Project Pals PBL software, offers a personalized approach to implement project-based learning in your school.

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This is a wonderful site that contains informational text and articles that connect to many books and topics. You can search by content and level each article to perfectly differentiate information for your students.

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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A visual way to take notes and it is easier than you think! Give it a try in your next staff meeting.

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Adobe spark is a wonderful, easy to use program. Students can design infographics, videos, thumb nails, a variety tools to create anything.

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Amy Copperman |

There's no denying that slight twinge in the air and ads everywhere-it's back-to-school time! As kids stock up on Pokemon-themed school supplies, teachers are preparing lesson plans. And as technology continues to take its foothold in the classroom, that means leveraging ed-tech tools to do what was once asked of just chalkboards, pencils, and paper. Today public schools in the US now provide at least one computer for every five students and the federal government continues its mission to bring Internet connections and online learning resources to its most rural and underserved corners. In fact, last year, for the first time, more standardized tests were delivered via technology than pencil and paper. It's clear that leveraging technology and increasing digital literacy is on the forefront of educators' minds. And as we all know, kids love high-tech devices, so you might as well turn screen time into learning time.

If there's any doubt in your mind that kids benefit from supervised technology in the classroom, check out this Spark Spotlight of a local 4th grade class that used Spark for their end-of-year projects:

To help our beloved teachers prep for the new year, we turned to our own Ben Forta, Adobe's director of education initiatives. Ben spends much of his time introducing Adobe Spark to teachers and in the process has learned of many ways educators have turned this dynamic, free tool into lessons that last a lifetime. From nurturing young storytellers to teaching a language to testing reading comprehension and cultivating presentation skills, teachers across the country have used Spark to engage students in and outside the classroom. So to that end, here are Forta's 16 teacher-approved ways to use Spark to foster learning and digital literacy in the classroom.

Speech and language play: Create a Spark Video story with a single picture per page, use big bold clear pictures (ideally isolated on a white or clear background to avoid distractions). Have the child go through page by page recording themselves naming the pictured object. (Note: Many teachers have asked how to create copies of blank or starter stories. You can do this by going to the Projects tab, tapping the project ... symbol, and then selecting Duplicate).

Sight words proficiency: Create a Spark Video story with one sight word per page and with no recorded voice. Have the child go through page by page recording themselves reading the words. This can be repeated at intervals so that the children see the progress and improvement for themselves.

Narrative prompts: Similar to the prior ideas, but pick images with an action occurring, and have the student record a single sentence describing what is happening.

Rhyming game: Show a series of pictures, and have the children use Spark Video to record a word that rhymes with it (as opposed to naming the picture).

Playing with shapes and colors: I've seen lots of variants of this one, all of which thoroughly engaged the students. Assign a color and/or a shape, and have the students walk around the classroom or yard or school building taking pictures of matches. They can then describing them in a Spark Video story.

Second language acquisition: A variant of the above (this one shared with me by teachers teaching Chinese Mandarin and Spanish to English-speaking kids, as well as by an ESL teacher working with immigrant children) is to show pictures or words that need to be translated, having children record the translations. The same picture can be used on multiple pages so that the child records the same word multiple times, building proficiency while being able to hear the improved fluency.

Story starters: Instead of assigning a topic for children to write about, assign a series of images that they must use. Allow them to create their own captions, add images, perhaps even edit the images, and build a story around them. Specify a minimum and maximum duration if using Spark Video, or a maximum length if using Spark Page, and then have the students share their work with the rest of the class.

Creative storytelling: With so many children (and their families) taking pictures on smartphones and devices, the odds are high that children will have access to lots of digital pictures capturing their summer break. Spark is great for "What I did this summer" type storytelling. Having the pictures stored on the iPhone or iPad camera roll will make this project easy and fun. Have the child take a selfie for the title page with a "Hello, my name is X, and this is what I did this summer" message, and then have them use their pictures to share their summer activities.

Collaborative storytelling: I watched a class of 5th-grade girls in Australia thoroughly enjoy a collaborative storytelling session. When I shared the idea with a teacher, she tweaked it as follows. Use Spark Video and have a student record the first sentence of a story. Then pass the device to the next student to record the next sentence. One by one, every student adds a slide and records the sentence. The student who started the story then records the closing. As for the supporting imagery, each student can pick one for his or her own slide, or that could be a group project. This idea promises lots of giggles.

Book reports: New school year means new books to read and new book reports to write. It's no secret that some children love reading while others don't, and even those that do often don't care for assigned titles and selections. Spark Video (for younger readers) and Spark Page (for higher grades) can make book reports fun, engaging, and a highly personal exercise in creativity.

Essays and written assignments: I used to write essays and written assignments in pen in a ruled notebook. My eldest kids got to use Word and then Google Docs. But that's not adequate for kids these days, they want a more polished and professional look and expect tools that let them complement their written creativity with equally creative visuals and presentation. Spark Page is superb for this (here's an example created by my youngest son). Just be sure to specify word counts or document lengths or some other guide, otherwise the kids will spend forever looking for images at the expense of actually writing their assignment.

Class projects: One teacher showed me a wonderful example her class created for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and this idea could be applied to Thanksgiving, Veterans Day, regional or ethnic celebrations, and more. The class created a single Spark Page story about MLK, his legacy, and MLK Day. Each student also created his and her own Spark Video about what they had learned and described what MLK Day meant to them. The teacher then used the Spark Page Glideshow feature to display a picture of each child, and as each child's face appeared on screen, up popped that child's Spark Video. (You can embed videos, including those created with Spark Video, inside a Spark Page). The final Spark Page was shared with fellow teachers and parents.

Class reports and blogs: If your class publishes reports for fellow students or parents, Spark can be a fun way to share classroom news and updates.

Classroom signs and posters: Adorn your classroom walls with student ideas, questions, quotes, and more. Spark Post is primarily intended for creating images for social media, but lots of teachers are finding that it's a quick and fun tool for combining images and text to create beautiful printed signage.

Video journal: Upgrade student journals with video. Each journal entry is a Spark Video slide. If using devices with cameras the student can even take a picture of the work or assignment. Students narrate each journal entry, and at the end of the semester (or year) they'll have a beautiful video recap of their efforts and progress.

Science fair presentations: It's not quite science fair season yet, but I'd be remiss to not share this one. Science fairs usually require a presentation of sorts to the judges, and these presentations are usually lost over time. Students can record their presentations using Spark Video, both to help prep for judging, as well as to record their work for posterity. One very innovative teacher went a step further. She created a QR code for each video and stuck them on the science boards, this way parents and visitors could scan each project with their phones and watch a Spark Video of the child explaining his or her experiment.

See real student examples from Beaverton School district:

Want more lesson-plan ideas? Check out some of our favorite resources penned by teachers for teachers:
Creatively Teaching with Technology
Free Technology for Teachers
Class Tech Tips
Technology and Curriculum

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16 Ways to Motivate Students in the Classroom Using Adobe Spark | Adobe Spark

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Amy Copperman | There's no denying that slight twinge in the air and ads everywhere-it's back-to-school time! As kids stock up on Pokemon-themed school supplies, teachers are preparing lesson plans. And as technology continues to take its foothold in the classroom, that means leveraging ed-tech tools to do what was once asked of just chalkboards, pencils, and paper.

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Tired of the 5 paragraph essay? Try a braided essay. This is a high interest new style of writing that includes pop culture, images, quotes and a challenge to students to add creativity and flow to their writing.
Introduced by Lauren Funk, Lincoln Public Schools (use in AP English class, but easily adjusted to MS as well) - If you are interested in this I have detailed instructions, student samples, articles and a powerpoint.

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Easy to use designs. This is a great place for creating infographics. There is no video or slides option here. I would use Spark It for those types of projects.

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Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool. Use it to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos and more.

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Splash boards are a way for students to gather information and add to a topic, theme or idea in the classroom. A splash board could be a whiteboard, door, wall or a piece of chart paper. For this activity students use a sticky note to respond to a question, write a reflection or idea and then place it on the splash board. Once that is done, students will visit the splash board to look for similarities, differences or things that stand out to them while looking at everyone’s reflection.

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Ways to step aside and let them learn.
COMING SOON

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A great place to organize information for students. You can include links, videos, and a variety of information for students to play with, read from or create. Students can also create their own padlets from templates to summarize lessons or use as a jigsaw for students to teach others.