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Spotlight: app.seesaw.me
Class: English
Creativity Element: Blackout Poetry
Problem: How can I use Seesaw to allow students to create in the English class and make their thinking visible.
Making thinking visible is one of the best ways we can utilize technology in classrooms to meaningfully empower the learning process.
Often people donβt know where to begin or how to start doing this so I wanted to share this example from an 8th grade classroom from a school where I have a long term infused classroom partnership. A place where I am honored to be helping staff to make those little tweaks that produce profound outcomes.
Spotlight on an actual example:
In this example, an 8th-grade teacher was doing a poetry unit and we were discussing an upcoming unit we will team-teach together around the poem Invictus. After talking, I thought a good infusion to get her started with using the Seesaw app effectively would be to have the students do Blackout Poetry with their current project.
Side note: Thanks to TheMerrillsEDU for this idea…I have always done blackout poetry but when we were chatting in St Marteen they talked about doing it on Seesaw and then I thought about how easily students could make their thinking visible with this activity -and I knew together we had a winner.
Without hesitation – when I mentioned Blackout Poetry the teacher got it! She went back and got her kids started on this project right away. Kudos to her!
The process went like this:
- Students chose a Poem to work with.
- They take a picture of that poem in the Seesaw app.
- Then they select words that describe the theme or their ideas from that poem or create an entirely new poem from the original one.
- They use the markers in the app – to blackout all of the other words so only the ones they have chosen remain.
- Then they press the record or microphone key to record their thinking and reasoning behind the creation of the poem.
- They turn in using the green check button.
Here are students in an 8th grade English class doing this. Although they have access to iPads this is as easily accomplished on a Chromebook.
It is simply amazing how just the idea of making their thinking visible changes this idea to something much more powerful and profound. Something centered around the student as the learner instead of the teacher as the distributor of information.
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