Narrative
Class Context
Students want to understand what they read, but not all writing is easy to understand. As they progress through the writing cycle, students often struggle with finding their own words to answer critical thinking questions, analyze text, and write research papers.Ms. Solarz, an 8th grade English teacher, saw a need to review Plagiarism and Paraphrasing with her students. One of the strategies that Ms. Solarz had successfully implemented to scaffold learning was to provide opportunities for student collaboration on difficult tasks. She understood the importance of practice and wanted to try a new method for collaboration utilizing technology through iPads.
Padlet, an online communication resource, enables students to offer their ideas while reading and commenting on their classmates’ thoughts. Student engagement goes up when they are able to view peer contributions. This resource allows struggling students jumpstart their thinking as they develop their own answers.
An Explanation of the Digital Resources Used
![]() | Schoology: A Learning Management System Used in this lesson to post texts and resources to students, to receive submissions of completed work, and to provide teacher feedback on student work. | |
![]() | Padlet: a virtual bulletin board that allows people to express their thoughts on a common topic easily. It works like an online sheet of poster paper where people can put any content (e.g. images, videos, documents, text) anywhere on the page, together with anyone, from any device. |