Category: Language Arts

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Story Speaker With Google Home

Encourage students to write a story in a Google Doc that includes twists and turns for an exciting story. Stories lead down one path or another where outcomes vary based on prompts you write in your story. Story Speaker lets anyone create talking, interactive stories with no coding required. You just write your story in a Google Doc with a basic template, add your directives for making it interactive, then play your story with Google Home.

If you have a Google Home device, you will want to add the Story Speaker extension! Storytelling has never been more fun.  Watch this short video to see how easy it is to use Story Speaker.

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SMMRY for Summarization

SMMRY is a bookmark widget you drag and drop to your bookmarks bar from  http://smmry.com/bookmark. This tool will be ready to use on any website you visit. It’s that simple.

Go ahead, test it out. It’s real easy to use.

  • Visit a website with an article to read.
  • Click the SMMRY bookmark widget called One-Click Summary in the bookmarks bar.
  • By default, you’ll get the abridged version of the article with 7 sentences.

smmry for summarization

For more or fewer sentences, enter a new number in the sentence summary box at the top of the page.

Additionally, you can click the “Settings” button at the bottom to make adjustments such as excluding questions, exclamations, and quotations.

 

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Tour Builder With Google

Did you know that Tour Builder is not simply a tool for geography or map skills? Tour Builder can be used cross-curricular. It’s a free tool created by Google.

With Tour Builder, you can create virtual tours or tell a story on a map that includes locations, images, videos, descriptive narratives, and hyperlinks. These tours can be the retelling the events from a novel, tracing locations of a historical event, visiting different biomes or landforms around the world, showing animals and their habitats, visiting ancient cultures, or famous landmarks in history.

Tours can be viewed by others in Tour Builder, or take it a step further and import them into Google Earth for a full 3D experience!

Example Tours below (provided by Eric Curts).

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Poems By Heart

Poems By Heart is a memorization game that will challenge you with classic poems from master wordsmiths including Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, and more. You’ll rack up high scores and achievements on your way to reciting 24 poems from heart, with recordings you can share online and email to your friends.

Poems By Heart uses brain-training techniques to make remembering poetry easy and fun—in a fast and responsive game. Each poem features two new and exclusive dramatic readings and all-new original art. John Keats, Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, and fifteen other masters of poetry are featured in tales of adventure, romance, and horror, all carefully selected and edited by the experts at Penguin Classics.

https://youtu.be/6EZqQnUJnf8

Memorize poetry with a free app for Apple iPad or iPhone.

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Naming Versions for Writing in Google Docs

Rough Draft, Revised Draft, or Final Version?

If you use Google Docs for writing, check out this new feature now available in the Version History.

The option to name versions makes it even easier to see student progress and provide better feedback and assessment. This provides more support for student writing to be a process, with the goal to improve their writing over time with feedback, reflection, and revision.

This would work within the Schoology platform as well.