Khan Academy, YouTube, etc.

Khan Academy

We are supposed to look at Khan Academy this week.  I did get on and look but they don't have much of anything for ELAR.  Looking at the other subject areas I see how Khan Academy could be very useful.  Now, there may not have been lessons on the skills for ELAR (main idea, sequence of events, characterization, the plot line, etc) BUT I did find things that I could use if I wanted to reinforce stories that we read in the classroom.  One subject area I looked at was US History.  I looked at the Civil War in specific.  The reason that I chose that one is because we have a couple of different pieces in the textbook that deal with the Civil War and it would give the students  a framework for the piece that they would be reading.  Now, I have a Love unit.  I think every teacher has one.  Mine happens to be the Holocaust.  We have the play The Diary of Anne Frank in our textbook.  I always save that one for after state testing.  I usually end the year with that unit.  As I look through Khan Academy there is a section about Hitler and the rise of the Nazis.  This would be something that I could use as an introduction for the students.

The only other thing that I really noticed that could be used in the ELAR classroom would be the Grammar section.  But even in the Grammar there isn't a lot to choose from.  And since I was in a Reading environment, they had a separate English class, I wouldn't have had to worry about teaching grammar.

Textbook Online Components

I decided to go ahead and discuss the online content that came with our textbook adoption.  This was something that I tried to use a lot when I was in the classroom.  It was one of the aspects that drew me to this particular publisher and textbook.  One of the things I liked best about our online component was that I could assign students tests of the piece that we read.  I had control over the setup of the test.  I could push out assignments to the students.  Based on how they did on diagnostic tests I could do "course intervention".  Which would give them remediation where they need it or give them accelerated learning if they do well.  Another component to our online content was the Level Up tutorials for the pieces in the textbook.  The tutorials focused on the skills that were covered in the piece.  For example, The Hitchhiker is a drama in the textbook.  So one Level Up tutorial focused on suspense and foreshadowing and another Level Up tutorial focused on the elements of drama.  It would go through a mini-lesson on the skill and also ask them questions along the way and give the student feedback.  Within the Level Up tutorial is a practice section where they can put the skills that they learned to work.  There is also an interactive vocabulary practice.  It is similar to Hangman but helps the students work on their vocabulary.  Another online component to the textbook is the Reader/Writer Notebook.  This is not interactive, per se.  The students read the story online (they can even have it read to them page by page) and then they answer the questions by typing them.  They are the same questions that are in the hard copy of the textbook, just as if we were having our students keep a hard copy Reader/Writer Notebook.  They can print it off and turn it in to the teacher or email it to the teacher.

YouTube

I have to say that until I started my Masters I had not really explored YouTube that much.  One of the main reasons was because our Technology Director discouraged YouTube because of the bandwidth that it used.  It wasn't until I thought I was going to have to go back into the classroom half a day that I started to REALLY look at YouTube.  I was going to have to teach a grade level and subject I had never taught before.  So I started looking for videos I could use.  And then one of my classes had us "play" with YouTube and now I that is one the places I start when I am needing to look for something.  I have found many useful videos when it comes to the skills that I cover in the Reading classroom.  I have found a few videos that I have been able to use and upload to PlayPosit and ask questions from.  I was needing some extra help with Google Forms for a project I was doing and the first place I went to was YouTube.  I found a couple of very useful videos and actually a couple that had nothing to do with what I really needed but it also spurred creativity for me with Google Forms.  Right now it is a little harder for our students to access YouTube.  Our technology department has it blocked because the students are not using it appropriately.  This where mini-lessons of appropriate use come in and more teacher monitoring.  I know that the online dual credit Speech teacher that I am a facilitator for uses YouTube for a lot of her lessons.  As I look through YouTube for videos on author's purpose I end up with over 19,000 hits.  Of course I have to wade through those but that just shows how many videos are out there to choose from.  And I had narrowed my search to just author's purpose for middle school and I ended up with the 19,000 hits.