Tracey Anderson Uses Tech Tools to Teach Craft Moves and Constructive Feedback

Tracey Anderson Uses Tech Tools to Teach Craft Moves and Constructive Feedback

 

Noticing Craft Moves & Providing Feedback in Informational Text

 

Tracey Anderson, 2nd Grade

Teaching Point: Writers study nonfiction books by noticing an author’s Craft Moves to provide constructive feedback.

Craft Moves Definition: These are tools and techniques a skilled author uses in storytelling to craft a piece of writing. The reader may notice that these techniques or moves are narratively driven, such as in moments of foreshadowing or characterization, or they are literary driven, like in moments of alliteration, personification, simile, metaphor, allusion, irony, and parallel structure. (Learn more here)

 

Common Core State Standards:
  • ELA.2.W.2  Write informative/explanatory texts in which they introduce a topic, use facts and definitions to develop points, and provide a concluding statement or section.
  • ELA.2.W.5  With guidance and support from adults and peers, focus on a topic and strengthen writing as needed by revising and editing.
  • ELA.2.W.6  With guidance and support from adults, use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.
  • SL.1 Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about grade 2 topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.

 

Tools Used:
  • Strip Designer: is an iPad-only personal comic creator with 100 prearranged layouts and advanced features designed to help color, create and bring to life an illustrative comic or picture book.
  • Educreations: is an iPad-only application, which operates as a recordable smartboard for your tablet, enabling you to record your voice, handwriting, or text, insert pictures or videos, and save or share these recording captures with your class. Educreations also hosts an online community, providing the opportunity for teachers and students to take their classwork into the public sector and share with other classrooms their projects.
  • Pic Collage Kids (PicKids): is an easy-to-use collage creator with over 80 creative backgrounds, web-based importable photo features, free to use stickers images and a simple editing features for crafting a creative and instructive collage.

 

Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition (SAMR) Model: (Learn more here)
  • Substitution: iPad are used for typing instead of using paper.
  • Modification: PicKids lets students use authentic images for their topics instead of drawing pictures of them. It also lets students record themselves while reading each page of their nonfiction books.
  • Redefinition: Strip Designer and PicKids are used to craft a story and are imported to Educreations to finalize and share with a global community. Using the dictation features (recording speech-to-text) in these applications help students to put words into writing instead of typing them down.

 

Lesson Background:

Students have recently completed a nonfiction writing unit, chosen their favorite writing piece, and revised and edited that piece to prepare for publishing. Next, students used the app Strip Designer to finalize their writing piece and saved their pages to the iPad photos. Then, students used PicKids to design the background of each page and imported their Strip Design pages into PicKids. Those pages were saved to the iPad photos as well and then imported into Educreations. Lastly, students recorded themselves reading their nonfiction books in Educreations, reading with strong fluency and matching their voices to the information in the text.

On the day of the Cotsen visit, students listened to their peers’ digital books, paying close attention to the craft moves that students applied in their writing and provided constructive feedback to their classmates using a rubric with the unit’s teaching points.

 

Other Information:

These young authors also shared their digital work with their parents, classmates, as well as the educational community at large. The Acacia classroom connected with another second-grade class in North Carolina via Twitter. The Acacia class met them in a Mystery Skype, and afterwards the North Carolina class provided feedback to their classmates. The Acacia class uploaded their eBooks to a SeeSaw blog where the North Carolina class could read them and provide authentic feedback from across the nation.

 

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