Do any of you use Formative to help the students plan and write formal essays? Can you give me some ideas? I would be grateful!
My 10th grade English students are about to start planning and writing an analytical paper. A good half of my kids have learning disabilities that make coming up with ideas, organizing them, and creating a solid draft extremely challenging. (And about as much fun for them as getting teeth pulled, too!) I need to figure out how Formative could help with this. It seems like the right Formative could lead the kids through the planning/writing/revising non-threatening baby step by baby step.
Any and all ideas welcome. I am thinking about how to use @Lisa_Scumpieruās chunking strategies, too.
Here are the assignment materials if you would like to see them:
I have thought about using it to draft and work through the process of a paper. I have used it for brainstorming with their passion blogs as well as sharing out ideas about their climate change research on todayās meet on formative and determining how much more research they need. I looked at your items. I think you could set up a formative for many of your handouts. I think the one where you have them look at adds on Youtube might be better if you collect 20-30 ads on a Padlet and then embed it into the formative. They could then choose the ad and then check off what the ad entails using the multiple answer part on formative. I think it may help them work through the process more. Let me know if you need any more help. Have a great evening.
Thanks, @Lisa_Scumpieru! Padlet is a great idea. I havenāt used it before, but it seems like a wonderful tool. I will work on that Formative, then post it here.
Great! Also, I just discovered another site that may be helpful for you as well. It is Tizmos. You can collect a lot of sites, Prezis, etc. on one site for your students to access. Canāt wait to see what you come up with!
On a really basic level I have done this with my Year 7s. I used the part marks feature to let the students know I had seen their entries and given feedback for them to action until it was green.
Itās taking me a while, but I am figuring out how to scaffold this paper on Formative as I go along. @Lisa_Scumpieru, thank you for padlet: it makes a great virtual blackboard. @kallgood, I really like the Formative you shared. I hadnāt considered moving from the paper draft to a Formative. What a neat way to get a quick sense of how the kids are doing. Thanks!
Here are the paper-writing Formatives I have made so far. Step 5 (Introduction), Step 6 (conclusion), and Step 7 (revision) will be forthcoming!
The updated links are below; please click my most recent post to see.
I am still working onāand still worried byāStep 4. The kids will be doing most of their drafting in that one; it is, unfortunately, epic in length. I thought about breaking it up into multiple Formatives by literary device, but my co-teacher and I decided that it would be confusing for some of our Special Education kids to choose a literary device and then switch to the appropriate Formative. It might work better to put all the devices in one Formative and just keep reassuring everyone. What do you think?
Also, do you think the kind of modeling I am doing works? Iām intentionally leaving my writing rough so that I can demonstrate revision in the last Formative.
The students wonāt be starting work on this paper until Wednesday or Friday, so I have until then to play with this. Any and all ideas would be welcome!
@clairesedoyle - This is looking great. I could see Steps 1 and 2 and really liked how nicely they went. For some reason, I cannot clone Step 3 at all. I tried several times. Step 4 is the longest Formative that Iāve seen! It should be in the Guinness Book of World Records! I am thinking that this step may be better served in a hyperdoc. Have you ever made one? I was thinking of setting it up like this:
Columns on the Doc:
Story Elements Examples with Analysis Questions or Comments
They would then have to go and explore each, but then only choose three of the rows. I made this, but only partially because I didnāt want to do a lot of work if you chose not to use it. I can help you finish it if you like it. Be sure to click on Imagery to get the idea. Maybe the kids can then transfer in their work after they use the hyperdoc if you want it on formative? However, if you share it in Google Classroom and give each student a copy, youāll be able to see their work beautifully. I hope this helps. Have a great rest of the weekend.
Hey Ant - at this point no, but will be diving into developing interdisciplinary units some time this year. Will hit you up here or on Twitter when I do!
@Lisa_Scumpieru, thatās amazing! Thank you so much. I can see how I might squeeze all the stuff in my oh-my-goodness-this-is painfully-too-long Step 4 into a much more manageable package. I copied your template and am going to play with it. Thanks.
No, I have never made a hyperdoc, although I know what they are in theory. Iām planning to watch your learning session with @msashlylcot this week to discover more. My school does not use google classroom, alas; we are a Microsoft fiefdom. Iāll see what I can make work in Microsoft OneDrive and OneNote. Our OneNote class notebook certainly lends itself to hyperdocs, but I havenāt shown my students how to play with those features of it yet. Perhaps we need to schedule a tech lesson as part of our paper writing. Hmmm.
Even though you do not have Google Classroom, you surely can use hyperdocs. How many students are you teaching? Is it okay for you to send it out another way and have them make a copy? I can help you add to the hyperdoc and walk you through anything. Have a great day.
I have 87 students. 23 have processing/attention/memory disorders of one kind or another, and an additional 10 are considered at risk for not making it through high school. Several of them are also extremely hesitant and anxious about using technology for school work, though they love multimedia (and their phones). Getting them comfortable with Formative was huge. Hyperdocs sound like the next logical step to take. I could certainly create and distribute one. Thank you for the offer of help!
I think that Iāll wait to experiment with hyperdocs until after your learning session this week. I want to make sure I know what I am doing before I throw a new tech procedure at the kids, even something as simple as āmake a copy of this google doc.ā For now, itās probably better just to revise, shorten, chunk, and enliven the Formatives I am making.
Iām off to revise. Iāll post again when I have something that sort of works.
I really like āHow Do I Analyze My Ad Checklistā you created @clairesedoyle ! I think this is a great way to scaffold the project. Have you considered uploading this to Formative using the āEnhance a PDF/Docā option? @dentlerp showed me how she did something similar the other day and it seemed like a great way to pin point specific parts that students needed help with. Sheās actually going to be leading a virtual learning session next Monday (January 29th) on different strategies for using Formative to teach languages and I think you might find that interesting as it provides more examples of scaffolding.
I have just recently been creating step-by-step activities to practice building a spoken response in target language. I have a PDF doc that I uploaded with all the essential communicative pieces that should be included in their responses. I uploaded that PDF into Formative and marked a āquestionā next to a number of phrases that I want them to use for that particular assignment. The student will then (in the short answer space) create a phrase in target language utilizing each marked phrase as it relates to the photo shown. The photos that they are responding to will change every week (in order to prepare for our course end exams) so, every time I change the photo, I choose to mark different phrases on the PDF for them to use. However, itāll be the same PDF used over and over with alllllll those phrases I need them to learn, so the more they see itā¦hopefully, the more theyāll sink in. Thenā¦the students will practice and record all of the phrases they created to submit as an oral response. I donāt have the premium account capabilities just yet of students submitting an audio response, but I have an easy workaround that they use.
I love that this activity really breaks down each step of a rather intimidating process for my studentsā¦and because itās all housed in Formativeā¦I can also provide them meaningful feedback for EACH STEP of this process, easily see and respond to specific troubles and help them every step of the way.
Also, once set-up, the ease of cloning and re-vamping an activity like this each week is such a blessing. Hereās the clone code if youād like to check it out: BFHWN
Iād love to brainstorm ideas and help set something up for your studentsā¦I have a HUGE appreciation for intervention specialists at the high school level especially! Bless you and your passion for getting all students to the finish line!
Here are my revised Formatives for scaffolding this ad paper. Steps 1&2 are the same; I chunked and simplified everything else. I still need to make some literary device Formatives and a conclusion writing Formative, but this is an improvement (I think). Thoughts?
Thank you for writing! You are doing exactly the kind of multi-step scaffolding for intimidating tasks that I am trying to figure out. I canāt get the clone code to work for some reason, but your phase activity sounds fantastic. Will you send me the link again, please?
This paragraph simply makes me happy. I agree.
I would be thrilled to work with you and learn from you. What shall we do together?
By the way, I am not technically an intervention specialistā¦just an English teacher who likes working with Special Education and at-risk kids. I agree that intervention specialists are the salt of the earth, though. Someday, I may have the honor of becoming one.
