Using Voice Thread and Google Docs to Make Stronger Writers

To get my Grade 9 HS English students ready for their common assessment this week on The Odyssey, my students began by annotating passages from the text on Voice Thread (see past blog post for more information).  From there I created the following step-by-step directions for writing a mini commentary.  On Monday my students will use a GoogleDoc to create a sample mini commentary (Thank you Keith Miller for the great idea). By the end of class, my students will have written five solid mini commentaries on The Odyssey and we can review them together as a class, make corrections on Google docs, and then share all five as exemplars to the entire class.  And, here comes the best part, instead of grading 20 mini commentaries, I will only have five essays to grade.  This is how technology can make our lives as teachers a little less stressful. 

But it isn't always easy.  Integrating web 2.0 tools into my classroom reminds me of being a first year teacher all over again.  I have all these new resources available to me, but eventually they will become easier to use and over time I will have a tool box of resources to utilize when needed.  The above projects honestly took me hours to learn, put together and then explain to my students.  But in the end, I will be able to use all of these skills as an educator to teach this lesson again and my students will be able to collaboratively learn from one another.  We'll see how it goes, but as always, I never find it wasn't worth it in the end.