As any secondary ELA teacher knows, finding the time to teach grammar and editing skills to students is hard. There is SO much to teach and such limited time to teach it all. This year has been even harder with the shortened instructional minutes. i-Ready has lessons for a few of the standards, but not all of them. Also, Collections does offer slideshows called Grammar Notes, which are pretty interactive but there does need to be some preparation done to create accountability for students. After trying multiple approaches and not finding the results I was looking for, I switched to creating lessons through EdPuzzle.
What is EdPuzzle?
EdPuzzle has a large variety of created lessons from teachers but also allows you to upload a video of your own and create checkpoint questions during the video. The video will stop at these points and require an answer from the students. You can also select the option to prevent skipping ahead, which requires the students to watch the video before they answer the questions.
How is this used to teach editing and grammar?
As an alternative to the traditional daily grammar warm ups many teachers use during class time, I have been creating videos for students to watch on Monday (our office day). The video is about 5-8 minutes long and presents sentences with errors then walks students through the editing process, as you would in the classroom. At strategic points in the lesson, students mark which changes should be made by answering multiple-choice questions. I record my videos then edit them to pause at the right moment to ask a question as I would ask in the classroom. Once students respond, the video continues and I discuss the right answer.
Sounds good, but is it a lot of work?
Recording the video each week takes no more than 10 minutes and then adding it to EdPuzzle and creating questions is another 15 minutes. For a week's worth of grammar and editing practice in one day, it takes about 30 minutes of preparation. That's not bad, especially considering that EdPuzzle lets me know exactly how my students did with data reports.
Data and Feedback
Before using EdPuzzle, I was meeting with students during Zoom and sharing the sentences to edit over the screen. I then gave them five minutes to complete a Google Form that asked questions about what needed to be added or changed in the sentences. After that time was up, we went over the sentence together. The problem with this was that it was difficult for students to see the edits as they were working independently on the Google Form unless they wrote it out for themselves as they worked. When students were using the EdPuzzle lessons, I have seen an increase of 30% in overall passing rates. More importantly, students have told me how helpful the videos are and that they feel like they are actually learning how to fix mistakes. That feedback is more meaningful than any information data can provide.
This is all a continuous learning cycle and it has definitely been a learning opportunity for every single teacher. The good news is we made it through an entire semester this year and survived!
Keep the magic alive,
Kandyce Valverde
7/8 Language Arts
Witsey Middle School
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