Giving ELA Lessons a Little Edtech Boost

One of the most important challenges educators face in today’s classrooms is how to integrate technology into instructional practice in a way that’s efficient and effective without reducing the human component of teacher-student interactions that are so important for a young person’s development. We know that young people thrive when given the opportunity to connect with one another and to use technology in ways that expand curiosity rather than provide quick answers and solutions.

It’s also important, in these exciting and uncertain times when artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, to learn to view technology integration as a tool to make learning better, rather than fearing that it will primarily become a method to escape true learning. These tools have so much potential to be the former and do not have to be the latter. Here are a few ideas for integrating technology with instructional moves that are tried and tested in English language arts (ELA). Use these tools to engage learners and encourage them to build community around ideas that inspire them most.

6 ELA Practices That Can Be Enhanced by EdTech

1. Book clubs. If you want to have a book club, consider using Chromebooks with Google Slides or Animoto and instruct students to create a book trailer to highlight key characters, plot points, archetypes, imagery, symbolism, and linguistic features. You might encourage students to read the same book and then work together to create the book trailer or have a film festival after all the book clubs are over so that groups can watch the trailers for one another’s books and add to their to-be-read lists.

Many school and public librarians like to have Bookflix displays created by young people. These could easily be integrated into a classroom setting to feature a display of recommended titles created by the class.

2. Collective note-taking. Another way to have students collaborate is through shared note-taking using NowComment, which allows teachers to upload a text to the site and students to collaboratively annotate it. You might cocreate an annotation rubric with the class so that you know what you’re looking for, or just add thoughts to song lyrics or a poem for practice before you tackle weightier texts. One of the newer features of NowComment is that you can use it with videos and images. The site (as is the case with more and more these days) does offer AI thinking partners.

3. Comprehension checks. Actively Learn is such a helpful tool for collective and individual learning. In this case as well, teachers can connect to online texts and create comprehension questions and extension activities that are embedded in the platform. The site also allows teachers to create a class so that they can easily assign texts to the whole class, and students can upload their own texts, create questions, and make them available for others to discover. This follows the Freirian ideology that teachers become learners, and learners get an opportunity to become teachers.

4. Video lessons. In a similar vein, Edpuzzle offers Schoology integration (for those who use the learning management system). It’s also a way for teachers to create video lessons that connect to any topic. Edpuzzle allows you to pull videos directly from YouTube, which has some wonderful educational videos for people of all ages. In fact, according to Statista, “As of June 2022, more than 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute.” Given the fact that two years have gone by since this data collection, imagine how many hours of video are uploaded every minute at the time of your reading this article. We know that media literacy is as relevant as ever and that young people today are learning through visual means perhaps more than they ever have.

5. Annotation. Thinglink offers an immersive learning experience. Annotated images can be used in gallery walks and for students to summarize the main ideas of their learning. The annotations can be student-generated text or include links to online resources to make the finished annotated image operate as a curated collection of online resources. Thinglink also integrates seamlessly with learning management systems and is very intuitive to use.

Images can originate from online sources, or they can be user-generated for a more individualized experience, which offers educators an opportunity to teach about copyright restrictions and the importance of giving credit to the creators of original images.

6. Differentiation. Rewordify is a tool that educators can use to change the Lexile level on advanced texts to make them more accessible. It helps students who are learning English to grasp concepts and isolate key vocabulary so that reading comprehension is faster and easier. Teachers upload a text to Rewordify and can also create crossword puzzles, comprehension questions at multiple levels, and other activities with the text.

Whether you’re looking for technology tools to integrate to make the most of the time you have with students, or you’re just looking for new ways to teach traditional methods, these are just a few of the technology integration tools that have proven consistently worth the time it takes to learn and implement them.