April is around the corner and when we are encouraged to inspire learners to celebrate National Poetry month. No matter what subject you teach, poetry can engage learners or stir their creative juices. Use shape, acrostic, haikus or short poems as a lesson introduction for science, math, history, or any other subject. Even better, get students to create their own poems similar to Bob Grumman’s long division poem or get them to tweet haikus, such as @ScienceHaiku. They can create shape poems, with a word cloud tool like Tagxedo, to describe an event or famous person. Below are more tool and app suggestions for getting students to animate their poems. Join me this Friday, March 18th for a live presentation about animating learning with poetry, at 4pmET/8pmUK.
Enjoyed these ideas? Get your copy of Learning to Go and The 30 Goals for Teachers.
Ideas
Students can:
- go on a poetry tour of the city. Check out Poetry Tours by the Poetry Foundation.
- animate their poems with digital poster tools, like EduBuncee, Flowvella, Sway, HaikuDeck, Adobe Slate, Canva, Tackk, Visme, Smore, ThingLink, Biteslides, and EduGlogster.
- produce cool videos of their poems with Powtoon, Touchcast, WeVideo, iMovie, Animoto, Magisto, or other video creation tools and apps.
- create digital poetry portfolios with free web tools and apps, like Weebly, Educlipper, Blendspace, Pinterest, and Livebinders.
- share their poetry in digital books with web tools and apps like Storybird, LittleBirdTales, and Book Creator (IOS / Android) app.
- evaluate poetry with the Voicethread web tool and IOS app.
- use this heart shaped word cloud tool to share what they love about the subject matter.
- view animated text poetry like Television is a Drug then create their own animated text poetry presentations with multimedia tools like Powtoon, Thinglink Video, 30 Hands, Tell Me About This (IOS), Narrable (IOS), and Fotobabble.
- create talking avatars to recite their poetry with Adobe Voice, Yakit for Kids, Tellagami, and Voki.
- create sonnets with the the Poetry Engine, an online interactive.
- create their own magnetic poetry with these themed sets (mustache, nature, geek, love and poet).
Resources
Here are a few more resources:
- Here’s the Youtube video of my webinar on creating poetry with digital tools.
- Here’s my poem, A Brown Cinderella, and lesson plans to go with it.
Challenge: Try one of these resources to help your students become digital poets!
If you enjoyed these ideas, you may want to get your copy of The 30 Goals for Teachers or my $5.99 ebook, Learning to Go, which has digital/mobile activities for any device and editable/printable handouts and rubrics.
Bookmarks
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Poetry, by shellyterrell
