Two (Free!) Apps ELA Teachers Will Love: Word Mover and Poems by Heart

Word Mover (readwritethink) and Poems by Heart (Penguin Classics) are two exciting apps for writing and fluency. One of my litmus tests for educational software is that it must improve upon its hands-on equivalent. If it functions no better than the literal version, many times the app will not help the students learn more productively. Word Mover's options, including several word banks and the ability to add your own words, inspired my students to construct impressive sentences and even several lines of poetry. A variety of backgrounds, fonts, and text colors are attractive strengths for this app. While testing the app I found myself inspired by the word bank's imagery and abstract words that suggested poetry: gold, gray, silent, sun, snow; love, new, hope, lost, believe, imagine. I was impressed with the positive results I saw when my students used the app. The most resistant writers in my class surprised themselves when they easily pieced together poetic sentences. Several students discovered how to make use of the app on their own, but I instructed most students to start by selecting the most provocative words from multiple word banks until they thought of a uniting theme. Then they placed the words in a logical order and added the articles and verbs that were necessary for complete thoughts. Once they followed this strategy, they were freed from starting their poem with lines like "Roses are red, violets are blue."

Poems by Heart leads students through the process of memorizing poems of increasing difficulty by reading, writing (filling in the blanks), listening, and speaking. In the first stage, students listen to an audio recording of the poem.  As they progress through each stage, students assess their memorization of the lines, and by the last stage, they record their recititation of the entire poem. Teachers need to help their students paraphrase the poems so this does not become an exercise in mindless parroting, and as a follow-up activity students should analyze the poem for deeper meaning.
Both apps are examples of software that enhances learning rather than merely digitizing paper and pencil activities.