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.



Valentine's Day Word Bingo: A Listening Activity

For Valentine's Day I created a heart-shaped word cloud using Tagxedo. From this list of words, students can choose 16 to fill in a small bingo chart, easily made by folding a piece of white printer paper four times. Candy hearts make fun bingo markers. Inspirational credit belongs to Classroom Compulsion.

Update: Before my students played Bingo, I wanted to make sure they understood the denotations and connotations of the words. They rated the words on a scale, from negative to positive, by listing them based on their perception of the connotations after I explained the definitions; then I gave each student one of the words, printed on paper, and they silently lined up along the wall, representing a scale from negative to positive. By this time, they had heard and read the words multiple times. Playing Bingo reinforced the pronunciations and spellings, and I also repeated definitions or example sentences while we played the game. At the end of class, they had read and heard each word at least ten times, and as all teachers know, repetition is key for students' acquisition of new vocabulary.

Recording students' reading using Audacity

Audacity allows students to record their speaking, and using the fusion page, they can upload the MP3 recordings for you to open.
1. Download the beta version of Audacity from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/beta_windows 
Select "run." This will take about two minutes.

2. From the same page, find "Optional Downloads" and look for the "LAME MP3 encoder." This will allow you convert the recorded files from Audacity into a file that can be uploaded to the fusion page. Without LAME, you won't be able to save the recordings as an MP3.

3. Continue to click on the links until you reach the page that looks like this, and then select "run."

4. Now open Audacity do a short test recording: Just click the red recording button and begin speaking.

5. Select File, Export and then find Libraries, My Music. From "Save As Type" select MP3 files.

6. To allow students to upload their audio files, create an assignment on the fusion page.

7. After students have submitted their files, they can be deleted from the "Libraries."
Variations: Students may record themselves individually, or as a group. I record the classes' reading of a scene from a play and played it back for them to hear; this allows us to have a discussion about how intonation and other speaking skills can be improved. Then we make another recording and assess the improvement of the second round. Using audio instead of video recording (which I also use) helps the students focus on listening to their fluency.