What Makes a Poem? - A Lesson for Poetry Month

This is National Poetry Month. "What is a poem?" might be the first question that students ask after, "why is it National Poetry Month?" The answer to that first question can be found in a TED-Ed lesson titled What Makes a Poem...a Poem?

By watching What Makes a Poem? students can learn the origins of poetry, the characteristics traditionally associated with poems, why poems don't always rhyme, and the format of a haiku. The video can be seen as embedded below.



Take a look at Read Write Think for some poetry lesson ideas that incorporate their free Word Mover app.

Mailbag - Answers to Questions from Readers

Every week in my email and Facebook inbox I receive quite a few questions from readers. I try to answer as many of them as I can (I get to the email quicker than I do the Facebook messages). Often the questions and my answers could be beneficial to a lot of readers so I'm going to try to share more of them here on FreeTech4Teachers.com.

Q1. Do you know of a way to do something like magnetic poetry, i.e., have words on "movable tiles" that students can arrange in sentences?

A1. ReadWriteThink's Word Mover tool does exactly that. Word Mover is available to use in your web browser. It is also available as a free iPad app and as a free Android app.

Q2. I would like to scan the books in my class library. Have the students check in and out books. This way I could keep track of my books. What would be a good app that I could use?

A2. Who Has What? 2 is an iPad app that will allow you to scan barcodes and or manually enter titles to keep track of what has been borrowed from you and who borrowed it. You can even use the app to send reminders when borrowed items are overdue. The app is currently priced at $0.99 but it has been free at times.

Q3. I'm looking for a way to record comments/feedback and send to my students when reading their essays. Is there something you can think of I could utilize? The only thing that I can think of is voice memo recording and emailing.

A3. If you use Google Drive, you can provide voice comments to your students through Kaizena. Kaizena will work with Google Documents and Slides. To use Kaizena to leave voice comments for your students your student should share their Documents or Presentations with you. Once they have shared their Documents or Presentations with you, open the shared file through Kaizena. With the shared file open you can highlight a portion of a document or slide then click the microphone icon to record your voice comment. Your students will see the comments after you have saved them. An outline of the process can be seen here.

Help Students Start Stories With Word Mover

This afternoon during the technology smackdown at Teaching & Learning conference in Gaston, North Carolina Julian Scott Wilson reminded me about Read Write Think's Word Mover iPad app. I wrote about the app last year, but until today I didn't realize that it can also be used in your web browser.

Word Mover is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open Word Mover 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.

Applications for Education
Word Mover could be a great tool for students to use to as a story or poem starter. Word Mover reminds me a bit of those refrigerator magnets that were popular for a while. You know, the ones that had individual words on them that you dragged around to create funny sentences. The same idea can be applied to Word Mover.