Ideas for Literacy Using Technology

Centers & Class Instruction

After reading a story/book to the class, set up a Word document with a question or phrase to be completed in a computer tag event or as a center where a team decides on an answer.  Such questions/phrases might be:

• If you were the girl in this story, what would you have done?
• Do you think the boy made the right decision?  Why?
• The wolf should have……
• The story could have ended different if……..

Or more indepth:

     After the wolf couldn’t blow down the house the story really ended different than what the book said.  Tell how the story ended.

If the Witch had been nice and asked the girl and boy in for hot chocolate, how would the story have changed?

Use your classroom computer for instruction as you would your white board.  Arrange students either sitting on the floor or in chairs around the Monitor.  You sit in a chair beside the monitor with the keyboard in your lap.  Please see last section of the video found at http://teach.fcps.net/stt/stage2.htm under the Elementary section for a model.  This method seems to keep attention of students for lessons that involve:

(Notice these ideas don’t depend on the network to be up unless you saved your files to the network.)

• Brainstorming ideas
• Listing words for a phonics and phonemic awareness lesson
• Writing a summary or retelling a story
• Lessons using a power point of multiple choice, matching, jeopardy and other games .Check out some of these power points for ideas http://208.183.128.8/la/activities/pptresources.html.  Also http://teach.fcps.net/trt14/Power%20Point%20Games/power_point_games.htm
• Cache (save) websites that relate and make connections to the story for discussion and other activities.  If they are saved you don’t have to depend on the network to be up.

I created the Internet Tools for Literacy which Bob McLaughlin endorsed 3 years ago to help out Literacy First teachers.   http://teach.fcps.net/trt18/Literacy/literacyNETtools.htm

Also other resources for Literacy can be found at http://teach.fcps.net/trt18/recent_request.htm#Literacy There you will find a site that some folks found useful the last 2 years but I have failed to maintain this year which is the Literacy Lesson of the Week.  If you are interested in me getting this started back, please let me know.