My goal this year in planning the third grade units has been technology integration in the curriculum. I am lucky to be working with fantastic third grade colleagues who also have the same goal. It has been a steep road, writing all of our units plans for each subject and pushing ourselves to plan technology into them, but so far it has been well worth it. I can see with every unit plan we write we delve deeper and student use of technology is progressing up the SAMR model.

The most recent unit that we planned in literacy was a combination of writing and reading. Our objective when we set out to write this unit was to take technology one step further than the last unit, always striving for transformation. As I have mentioned in previous posts, having our Technology Resource Facilitator, Mr. Alfredo Papseit, to assist us with planning technology integration into our units, has been incredibly helpful. His experience and knowledge has been invaluable to assist us in transforming our units as well as helping us to grow professionally.

Grade 3 Art of Informational Writing/Reading Non-Fiction Unit (written using the resource: Lucy Calkins Units of Study)

Brief Summary: These units focus on the reading and writing of informational text. The students explore mentor text to discover how text structures aid in comprehension of a topic. Using these mentor texts, student write an informational piece on a topic that they know a lot about. This is not a research based paper, but students do dabble in a little research just for clarification or further develop an idea. Students identify the text features for their piece to both further their thinking on the topic and incorporate them into the text to aid their readers’ comprehension.

• Essential Questions for Reading: How do informational texts use a variety of text features to aid comprehension?  How do informational readers determine main idea? What strategies do informational readers use?  How do we communicate what we have learned?
• Essential Questions for Writing: How do writers find nonfiction topics to write about? Why do informational writers experiment with a variety of structures? How do informational writers use structures to build the readers understanding? How do informational writers support ideas?

As we wrote the unit, we used TPACK as our guide. After completing the summary and essential questions, we progressed through our learning plan trying to figure out, with the use of technology, what would work best to aid in and to asses student learning in both reading and writing. Upon the recommendation of Mr. Papseit, we decided to have the students produce ebooks using Visualize , Book Creator and iBook . The students used these apps in sequence. Visualize allowed the students to add a variety of text features to their informational books. They then brought their pages together using Book Creator. To publish their work, iBooks was used. The students books were then loaded on all iPad’s to allow the students the opportunity to read the third grade books.

The students spent the majority of their class time working on their pages in Visualize. It has been amazing to watch them as they see their books come to life. It has also been an authentic way to assess their knowledge of text features, how to use them effectively and how they aid in the readers understanding of their books. The students have been so engaged in their literacy learning. First, using pencil and paper in writers workshop and readers workshop and then moving onto the iPads. They were thrilled to be writing about a topic that they are “experts” in and have a passion for.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.In order for the students to have a clearer picture of their books as a whole, we provided them with this outline to storyboard their books. We also provided examples of a cover page, a table of contents and one of the chapters in our book. We used the examples of the writing that we had been doing in class with our students. The students were responsible for inputting their own information and creating text features of their choice. Some students chose to draw their own illustrations take pictures of them and others chose images from the internet. The students were also responsible for creating their own bibliographies and were introduced to creative commons for the first time. As you can imagine all of this took time, and we provided mini-lessons for them every step of the way. This checklist was created to help us assess student learning (we also used anecdotal evidence as well).

I have been thinking a lot about gamification in education and game-based learning after being introduced to it in our COETAIL course 4. Perhaps using a rubric as mentioned by Judy Willis in her article “How To Plan Instruction Using the Video Game Model” would work well with this unit. Something that may integrate well into this unit may be having the students use a developmentally appropriate rubric and having them progress through levels of their editing and revising. I plan to sit down and think more about this when we revisit editing and revising this school year. I am always looking for exciting ways to encourage students to use writing structures, capital letters and punctuation! Jane McGonical’s TED talk also makes some compelling points about the use of game-based learning that has begun to make me think more about how I can integrate this way of teaching into my lessons. Having never really been a “gamer” I look forward to learning more and trying out some ideas. I have no doubt that the third grade students would love them!