The Week in Review - Spring Has Sprung!

Good morning from Maine where spring has finally arrived. The last three afternoons has been warm enough (45F) to sit on my deck with my dogs. They have been very happy to lounge in the sun again. Wherever you are this weekend, I hope that the spring weather (or fall weather for my southern hemisphere friends) is treating you well too.

Here are this week's most popular posts:
1. Tackk - Create Webpages for Announcements, Assignments, and Digital Portfolios
2. TwistedWave - Create Audio Recordings and Save Them in Google Drive
3. CCSS-Aligned Rubrics for Project Based Learning
4. A Handful of Google Calendar Tutorials for Teachers
5. Two Activities to Help Students Learn About the Cost of Living
6. 7 Online Tools for Creating Charts & Diagrams
7. Four Sources of Print-on-demand Graph Paper

Would you like to come learn with me this summer?
Click here to learn more about the Practical Ed Tech Summer Camp.

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Discovery Education & Wilkes University offer online courses for earning Master's degrees in Instructional Media.
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StoryBoard That is a great tool for creating comics and more.
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Three Good Resources for Helping Students Learn About and Write Poetry

In my previous post I shared Haiku Deck's list of ideas for teaching poetry with the Haiku Deck web and iPad apps. If Haiku Deck isn't for you, here are a few other good resources for helping students learn about and create poetry.

Scholastic has assembled a big list of lesson resources for teaching poetry this month. One of the resources that I really like is the Poetry Idea Engine. The Poetry Idea Engine is a simple, interactive tool that helps students create four types of poems; haiku, limerick, cinquain, and free verse. To create poem on Poetry Idea Engine students select one of the four formats. If they pick one of the first three format students will be given a short explanation of the pattern before completing the template to create their poems.

The Poetry Foundation offers some helpful resources for teachers and students. One of the resources that immediately jumped out at me when I visited the Poetry Foundation's Learning Lab was the glossary of poetry terms. Students can search the glossary alphabetically, by form & type of poem, by rhyme & meter, by schools & projects, by technique, and by theory or criticism. The Poetry Foundation offers a free mobile app for iOS and Android. The app allows users to search for poems, save poems, and share favorite poems with their friends. You can search for poems by poet, by title, or by entering a line or two of a favorite poem.

Word Mover is a free iPad app and web app from Read Write Think. The app is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open the Word Mover app they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems. If the word bank provided by Word Mover doesn’t offer enough words they can add their own words to the word bank.

Poetry Projects With Haiku Deck

April is poetry month. Haiku Deck has published a list of twelve ideas for using Haiku Deck in poetry lessons. While I wasn't crazy about every idea on the list (that's more a reflection of my style than it is of list) there are two ideas that jumped out at me. Both ideas utilize Haiku Deck's integrated image search to help students find images to match the main ideas of their poems.

First grade students in Meghan Zigmond's classroom used Haiku Deck to create poems about animals.

Fourth grade students in a classroom with one shared iPad collaborated to create poems about color. Their teacher, Daisy Marino, shares information about the process here.