Being Less Helpful* with SMART Notebook

Sometimes being less helpful would be a good thing. A "helpful" friend who shares the highlights and score to a game you've PVR'd is an unwelcome friend. Similarly, giving our students all the information we think they need can diminish curiosity and bypass opportunities to build inference and thinking skills.

Cover Up

Using white ink to cover information in SMART Notebook can be used to encourage curiosity, while building inference and thinking skills.
 
Help students to develop their ability to infer meaning from text by covering key words and short phrases, and then ask students to suggest what might fill the blanks. Ask students to write their suggestions on the board to complete the document. When finished, read the document together to see if the text reads smoothly and coherently. Finally, use the eraser tool to reveal the underlying text so that students can compare their inference with the original writing.
Many textbooks and resources turn problem solving opportunities into pattern matching activities. Sometimes these scenarios and the questions that follow have the possibility to spark curiosity and prompt thinking, but too often instead of scaffolding the question in a light and differentiated way, the resource builds an elevator to "the answer" where all that is required of us and our class has the equivalent complexity to walking and pressing a button. By covering up as much information as possible we can open the range of approaches and help students to develop their thinking and problem solving skills.

The Technique

To cover text with white ink:
1. Pick up a pen from the tray
2. Press the Colour button to display the palette
3. Press the white square in the lower right
4. Press the Line Style button to the right of the colour button to choose a wider pen thickness.
5. Draw with white ink over the items you would like to conceal.

Sources:

• Michelle Grainger: Markville SS Digital Literacy strategies for OSSLT (bit.ly/Pf3fla)
• Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover (bit.ly/QwwOM5)
• Foundations of Mathematics 10, McGraw-Hill Ryerson

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[*]"Be Less Helpful" is Dan Meyer's slogan. For more of his work see: http://blog.mrmeyer.com

Three online tools for Reading

While proper precautions need to be taken to avoid strain while "screen reading," online tools to help build reading and understanding can make it worthwhile. Here are three tools to consider with your students.

Vocabulary Building with Lingro

Lingro (http://lingro.com) is an excellent tool for vocabulary development, and it has been well received by ESL students at Unionville. When looking at any web page through Lingro, every word on the page becomes clickable to speak, define, or translate the word. For beginning English Language Learners and Modern Languages students, Lingro supports translation between most combinations of 11 major languages including English, Chineese, French, and Spanish. More advanced students can use definitions in the language they are learning for help understanding the word.
A powerful feature of Lingro is its ability to create personalized word lists as students read. Every word that is clicked is automatically added to that student's "Word History," and students can drag and drop these words into word lists. To reinforce these words, Lingro can show students the sentence in which they encountered the word, and can randomize them into a flash cards game as a study tool. When students register for a free account with Lingro they can save their word history and access it from a different computer.
While Lingro works best while reading public web pages, it also has a file upload feature to allow Lingro tools to be used with text, Word (in .doc format), and PDF documents.

Active Reading with Diigo

Highlighting and note taking are good active reading skills. Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) is a great tool for highlighting web pages in any of four colours and adding floating "sticky notes" to summarize ideas. Diigo annotations are saved automatically, and can be shared with others like peers or with a teacher. The site also has good teacher tools to manage a class of free student accounts. Diigo works with password protected sites, so students can annotate a text posted on a Moodle page. For more information on Diigo, see the January 13, January 20 and February 10 Digital Dispatches on the Unionville Digital Literacy moodle.

"Drawing" Connections with MarkUp

MarkUP (http://markup.io/) is a tool that turns any web page into a whiteboard that you can draw or type on. This could be used in text to trace implied references in pronouns or between ideas. Drawing on a diagram or image could highlight important details or build connections between different parts of the work. MarkUp does not use accounts to save annotations, and instead gives a unique URL link to a page with the annotations and a snapshot image of the web page at the time it was annotated. MarkUp will work on password protected pages, but has limited security so should not be used on sensitive information.