Lit & Tech

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

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Showing posts with the label Teaching Strategies

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Revising From an AI Created Essay Draft: An end run around potential unethical behavior

June 14, 2024

Academic Integrity AI in Education AI Writing Tools ChatGPT Digital Learning edtech High School English Student Writing Teaching Strategies Writing Instruction

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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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Got a few minutes at the end of class?

It happens to all of us sometimes. Your perfectly planned lesson goes just a bit faster than you expected and you have a few minutes left at the end of class. Or maybe your students have been showing some excellent focus on their projects and you want to give them a few minutes of fun. My students have to put their laptops in a cart at the end of class and that takes a few minutes. For whatever reason it's good to have a few things you can pull up fast and engage students with for those last few minutes. These are some of my favorites. Share your's in the comments. GeoGuesser: https://geoguessr.com/ Where do you think this could be. This site drops you at a spot in the world and you have to guess where you are. It's good for a quick lesson in observing details. It's funny how often it seems like the picture seems to be from one place, but it really a whole different continent. I'll have one student come up to play, but the whole class loves to watch and...

Curriculum Planner Spreadsheet for Secondary Teachers: You can have a copy

I'm a big fan of teacher collaboration. (I wasn't always, but that's another post.) My team has been collaborating together, in various combinations, since 2011. At first we organized each unit in an excel sheet in a shared dropbox folder. Now we mostly use a Google Drive folder and instead of a separate spreadsheet for each unit, we have combined them all into one year long planning sheet. Each year we make a copy of this living document and start changing. It's messy. It contains some legacy stuff we don't really use. It's incomplete sometimes, but it gives us a starting point for our conversations. It holds our end of unit reflections about what did or did not work well for our students last year. It keeps us from getting blindsided by events we know happen annually, but never seem to get enough notice about. If you are looking for a way to get yourself or your team more organized. If someone has said you need a year long planning doc and you...

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 directi...

Gear for Virtual Teaching And A Virtual Classroom Background

Picture stylized with Prisma photo app. A back in March I posted a picture of my classroom on Twitter and suggested teachers take pictures of their own classrooms to use as a virtual background on Zoom. That tweet has turned out to be very popular, so here is a little more info. To add a virtual background on Zoom you will need to go into your settings in the zoom app. I find it easiest to do this if I launch a meeting and click the arrow next to the camera icon. One of the options is to add a virtual background. It remembers the backgrounds you add, and you can have more than one. There are much more specific directions from Zoom here . Note that the full image, and what shows up on Zoom are slightly different. Zoom trims all the edges. The Gear: (Updated in August 2020 because I found some things I like better.) Virtual backgrounds work much better if you have a green screen. I happened to have one already and I was glad I had thought to bring it home from my classr...

How do I organize my Google Classroom?

The question I get the most about Google Classroom is, "How do you organize it?" When I am helping teachers in my district, I often ask them to add me as a co-teacher to their Google Classroom. Then I poke around, and make them a screencast with my feedback. Much of that feedback is about organization. I know every teacher out there is doing the absolute best they can in a very new situation. Most of them have no experience with GC and they are making normal, rookie, mistakes. I want to help. I'd love to just write one post about this, but I have a feeling it's going to be an ongoing series. So, today I'll just focus on one thing, assignment efficiency. Assignment efficiency means giving assignments in a way that makes the most sense to students, and also creates the most practical work flow for teacher evaluation. I think when teachers ask me about organization they are really asking how to assign things efficiently. I'll show you a wron...