Recently I joined a chat based on minecraft. I have been interested in using games as a way pique student interest in writing. During the chat I was given some great advice. The advice was that I could have the students take screenshots of their minecraft game (or online or offline game with a camera) and have the students annotate the pictures.
Instantly, I was hooked.I thought to myself, how could this work in my classroom? I just recently received five iPads in my room that will be shared with another colleague. Therefore I could setup stations in my room for students to be able to do this during school. Students who do have access to games and technology could save their screenshots to google drive and have them ready during class. If students don’t have time outside of school, I am sure they would be more than willing to do this briefly during class. Win Win, right?
I did have to figure out hot to take a screenshot on a desktop. This wasn’t hard to find out how to do. Just a quick Google search. The students were amazed when I began talking about doing this in class. Image never heard so much enthusiasm coming from my students about what games could we use; when will we be doing this; what do we get to write about?
They could annotate with Canva, Google slides, Shadow Puppet, or Adobe Spark just to name a few. To further add more variety and language modalities (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) to this project a podcasting app could be used in conjunction with the above mentioned apps. This repetition is especially critical for ELs to move toward proficiency.
dreaming big... 