The Global Read Aloud: One Book to Connect the World
Beginning
Connecting
Students imagination is their only limitation...
Will you join us? Video from founder, Pernille Ripp.
Sign up to be involved in the Global Read Aloud 2016.
- What is the Global Read Aloud and how did it begin? Video from founder, Pernille Ripp.
- Plugged In: One Book to Connect the World.
Connecting
- For teachers, there a several ways to connect before, during and after the project. You can connect through the Global Read Aloud Blog, the Educator's PLN Page, the Twitter feed, #GRA14 and join the teacher groups on Edmodo. If you are looking for a connection with specific grade level, geographic location, or tool, you can connect with other teachers through the Connection Wanted page.
- Students can connect to classes worldwide through blogging, tweeting, Skyping with other classes, Google Hangouts, guest readers, and TodaysMeet. My students connected to classes through our class blog on blogger and their individual blogs on KidBlog. Not sure where to begin? Read this post, Looking to Connect Your Students? First Steps in Social Media.
Students imagination is their only limitation...
- Character Trading Cards is available as an app and an online tool. Through this tool, students are guided in analyzing characters, real or fictional, by pulling support from the text. Each category on the card, asks questions that guide learners in creating information-rich cards while employing summarizing strategies. Trading the Cards can be shared with an audience and collections of cards can be built. Here is how my students used the Trading Cards app: An App Stop on Their Learning Journey.
- Instacollage, the sister app to Instagram, allows a user to create a collage of multiple photographs into one project. Each of my students created an illustration of a different character and then photographed them. They imported all of those photos into one collage for The One and Only Ivan.
- If you would like for your students to look at a story or event from different points of view, then Voki is a tool that can support that type of learning. Voki gives the user the opportunity to create and design an avatar and record their voice speaking. Vokis can be emailed or published/embedded into sites like blogs, websites, and wikis. Teachers can set up Voki Classroom, where the teacher can set up and manage a class of students. With Voki Classroom, students are not required to have email adresses to register. Voki is free; Voki Classroom costs $29.95 for a year. Here's a piece I wrote about Voki: Speaking of Motivating Students.
- Morfo is a free app that is similar to Voki. Users can create avatars and record their own voice speaking. The major difference is that students can take a photo of themselves, and Morfo guides them in setting the photo to be the one that talks. With Morfo, students become the avatar. The website has several examples that demonstrates how it works.
- Graphic novels and comic books have a strong appeal for students, and they support ELL and struggling readers. ComicBook! has quickly become one of my students' favorite ways to publish.The user has the ability to create their own comic book using photos taken on the device (Apple or Android). The app provides the user with different filters for the photos to make them look like the artwork in comic books as well as adding borders, captions, stickers, and graphics within different layouts. The finished product can be saved as a JPEG (image) or PDF making it easy to embed into other tools. You can also share it through email, Twitter, or Facebook.
- Toontastic is a free app that allows the user to create their own cartoons. Users can use the backgrounds and characters provided in the app or they can create their own. It guides the user through a story arch while they add animation, music and voice. To publish it, an adult must approve the account. Then it can be sent through email or embedded into other sites. Additional characters and backgrounds can be purchased for a small price.
- In Songify, the user can record their normal speaking voice and then select the beat or sound that they want. Then the app auto-tunes the spoken voice and creates a song for them to share with the world. My students use it as a different way to publish their poetry. Songify is available for free on Apple and Android devices, but additional soundtracks can be purchased for a nominal fee.
- Puppet Pals is similar to Toontastic as students can create puppets and record their voices in a play format. In order to publish and save a final play, you will need to purchase the "director's pass" for $2.99.
- TripWow is an intuitive tool that leads users through the basic steps of creating a simple travel documentary using the photos, or images, that they have. It guides the user in pinpointing a starting destination and an ending destination. When it is published, it begins with a map that shows the journey and tells how many miles have been travelled. Captions can be added, music selected, and it can easily be shared through social media outlets, emails, or embedded into websites, wikis, or blogs. Read more about how TripWow can be used in classrooms: A Wow Way to Support Student Learning and Oh the Places They Can Go: Sharing the Journey to Destinations Unknown.
- Padlet (formerly Wallwisher) is a tool that allows the user to pin items to a digital pinboard. Images, links, and photos can be included. Padlet is a great way to allow students to share previous knowledge, document new learning, or pose questions to their peers. Here is the Padlet we used during our session together.
- The Global Read Aloud wiki is a place for students from all over the world to publish the work that they have completed each week while reading the book. In addition to publishing on the wiki, many classes also publish their projects on their blogs. Here are some that my class published on our class blog: Ivan and the Epigraph, Inspiration from Ivan's Art, Character Trading Cards. Since we have a lot of followers from around the world that follow our class wiki, my students also published some projects on there.
Will you join us? Video from founder, Pernille Ripp.
Sign up to be involved in the Global Read Aloud 2016.
Please stay in touch. I would love to continue these conversations. You can follow me on my blog at [email protected], on Twitter and Instagram @juliedramsay or on my Facebook author/educator page, Julie D. Ramsay.