Lit & Tech

Teaching literacy with technology in an era of educational innovation. By Jen Roberts 🦋 @jen.litandtech.com

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Using ActivEngage With Students

June 03, 2011

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Jen is available to speak virtually and in person depending on your needs and geography. Please reach out if you have an event coming up where her perspective would be helpful. Jen(at)Litandtech.com

Jen's Edutopia Articles

🗣️ When Students Use AI in Ways They Shouldn’t
✍️Authentic Writing in the Age of AI
⛔️ Proactively Limiting the Use of AI in the Classroom
🤖 What ELA Teachers Should Know About AI Detectors
📄 Using AI Tools to Give Feedback on High School Students’ Writing

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Pedagogy for 1:1 Classrooms

NBCT: My Experience with Component 2: YA ELA

Assembling Component 2 Considering National Boards? I recommend the process, but you should know what you are getting into. Start early and get organized. In the spring of 2016 I began pursuing National Board Certification for teaching. I know eventually someone will ask me for my thoughts and advice about that process, so I'll capture them now while the experience is fresh. Because I teach 9th grade, and previously taught middle school for ten years, I decided to do my NBCT in the area of Young Adolescent ELA. (Yes, I also taught 11th grade for six years, but that was a while ago.) Though some do it in one year, I'm taking two years to complete my NBCT. Last summer, at a small local conference, I stumbled into a conversation about National Boards and happened to find out that my County Office of Education sponsored a support program. I was just in time to sign up. Through that program I got early advice and support to help me understand expectations and deadlines. Th...

Using Brisk Boost for Reading: Formative Assessment That Actually Helps Students Learn

If there ever was a post that belonged perfectly on this blog, it is this one about Brisk Boost for Reading. You may know the Chrome Extension Brisk as a great way to give feedback, create materials, or inspect a text to authenticate it. (It also works with Microsoft Edge now too.) If you don't have the Brisk extension I highly recommend it for all those reasons. This post though, is about Brisk Boost. It's the option with the red backpack 🎒when you click the Brisk icon on a doc or website. What Brisk Boost Does for Reading Starting with a reading on a Google Doc or a website, Brisk Boost creates learning objectives about that reading. You can edit these learning objectives and even delete a few if it feels like too much. Then you create the boost and share the link with students. When students click the link, they get the reading material, and an interactive chat that will guide them toward the learning objectives with questions that adapt to the learner. The teach...

What Happens When Students Have Access to Instant AI Feedback?

I teach English to 9th graders, which means I frequently ask them to write things. Right now we are working on a narrative unit and I often ask them to write stories related to our readings. Recently, we have watched the famous TED talk about the danger of a single story, and read a great essay on the same topic, and then I asked students to write about a time when they had a single story about a person or place, or a time when someone else had a single story about them. Nothing revolutionary here, just a pretty typical classroom writing exercise, except that I also gave them access to immediate AI feedback through Magic School . What happened: Some students started writing, some went to the idea generator in the Magic Student room I gave them, and then started writing. So, as usual, the first ten minutes of writing time was pretty productive and on task. Initial AI Feeedback Then we hit the usual wall. You know the wall. The moment when one student ...

Group Creator: Group Students Fast, but Not Random

I want to have my students work in groups and with partners as often as possible, but the process of making their groups or choosing their partners took me a long time. I kept looking for a digital solution that would speed up the process for me, but I could never find one with the features I wanted. Then I figured out how to make a group creator that works for me and I'm also sharing it with you. My Group Creator runs in a Google Spreadsheet. (Don't panic, it comes with directions.) After you add your class roster and sort by a score you put in, you can click on the different tabs across the bottom to see the different groups students should be in. The tabs include both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups of six, groups of four, and partners. Directions Page Click this image or any other to see it larger. Roster Page On the roster tab replace the sample names with your own students. Then add a score that you can use to rank your students,...

I Let AI Redesign My Canvas Pages (And You Should Too)

My latest favorite way of using AI in my classroom is to vastly improve the look of my Canvas course pages and assignments. Update: I've built a custom tool in Magic School called HTML Improver . You can make a copy of it for yourself and use it to quickly improve the HTML of any Canvas page. It's easier than working with Claude or ChatGPT. Once you make a copy of the tool, click generate. Then paste in the HTML you have and click generate again. (The rest of this post below has more helpful tips.) Original Post: I've tried making my Canvas pages better by adding color and images ever since I first started using it in 2020. I've attended webinars about how to make small tweaks to HTML to add borders to my images, or turn horizontal lines into dotted horizontal lines. And, of course, emojis help. Then, one day earlier this year, I was frustrated with how much trouble students were having with the directions for an assignment. Admittedly, the directio...