NowComment.com: To Facilitate Discussions and Feedback

Personally I always found it easy to dismiss ICT tools for literature classes (possibly because my teachers have never really integrated such tools in my learning of literature). But I’m suddenly discovering a whole lot of potential platforms that can, not only engage students better, but aid in the assessment of student learning.

NowComment.com is a website where you can upload a document or share a document you wish your students to read and have them input their comments or annotations alongside it (the website puts the text and the comments side by side and enables independent or simultaneous scrolling). Some ideas for comments can be in the form of interpreting what they have just read, close reading analysis or asking thinking routine questions along the way (see: visiblethinkingpz.org).

What I also like about the website is that you can sort comments by users so you can tell who has actively participated the most or what kind of comments a certain student has been making. This can help in the assessment of whether their understanding has been superficial (mostly centred on plot, character and setting) or incorporates a deeper analysis (literary devices).

Since it is an open discussion to those who have access to the document, this means that peers can simultaneously reply to their comments or share their own interpretations of a particular passage. Learning in this case then becomes collaborative and student-centred. It creates a community among your students that hopefully encourage deeper literary appreciation.

For more information:

From the video above:

Teachers can see from the online discussions …

• 1.     How many students did the reading (quantifiable)
• 2.     How well they understood (comprehension of text)
• 3.     What parts did they focus on (points of interest)
• 4.     What points did they miss (possible areas for further discussion in class)

Apart from analysing readings, I also like the idea of this website for students to share their own writing (essays or otherwise) with their peers for feedback. This means that they are not only exposed to the primary text and their peers’ feedback, but also can be exposed to their peers’ writing styles and (hopefully) constructive criticism.

The idea of using this website as an assessment tool was firstly introduced through the discovery of this blog, "How to Teach a Novel".

WET!: Web English Teacher Resource

In the course of developing this blog post, I discovered that the Internet does provide a treasure trove of materials to support the teaching of Literature. The webenglishteacher.com provides resources for various subjects, and I find its Literature materials comprehensive and detailed. Depending on the specific area of Literature the teacher is teaching, be it poetry, prose, drama, or Shakespeare, one can navigate the tabs located on the left side of the webpage to access the relevant materials. Each section provides teaching guides that provide various teaching approaches for a particular text, as well as useful summaries for both the teacher and students. There is also a myriad of teaching plans and guides with differing durations, which I feel, offers greater convenience and flexibility for teachers in the lesson planning process. The icing on the cake is some novel learning/teaching guides and plans, such as tabloid-style summaries and plot diagrams that not only cater to students with diverse learning needs and styles, but also supports the scaffolding of Literature content for students who might struggle with the learning and understanding of Literature. Cross-curriculum activities are useful to help to engage students' prior knowledge in Literature as well as other subjects, and assist them in making links between different subjects, and concurrently, observe the relevance of Literature in their daily lives. I hope these activities and ideas will promote meaningful learning, and foster students' interest towards Literature. 

From the assessment point of view, this site does provide plenty of follow-up activities for teachers to assess students' level of understanding of the lesson content and text, such as interactive quizzes and essay topics. It also provides valuable ideas for multimodal assessment, such as drama and student videos, which can potentially help to reduce the monotony of writing essays (from a student's perspective, and dare I say, perhaps the teacher's marking load as well?). Having noted this, I think these multimodal approaches to assessment also provides a fresh perspective towards Literature assessment, and a useful opportunity for students to display their creativity. There are rubrics for essays provided for most of the essay texts to support teachers' assessment. If there are specific assessment guides teachers have to follow, or specific texts used, rubistar provides a great platform for teachers to design and customise their own set of rubrics independently and works in tandem with the essays suggested in the site. 

Academy of American Poets Resource

I stumbled upon this particular website whilst writing one of the portfolio assignments for content upgrading. As much as I am a fan of web compendia of poetry, they tend to be nothing special. To my relief, the Academy of American Poets webpage is more than just a collection - it comes packed with several useful resources which I hope will be beneficial to my fellow Literature teachers.
Moreover, the website actually looks nice, which makes one more inclined to peruse it.

So let's get started! One of the best things about this website (apart from looking good) is that it has a classification of literary forms, schools & movements, and occasions (themes). I've taken the liberty to do a screenshot of just a brief summary of the literary form, Anaphora, but if you click on Read More, it displays a more thorough explanation, and also provides examples of poems that demonstrate the use of such a device. And it's not just a list of titles - you can click on to the actual poems.

Great Website.

 A way you could use this to assess literature would be to give students poems and ask them to blind-group them as best as they can. This method of problem-solving before direct instruction allows students to uncover patterns evident in certain works - perhaps a scaffold of instruction such as "Group it by theme" would be necessary for the less adventurous learners. It's a way of getting to see what prior knowledge your students may possess.

I shall not expound on the website's merits as a collection of poetry - that is probably evident if you wish to explore the website further. Take note that it does have an American bias towards the collection, though I suppose considering the fact that it is the Academy of American Poets website, that will have to be forgivable. However, it is not impossible, nor even remotely difficult, to locate biographies and poems of Wordsworth, Keats, Pope, etc., on the website.

Moving on, the other commendable features of the website are resources for teachers. It has a number of lesson plans and relevant education articles to whet your appetite. The lesson plans are also tagged with the various levels and types - though once more, bear in mind that the classifications are geared towards the American model. Granted, the amount of available plans is small (the last count being 37), but I enjoyed the fact that there are also op-ed pieces on the website that help the thinking process regarding how to approach poetry as a teacher, a reader, a curriculum planner - what-have-yous. 

Bloody marvellous stuff.

Letters to Poets is quite an interesting specimen of a lesson plan - and though I enjoy the idea, I would deviate from the given plan because it seemed rather excessive. Instead, an approach I would consider would be the assign each student a specific poem. Perhaps they could have one assignment every term, or every half a year, and what they would have to do would be to first, interpret the poem, and then write out a paper to the poet, telling him or her what they thought the theme was and how they felt the devices used helped or hindered the theme. It may help to do so in an informal structure but I would caution against allowing that sort of structure on a regular basis. I also think that writing the letter would not be sufficient as a thinking activity - it does, after all, mirror an exam paper, masquerading under a Dear Mr Wordsworth heading. So a suggestion to build on this assignment would be to ask students to write a 500-800 words on the theme they have identified - an open-ended paper on the theme of Decay, for example. This open-ended paper can be written in any form they wish - narrative, an exposition, formulate an argument on the theme, or even as a poem. 

Fun Classroom Activities for Teaching Literature

https://suite.io/carol-rzadkiewicz/4f4t20v

This website speaks about the importance of teaching Literature through fun and creative activities, and suggests some visual and interactive ways to teach Literature. Its main point focuses on allowing Literature and the books studied to have a special meaning to the students, so that they can truly understand and consequently retain what they learn in/through the books. However most of the strategies are carried out through group work and mini projects which means that assessment would take place over a sustained period of time and in formal and informal situations. 

The group projects proposed in this website involve creating written pieces (e.g. newspapers, advertisements, board games, websites, book jackets) which present through another channel the events and characters in the text. The newspaper example: the newspaper produced by a group of students may headline a major event of the novel/play, or report smaller events (past or planned for the future, e.g. a wedding next week) that take place in the setting of the text. In the article, they may incorporate descriptions of the weather/setting, report the event, and even get ‘interviews’ with the main and supporting characters of the novel. This assignment would require students to be familiar with the significant events of the novel (and the timeline in which they occur: they cannot write about an unplanned event that hasn’t occurred, unless they report about them after the whole novel ends). Students would also have to know the character traits and the habits of the characters in the novel, to be able to accurately portray them and their responses in the article. Each article may be presented for discussion with the class for their accuracy (with regard to the novel) and logical sense. 

[Extending this idea: they may also feature ‘opinion’ pieces (as a voice representing a community) from themselves (outside of the textual world) or a minor character from the text about the events in the text]

Assessment: The newspaper project would show up the students’ knowledge and familiarity with the text content (in terms of what happened and who are involved). More than that, their reports of the events and the characters would reveal how they perceive the characters (i.e. the quotes they extract from the text to represent those characters) through how they choose to orientate them. The opinion articles, as opposed to the factual reports, would be more similar to personal responses to the text – a disguised and implicit exam question. The newspaper published for the class to read may generate critical discussion (and informal peer assessment) over not only the accuracy of the reports but also the various responses to the text. The assessment possibilities range from text content knowledge to logical sensible personal responses (and defense) to effective word choice in the articles. Furthermore, assessment need not take place only at the end with the final newspaper edit, but also in the drafts of the newspaper and during the class discussion. 

The website also suggests that the class can design a book jacket for their text, with the synopsis of the novel printed on the inner fold, along with the author’s photograph and bio. A short write-up providing the rationale for their choice of design and information provided (e.g. significant or interesting facts about the author which may aid understanding of the novel, the publisher, and more) may be completed with more enthusiasm. Furthermore, in thinking up the design of the book cover, students will be motivated to consider what the message of the text is, and what the text means to them, and how to best convey it using visual art. For example, one of the book covers of To Kill A Mockingbird features a swing next to a tree with falling leaves, which may signify that this is a book about growing up and seeing the world clearly for all its injustice and depravity. 

Assessment: This book jacket activity equips students with background knowledge about the author and perhaps even the social background of the text composition. Assessment would mainly be concentrated of the final presentation of book jacket and rationale, but discussion always allows room for informal assessment and clarifying/shaping of ideas.  

Wonderful Trove of Resources

Hi guys! So I was looking for a site and trying to figure out which site looks like it has the best ideas for teaching and assessing, and I must say I was really excited when I chanced upon this site that's run by the NYTimes.

It's actually a brilliant blog that has lots of learning resources for many different subjects, but here's the page that's specifically for Literature, and it lists 10 Ways to Use the New York Times for teaching Literature.

There are lots of resources and suggestions on how to make Literature more relevant in the classroom, and I feel it's especially helpful because it gives you direct links to the required information. Some of the great suggestions (with complete links to lesson plans and worksheets) include getting students to create their own graphic novels, pairing YA novels with the Classics and drawing links between them, etc..

I think the idea that works the most for me, especially in terms of accessing students' understanding of a novel is the idea of asking students to continue the story. Specific material, warm-up activities and suggested ways of allowing students to continue the story can be found here.

This activity will allow students to expand their creativity because of the various ways they can choose to tackle the assignment, such as creating their own comic, choosing to write a new chapter in prose form, continuing the story by writing letters from the characters' point-of-view, writing a journal from the characters' point-of-view, or even act out their story and how they believe it would continue after the book ends.

But more importantly, asking students to continue the story means that they must first have a proper and accurate understanding of the entire plot and the characters of the novel. Furthermore, it also allows the teacher to discuss the stereotypes of certain genres of novels, such as the typical scenarios in Sci-Fi as compared to that in Romance or Victorian Novels, so that students will know how best to continue the story. It will also bring to the fore many characteristics of the book they are reading, such as the author's choice of diction and stylistic features.

In this way, I feel that it allows the teacher to discuss important elements of the book and access the students' understanding of key features, while being interesting and creative all at the same time.

An alternative of this would be asking students to rewrite a part of the story in a different genre while keeping salient features - something like the parody, Pride and Prejudice and the Zombies. Once again, key understanding of what is characteristic and important in Pride and Prejudice and how Zombie movies and books usually pan out is necessary for students to accurately complete this task.

The gallery walk that is also suggested on the site definitely sounds like a very interesting way to end this activity, as students will be interested to see the different products their classmates (in groups, possibly) have come up with and will be an exciting way to round up this entire activity.

Today's Lesson was Brought to you by The Literary Term...

An interesting and systematic approach, to teach and to help students remember literary terms, would be the “Literary Term of The Week”  activity. It can be found on this website. I have adapted it for use in the Singaporean classroom. I think this activity should be conducted as a post-activity. This activity can be considered as informal assessment or as part of continual assessment.

Here is how the activity might be conducted:

1. At the start of this activity, the teacher will introduce a literary term and provide its definition. The teacher will also provide a few examples of a literary term being used in images,videos and text.

2. Students will need to have a  “Literary Term Booklet”, into which they can copy an appropriate definition of the literary term that they have been introduced to.

3. For the next lesson, students will have to find examples of that literary term in games,novels,magazines,movies,online and television.

4. If the class is conducive for the use of ICT tools, the teacher could set up a class blog or a similar website, where students could submit the examples that they have found with a short write-up.  

5. If the usage of ICT tools is not appropriate, the teacher could set up a poster on one of the classroom noticeboards with the literary term as the title and the definition as the sub-heading. Students can then write down their examples onto that poster.

6. If ICT tools and noticeboard space are not feasible options, students can write down the examples they have found into their “Literary Term Booklet” with a short write-up. This is also useful when students are not online and when the posters from previous weeks are taken down.

7. However, if the teacher has the good fortune to have a classroom where both the use of ICT tools and noticeboard space are available, the teacher should have the students utilize the ICT tool and noticeboard space.

I think for the students, having come up with personal examples and having those examples up on a website, noticeboard or even in their booklets, will help them to remember literary terms.

For the teacher, it provides a method of assessing whether students have understood literary terms that they undoubtedly will be using in their essays.

A depository of cool ideas for teachers

Hey all, I’ve found a pretty good website for assessing English literature. Check it out!

ReadWriteThink.org (http://www.readwritethink.org) is a website for English language teachers to share and publish their lesson plans and ideas on teaching. This website is a great resource as there is a wealth of lesson plans and activities available for teachers to conduct literature lessons and assess students’ knowledge (Click on tab: Classroom Resourcesà Lesson plans). What impressed me about the website is that there is a wide range of lesson plans that are complete with resources (worksheets for students) and detailed instructional strategies. One of the lesson plans that caught my eye was about active reading and self-assessment. (see http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/active-reading-through-self-30702.html?tab=4#tabs) Students are tasked to undertake a project as a group, which is to come up with a quiz questions based on the text that they have read and exchange and answer quiz questions from other groups. The process of formulating the questions is very scaffolded. Resources such as the T-chart were provided in PDF form to give structure to the activity. This aids the students in coming up with the questions by looking at small pieces of information at one time. For example, students are asked to choose 3 quotations from the text that will exemplify the main idea of the text and formulate the questions. Furthermore, this scaffolds them coming up with a final set of questionnaire and at the same time, it provides opportunities for self-assessment when the students analyse the text in small chunks (quotations) and this tests their understanding through questioning the significance of what they have read. Other activities to assess students understanding include using wikis, role-play, creating epitaphs for deceased characters in the play Hamlet and etc. Most of the activities suggested are very doable and can be used almost immediately with some tweaking. There is even a ‘comment section’ where users can provide suggestions to improve the lesson plan or extend it further. The website also provides assessment rubrics for different types of essays as well as tips on writing rubrics. In a nutshell, ReadWriteThink.org is a useful website that teachers can make use of when conducting literature classes where assessment of the students’ knowledge and understanding is a key aspect of the lesson.