Teaching & Learning in the 21st Century

Narrative

For many years, we have been telling our students: “Don’t write in your books. In attempting to preserve our valuable educational resources, have we been dismantling our students’ ability to track their mastery of concepts or ability to read critically?

By leveraging digital tools in a classroom, a variety of texts are now renewable resources that can be copied, highlighted, and marked-up in ways that allow each student to follow their own path to comprehension, with infinitely variable new understandings and individualized access to the material.  Annotation is a strategy that can enhance a variety of lessons.

“I saw that annotating had helped students see that reading is a process and that applying the ways of responding to text through annotation changes comprehension. Because annotating slows the reading down, students discover and uncover ideas that would not have emerged otherwise.”
- Carol Porter-O’Donnell, Beyond the Yellow Highlighter

The English teachers at Dymally High School have been asking students to mark up texts for a while now, printing out articles on paper, so that each student may have their own.   This year, they began using the Learning Management System, Schoology, to streamline and enhance their instruction.  These dedicated educators have begun the process of answering this question:

How can annotation be functionally
improved through the use of digital tools?

This exemplar practice was collected while their transition and exploration were still in progress;  they are still having students mark up an article on paper, as well as online.  They are still refining their best practices with
annotation and sharing their successes with each other. Thus, the exemplary practice herein is a combination of practices from two teachers’ classrooms. What they have discovered is powerful.

An Explanation of the Digital Resources Used

Schoology -  A Learning Management System was used in this lesson to post articles and resources to students, to receive submissions of completed work, and to provide teacher feedback on student work.

Google Drive  - A cloud-based file creation and sharing platform was used by the teacher in this lesson to upload articles to Schoology (via a linked app).  Drive was also used by students to work on article annotations within the Kami plug-in.  Schoology and Drive accounts are supported by LAUSD SSO and can be linked in Schoology.

Newsela - A news resource for teachers and students.  Free accounts allow anyone to change the lexile level to accommodate grade level, and to change the language. Teacher used Newsela to select engaging, informative articles on a particular topic by course of study, or by student interest.

Kami - A free Google Drive plug-in with a number of annotation features.  Usable for iOS and Chrome. This digital resource was used in this lesson by students to annotate their texts in a variety of expressions.

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