With Halloween right around the corner, students have visions of Starbursts, Milky Ways, and Skittles dancing in their heads. Today this 3rd grade class was given and opportunity to write about their favorite candy. The prompt was “If you could only eat one type of candy for a year, what would it be and why?”
Students began this lesson by going to the trial version of Popplet to brainstorm their ideas. After they were done mindmapping, they used the snipping tool to take a picture of their work and saved it to the desktop. Then they went to Google Classroom and opened the assignment which was to create a doc and type their response to the prompt. They pulled in the image of their mindmap into the Google Doc and then began typing their paragraph. As students were working, the teacher and I went into the assignment on Google Classroom and began opening up and reading each student’s work. As we read, we used the comment feature to add editing suggestions for the students to go back and fix. The students loved seeing our feedback in real-time and having the opportunity to edit their writing before turning it in.
I also showed the students the Read and Write for Google extension. This allows anything they type in a Google Doc to be read aloud. This is so important for the students because as they read it back themselves, they don’t always hear the errors, but when they hear the “computer robot” reads it back, they notice that it doesn’t sound right. For example, this student did a wonderful job writing to the prompt and including a lot of description, but there wasn’t any punctuation, so the reader never paused. Read and Write for Google selects one sentence at a time to highlight and highlights each word in blue as it reads. When this student saw that the whole paragraph was highlighted in yellow, she know something was wrong. The student realized that the reader never paused because there weren’t any commas or periods, and was able to then go back edit her work.
