The English III team had a great couple of days pushing their students collaboration, communication, critical thinking skills, and of course content knowledge. The beauty of BreakoutEDU is the ability to incorporate 21st Century Skills along with content driven lessons.
What did the Breakout incorporate? 1. Clue 1 incorporated content knowledge of the Great Gatsby and puzzles. Students had to analyze symbols in the book as they related to characters. Then they had to decode the names and complete the code using some basic math skills. 2. Clue 2 used knowledge of colors in the books. They filled in quotes with the correct color symbols, which eventually lead to a WORD code. 3. Code 3 required students to put the book events in order to open the directional lock. 4. Code 4 then had them read a passage, finding literary devices, and using those line numbers to open the last box. How were 21st Century Skills involved? Students had to collaborate with their group in order to understand the clues. Through collaboration they used critical thinking skills to not just understand the content of the game, but to solve puzzles. Oftentimes in secondary classes, content becomes the main focus to where there is no other focus on other skills. Was there high student engagement? Absolutely! While I will not go on and say every student was engaged 100% of the time, and not every student loved the challenge, but I would definitely say that most did. Throughout the game you could find students talking it out (even arguing on who was right), competing to get to to open the box first, running through the library to find the clues the fastest, asking questions, and most of all seemed to have a genuine interest in completing the breakout and having fun. To me, the best part, was to see the kids in action and watch their thinking occur in physical ways. Teachers, don't be scared to try new things and get a little "out there." Students appreciate the time and effort you put into lessons to make them engaging. Don't let the 1-2 students who don't like to be challenged, keep you from challenging the others. Try it, you'll like it! You can find the resources for this Breakout here.
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Our English III team is using the highlighter features in OneNote to help identify musical devices found in literature. First and foremost, instructions need to be VERY clear. In the first section, the content directions are stated. After the content directions are given, it is important to follow up with very specific tech directions as well. While we think students know how to work technology, many of them do not. So don't forget your tech directions. Below you will find the tech directions that were left for the students on their OneNote page. Here is an example of student work using the OneNote highlighting feature. This same feature could be used any all subjects. Students could use the highlighting feature to break down different aspects of text, highlight important parts of an article, or break apart notes.
I first want to brag on our English III team (Mrs. Westberry, Mrs. Hodges, and Mrs. Adamson) were an amazing group of teachers with an abundance of ideas. They were able to accomplish and finish so much in our 1/2 day of technology and curriculum planning. So I want to show off some of the cool things that they have worked on. First, they decided to stick mostly to OneNote and learn to incorporate most of their ideas through OneNote pages. While they may have used some outside website, everything was linked back to OneNote to keep things simple for their students. So here are some of the creative ideas that were worked on: Short Story Unit In the short story unit they were able to create a hyperdoc that walked students through satire. It started with a simple example of satire, then had them apply their understanding of satire to the short story they were reading, and lastly asked the students to create their own example of satire in their everyday lives through a comic. In this unit they also discuss foreshadowing. Using OneNote they attached their short story and a concept map for the students to use and display examples of foreshadowing in their reading. Here is a screenshot of that page. The Crucible The next unit was The Crucible. In this unit, an emphasis was placed on character development. So a couple of pages were made for students to analyze a particular character or to rank the characters by morality. Here are screenshots of those assignments. And who does the crucible without going on a witch hunt?! The team found an online witch hunt through National Geographic. They hyperlinked the URL into their OneNote page. Those were just a few of the activities that were accomplished that day. Excited for students to continue on this journey with our amazing teachers.
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