Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
SOS Packet 4Twenty Questions
Multiple PerspectivesHalf the Picture
Reading Between the Lines
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
Materials: Approximately 10 images printed in advance, writing utensils for each student
1. Teacher Prep: Print images from Discovery Education that pertain to your topic and post them around the classroom. Develop a higher order inquiry question that will prod students to ask more questions as they attempt to answer the provided question and/or determine the broad topic of study.
2. Explain to the students that they will view some images around the class that are all related to a bigger idea and that the images are merely a snapshot.
3. Have the students move around the room and take a moment at each photo to think of questions they may have about the bigger picture question that you asked.
4. Continue until all of the students have had a chance to analyze each photo. 5. Come together as a group and have the students share the questions they
created.6. Print or post students’ collective questions around the classroom, or share on a
website so that your class will be able to refer to the ideas throughout the unit.
Twenty QuestionsThe game Twenty Questions is widely known and helps encourage questioning and deductive reasoning. “The act of questioning actually has a physiological impact on the human brain. The neurons make more connections because of the body’s need to deal with a question.” (Leading With Questions, Michael Marquardt) Creating a questioning culture within the classroom helps improve problem solving, develop self-confidence, and foster individualized learning. This strategy takes a spin on the traditional game as a way to encourage students to think through and articulate questions about a unit or topic of study.
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
This strategy is an effective way to encourage student inquiry by promoting the processes of questioning and deductive reasoning in the classroom.
1. Challenge students to find the answers to questions by working in small groups or pairs.
2. Use a developed list of questions as a scavenger hunt in Discovery Education.
3. Share and pause video or audio segments every 60 seconds and allow students to write questions.
How do organisms in these environments meet all their needs?
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
Materials: an image or video about the topic, paper, writing utensil
1. Select one image or video. It is best if the video or image has many components, as students will be responsible for pulling out several details and different perspectives.
2. Have students examine the image through the perspective of an object or person represented.
3. Ask students to write a narrative explaining what they see, hear, say, and/or experience from that perspective.
4. Allow students to share their stories with other people who wrote from the same perspective and/or different perspectives, to compare and contrast details.
Multiple PerspectivesThe Multiple Perspectives strategy uses images to engage students in multiple perspectives of a topic in a way that plays to their unique learning styles. The theory of multiple intelligences, proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983, has been leveraged in classrooms across the world as a way to differentiate instruction and appeal to students’ strengths and interests. By closely examining the details within an image or video clip, students can immerse themselves in a topic and express understanding according to their unique learning style.
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
In the information age, students are bombarded with images, videos, and data. It is easy for the details to get lost in the big picture. By focusing on multiple perspectives, students will be able to examine and explain specific details as they relate to the big picture.
In the sample image below, students can take the perspective of the drummer in the upper middle portion of the image and write a song with appropriate content from the time period. They might also take the perspective of the gentlemen holding the note in the lower right corner and write a response in the form of a letter. Or, they might create a news report from the battlefield for the newspaper being reviewed in the upper left corner.
Have students choose one perspective and keep a diary or journal from that person’s viewpoint.
Ask students what might happen next after the video or image. Students will then answer from each of the different perspectives.
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
Materials: reading passage, paper, highlighter, online access to Wordle.net
1. Copy and paste text from a reading passage into Wordle.net.2. Display the word cloud to students. Have students predict the big idea or
concept they will be studying. 3. Select the six most frequent (largest displayed) words and conduct vocabulary
development activities with students. 4. Distribute the reading passage, and allow students to individually skim through
the text to find and highlight vocabulary words.5. Have students read the passage in partners or in small groups and complete
comprehension activities.
Reading Between the LinesWords are a powerful force. Sometimes, it is best to allow words to reveal their own hidden messages. Wordle.net™ is a visually stimulating instructional tool that allows the user to copy and paste text and generate a word cloud. The more frequently a word is present in the original text, the larger it will appear on the image. Through this tool, we can reveal the most important parts of a text to build background knowledge for solid understanding of content.
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
This strategy allows students to examine important vocabulary associated with reading passages. Wordle.net provides a quick visual representation that allows teachers to engage in vocabulary development activities before reading a passage. This will ensure that students understand the key ideas in a text.
•Have students write summaries of the reading passage and copy their text into Wordle.net to look for similarities between the word clouds.
•Have students create visual glossaries for vocabulary words by sketching graphic representations of the most frequently used words.
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
Materials: video segment (2-5 minutes), image, blank paper, and writing utensil
1. Find a video and an image that demonstrate the big idea of your unit of study.2. Copy only ½ of the image so that students can not see the entire picture. 3. Distribute the image and have students glue it into their interactive notebooks.4. Explain that they will now watch a video segment about the concept and they
will use information gathered from the segment to complete the picture, label it, and add supporting information.
5. After viewing the segment, provide time for students to draw, label, and add supporting details.
6. Have students work in pairs or small groups to compare their completed picture and examine similarities and differences.
Half the PictureIn essence, the active processing theory rests on a principle of "use it or lose it" (Kaufeldt, 2010). This means that students must be actively involved in what they are learning. This strategy leverages the use of Interactive Student Notebooks. These notebooks have a "left-side" (output), "right-side" (input) orientation to help students actively record, organize, and process new information. By completing half the picture, students are actively engaged in their learning and can have an opportunity to share what they've learned in an Interactive Student Notebook.
Simple instructional strategies that incorporate digital media in meaningful, effective, and practical ways.
Access more of these strategies at links.DiscoveryEducation.com/sos
By completing half of a picture, students are actively engaged in their learning. They have to sum up what they’ve learned as they fill in the other half of the images and take notes on the information. Using Interactive Student notebooks encourages students to process what they’ve learned and present it visually.
Here is an example of what a student notebook entry might look like:
•Have students find additional images that support the concept studied, and add those images to their notebook.
•Have students open their notebooks and leave them on their desks. Provide three sticky notes to each student and have students circulate to leave positive feedback and/or ask questions for classmates by posting sticky notes on the notebooks. If a notebook has three sticky notes it is “closed,” so all students receive feedback.
