 Hello, hello, and welcome to PD and your PJs. I'm so excited to be here with you to talk about all of the ways that you can use CISA to read, write, and record poetry. I can't wait to give you several great new ideas with activity links. You should hear my voice talking now. I do want you to know that we are recording this presentation and you will receive that in an email shortly after we conclude. The best part though is that we'll also share the slides, so those will be coming to you in an email as well and then you can go back through those at your convenience and take a closer look and click through those and click on those activity links and save them to your own library. Quick introduction, my name is Julie. I was a high school ELA teacher for 18 years and I also worked with students of all age levels in tech integration for my last four years of teaching. So some of the examples I'm gonna share with you are coming from older kids and some from younger kids. I'm now on the teacher community team at CISA. I would love if you could go on Twitter and give me a follow at EdTechJulieJ. I share lots of tips and resources related to CISA and of course you can connect with our whole team on Twitter at CISA. So if you are brand new to CISA and you're just getting started and you're not sure how to set up a class or you need other introductory materials, go ahead and find those at ideas.cisa.me. We're just going to be talking about poetry tonight. So I do want you to know if you're watching a recording and you're not with us live, you can see a QR code on most of the slides that I'm gonna be showing you, scan that and that's how you can access the slides if you're not joining us live or did not register for this webinar. If you're registered, you're gonna be receiving those in an email shortly just like I said before, but I did wanna make sure if you're watching this video later, you know how to access the slides and you can just do that by scanning one of those QR codes. Okay, so it's April, it's National Poetry Month. This might be the time of year that you're devoting some lessons and some class time to poetry. I do wanna give you a quick tip before we get further into our presentation. If poetry is something that's coming up for you just as a unit or a seasonal thing, like in April, go ahead and create a poetry folder, that way the creations that your students make and some of the things like we're talking about tonight can get saved in a special place for easy organizations that you can access them later. Remember, if you add punctuation, maybe like a period before the title poetry on your folder name, and it'll actually bump your folder, you'll bump that name to the top of your list. So if you're working with younger students and you want them to be able to find poetry on a long list of folders, just add a period before the word poetry and it'll bump it right to the top and then you can always edit that folder name later and take out that period, but I find that that's a great way to make sure students can get their creations in the right place. So if this is something new for you, you're just now starting a little bit of poetry, create a poetry folder. I wanna give you about four brand new ideas for different things you can do with poetry in Seesaw tonight. This is one of my favorite ones. I call this magnet poetry and I think it's just because in my classroom, when I was teaching, I had whiteboards and I actually had a set of magnet words that looked actually just like this. They were white with black letters and they were on my whiteboard and students would play with them and move them around. And when Seesaw came up with labels in one of their updates, maybe like a year and a half ago, when I saw those labels, the first thing I thought was that those look like magnets and that I wanted to use them for magnet poetry. So I've experimented with that a lot with my own students and I was doing this type of thing in my classroom last year when I was working with students. And so what you can do now that Seesaw has activities which they did not have at the time I was in my classroom, and you can actually create part of this for them. So I wanted to make sure tonight that I included an activity link to this for you. So I'm popping out of my slides real quick to show you that you can click this link and it's showing on the screen. So if you're watching me on a recording, you can get that link later. This is something you could do with your students. You would have them add their own magnets or I suppose you could edit this activity and add magnets. But the idea would be that students have like a bank of words. In this case, they're seasonal. It's April and I made the theme like a spring or April theme. You could do this any time of year with any kind of image. And then all you're doing really is adding a seasonal image to be like your background. And then students can add the word magnets which are really labels in Seesaw or you could do that yourself. So like these are the directions that I was using last year in April. But now because Seesaw has activities, students could do this just as an activity and all those instructions would be there for them and they could listen to those read aloud as well. So I just wanted to show you how you could do that. Of course I've done magnet poems in winter or with other backgrounds. And you don't even have to add a background if you don't want. I just think it looks kind of nice and gives kind of students maybe a hint at what the theme or the topic might be. The thing I always say about poetry and I of course was teaching big kids who were like in 12th grade. It's not that students necessarily don't like poetry. It's just really intimidating to start with a blank piece of paper and just write a poem off the top of your head. So I always like to have activities like this, formulas, templates, something that they can kind of start with. And I think a magnet poem is a great place to start. And in my situation, like I said, my students had familiarity with the actual tangible magnet poems, like magnet pieces that were on my back whiteboard. So they kind of knew the gist of what magnet poetry was. So I hope this is something you maybe want to try with your students. That idea that the labels in CISA look like magnets, I've used also for something like fridge spelling, like type your spelling words and add them to this picture of a refrigerator. And of course we're doing that with younger students. So if that inspires you, I wanted to give you that link as well. You can click on that in the slide. CISA also has this activity now in the activity library and that's new this month. So you can get this in CISA now, it's the same thing. It's like a magnet poem where these words are already there and students can take their finger and move those labels around or add new labels to create a magnet poem. So this also has like a nature or a spring theme. Your students will love that. I like the idea that it's tactile as well. So it's not just them writing something or typing something, but they're like actually moving those pieces around which is kind of cool as well. If they create some of these types of poems, please don't hesitate to share them with us on social media. We'd love to take a closer look. Another idea I wanna share with you is book spine poetry. And I've done this with younger kids and older students as well. The idea would be that you find some books and arrange them. Again, I really like the idea of that being hands-on and not so digital that it's kind of analog. They're taking books from your library or from your classroom and then arranging the spines in such a way that the words could make a poem. The teacher Brenda Moro who can be found on Twitter at itech5m has created this activity already. So the instructions are there for you and if you want to use her activity, the link is here or you can click on it later when you go back through the slides. So this is the book spine poetry activity. You can see what she had her students do was stack the books. So these are the words of the poems. So they stack the books but then she had them type the poem here as well which is kind of cool as well. So they're taking the photo and then adding the label here to type their poem. And then the best part of course in Seesaw is that they can always record themselves reading their poem and I'm gonna talk about that as we conclude tonight as well. So that book spine poetry is pretty cool. I like this one too. And this was a hit with my older students. It would maybe look a little different if you were doing it with younger kiddos. I was doing it with 11th and 12th graders and these are a couple of examples from last year. Quick shout out to my students, Caitlin and Jenna whose work I'm showing on the screen right now. The idea with a blackout poem is that you're taking a page from your book. So maybe they're reading something, they're taking a picture of it or maybe they're even reading it on their tablet. Like Caitlin whose tree blackout poem is on the left there was reading in iBooks and she literally just took a screenshot. So what this looks like at the beginning is just a picture of text. So it's just words on a page. And then the student uses the drawing tool in CISA to white out or to black out the words that they don't want in their poem. And I wanted to give you that as an activity so you could see the directions. So later when you click on the link, it will look like this. Okay, so the directions are all there for you. So they take the picture of the page in their book and they're kind of trying to identify the words and the phrases that could make up their poem and then they're basically crossing out anything that they don't want in their poem. Then they can read it aloud, which is the best part. If you have never heard of blackout poetry and this kind of doesn't make sense to you, I wanna tell you some other things you can look up. Sometimes these are called redacted poems. Sometimes you could even think of them as a white out poem. So blackout poetry is one of the ways I first heard it described, but you could use the white marker as well and you can see that Caitlyn kind of did that on the left with the background of her tree as well. So you could call it a white out poem, you could call it a blackout poem or a redacted poem. When I first started teaching, we were calling this something like a found poem, like you would find the words for your poem in a longer piece of text, like an article or a page from your book. So now digitally it's really easy to make these blackout poems. I included some links in the notes to the slides here so you can take a closer look at some of those resources, but this is really easy to do in CSOT and it's very fun. And like I said, even my older students really liked this activity. And then another idea that I wanna share with you is how students really could use a fill in the blank or a template to create a poem. This is a Sincane and you can see the instructions for that are showing in the template, which I do have attached in this activity. So if you wanna grab this activity for your students, the template is there and they're kind of typing in to fill in the blanks. I guess what I wanted to show you about this is that I think you could think of this also, like you could use the same kind of CSOT activity for a haiku or a diamente, like the idea that if students are following directions for like types of words or syllable counts, like in a haiku, that's also an easy way to get students inspired to write poems. They know they have some rules to follow, a recipe, a formula, a template. It's a little easier again, like I said, than just writing a poem from scratch on a page. So I like the idea of giving them this template and letting them fill in the blanks. And then like I always say, the best part of course is that they're able to record their voices reading it. I also wanna tell you that, you know, I was teaching older students. So we weren't approaching poetry as just something to do in April for poetry month. I was actually teaching a literature class and it was a genre study. So poetry was one of the genres we were covering. We weren't covering it for the whole semester, but just, you know, part of the time. And one of the things they were doing is poetry analysis. And so they were reading a poem, studying it, interpreting it, analyzing it. And I was using some questions for that activity with 11th and 12th graders from Mrs. Orman. And you can find her on Twitter at Mrs. Orman. So I was using some of her resources. My students were answering some pretty in-depth questions. And then what I wanted them to do with their poetry analysis was maybe to make something digital. So I had students making an Adobe Spark video, for example, they had some choices about what applications they wanted to use for that. And then as part of their video, they were reading their poem aloud and also sharing some of their analysis and their answers. And they included the link there for you. It's not a seesaw activity with instructions, but I wanted you to hear an older students work in case you were interested. If you're not just interested in having students write their own poetry, but you're interested in having them analyze a classic poem, this would be the type of activity maybe that you could create. So if you click on that image there later, you can hear that students work, okay? And then don't forget to check out Mrs. Orman's resources if you are interested. Final unplug for students recording themselves. That's the best part. Students have always been able to create poetry on paper. We've had students for years doing poetry worksheets or writing poems and notebooks. But seesaw's gonna allow your students to have a big audience. Their family members are probably connected, maybe even other people in your school. So always make them record. Like if you are having students create poems, let's hear those poems being read aloud in their own voices. So I just wanted to put in a couple of video links here. These are other webinar recordings, but we've had some presenters talk about seesaw for reading fluency and this presenter Lorraine talks about reading poems. So if you wanna watch her short video, there's some tips there. And then in the bottom there, you can see Angela's recording about recording stations and just different tips for how to get good clean recordings in seesaw. So you can check those out later when you open these slides if you want more tips specific to recording. Okay, so I just wanted to give you three or four new ideas. And mostly I would just love to see what your students are creating. And I'm happy to answer other questions about other activities that I didn't have time for tonight because I have a couple of other things that might leave that I could share with you about poetry. Seesaw is a great resource for you as far as getting your students to share their creations and read their poems out loud. So I can't wait to hear more about how you're using seesaw for poetry. Don't forget, you can join us for seesaw chat on Twitter on the second and fourth Thursdays or you can connect with us on Instagram and Facebook as well. As we conclude tonight, if you have a survey that pops up on your screen, if you don't mind taking a minute, I would really appreciate your feedback. It helps us get better and know what other topics you might be interested in. We also draw our t-shirt winner every week from those survey responses. Thanks so much for joining me. I can't wait to hear more about what your students are doing with poetry and seesaw. And I hope I get to see you in a future session again soon. Thanks, bye-bye.