RWT secrets revealed: K-W-L chart creator!

It's been a month--a month!--since my last blog. That just won't do!  Though I have a good excuse and a couple doctor notes.

What to talk about now that it is July?

Hmmm.

Maybe I should unveil my big ReadWriteThink project of the year....

Sure, let's go with that.

I mentioned in a previous post that I have been working on redesigns of RWT interactives: giving them a new luck, adding new features, and updating them with the Work Saver functionality. What I did not mention is that we are also working on three new interactives for the site. We hope to have them up for the new school year, but we don't have a set-in-stone timeline yet.

I won't reveal them all (yet) but I will talk about the one that I spearheaded, the interactive K-W-L chart creator.

I assume you know what a K-W-L chart is, but in case you don't, here is the gist. The name stands for what I Know, what I Want to know, and what I Learned. It begins as a pre-reading exercise in which students list what they know about a topic and what they want to learn about the topic before reading about the topic, filling in the K column and W column respectively. After the reading is finished, the students then list what they learned in the L column.

If it is just a chart that students fill in, then why make it an interactive? After all, RWT already has a printout.

This is where the Work Saver feature comes in handy--it allows us to think about interactives as something teachers and students can go back to rather than just use once and immediately print out a final result. It gives us the ability to consider whole-classroom uses.

The idea with the K-W-L chart creator is that a teacher could start a whole-class discussion about the topic the students are going to read--ideal if the classroom is fortunate to have an interactive whiteboard, but that's not necessary. The class collectively discusses what everyone knows about the topic, and the teacher fills out one K column for the class, maybe the W column as well. The teacher can then save the file and send it to all the students so they can fill in the L column as an individual assignment.

So there is a sneak peek of what we have in the works for this year. And there are two other new inteactives coming. I'll reveal those in the upcoming months, along with screenshots when I can manage.

And that does it for this week. See you back here later for more behind the scenes at IRA! Maybe I'll sneak into some meetings and see what other people are working on in the building.

Wes