Summary
Students practiced tone and theme summarization skills by summarizing book reports into 103 Character essays. The essays are part of the Chipotle “Cultivating Thought Author Series” contest offering free burritos for 103 character tweets about the stories on the website http://cultivatingthought.com/supershort/ . By working with a partner, students selected their story and worked together via Google Docs to break the story down to 103 characters. They were only allowed to communicate using the Comment/Annotation feature on Google Docs. Then students would post their final draft onto usecandor.com brainstorming app to read and vote on. The student submission with the most votes was the winner. The top three submissions discussed their writing process with the class and the winning team was featured in Tweet to Chipotle to thank them for their participation in the lesson.
TIPC Ratings
Approaching – Teacher models strategies to guide student investigation and designed challenges that promote student synthesis of resources to address the authentic task of creating 103 character essays for the Chipotle contest. Students assembled and organized information to address the authentic task.
Ideal/Target – Students worked in self-selected groups of two to select the story, summarize using non-verbal communication using technology (Google Docs); submitted, analyzed and voted on the best student work using a brainstorming app called Candor. The lesson also went outside the walls of the classroom to include community partners, by soliciting prizes from the local Chipotle and communicating their results via Twitter to the outside world. Students reflected on their work for future growth through in-class discussion.
Ideal/Target: Teacher facilitates and formatively assesses authentic tasks where students are engaged in meaningful questioning, critical thinking and problem solving by summarizing short stories and communicating non-verbally using digital tools to shorten the summary down to 103 characters to deliver the most insightful and compact message, thereby solving the authentic task.
Ideal/Target: Students synthesized existing and self-generated knowledge to create new ideas and products within and beyond assignment parameters. Some chose strategic risks that support innovation by saying more with less by going outside the rules of grammar and syntax to use special characters and emoticons.
Student Artifact
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