September 14

When Tech Goes Low-Tech

Things I’d rather be doing right now: watching Worst Cooks in America – Celebrity Edition, snuggling with the dogs, finishing a book (preferably The Great Gatsby* and not A Short Guide to Action Research), sweeping and vacuuming**, or just about anything. Instead, I’m sitting here, trying to sum up why a teacher who wholeheartedly embraces all things technology decides to have her students keep an interactive English notebook (IEN). And pretty much, it all boils down to this: it just works.

I work in a district where I am privileged to have ample access to technology on a daily basis. For the past three school years, I’ve had a cart of Chromebooks in my classroom every single day. Yes – computers day in, day out. The first year, I thought I would let my students take notes on their Chromebooks, but a funny thing happened. They were bombing. Students were so concerned about where we were and taking down every single word that they were getting lost with the notes. They were missing the details in their desire to capture the whole thing. Later, when they tried to retrieve their notes, they struggled because they couldn’t remember what they called it or they didn’t save it in the right spot (file management is a skill, folks, and middle schoolers don’t always have it). We resorted to searching based on the day that it might have been created, and nine times out of ten, we gave up and I printed out the copy of my presentation. Come time for the test, the kids who took notes electronically didn’t always study because the Internet was down or their computer was broken or some other technology related malady. Honestly, if I was frustrated, I’m sure they were frustrated. And so, I started looking at other means to achieve this end.

A pile full of journals . . . they get better and better each year

A pile full of journals . . . they get better and better each year

About six years ago, I had dabbled with an English binder full of grading rubrics and sections and truly over the top mechanisms for organizing that only I fully understood. While I appreciated the complexity of my binder, it didn’t work for many seventh graders; I think it actually might have only worked for two seventh graders if I am being completely honest. If this organization thing was going to work, I needed something much, much simpler. After doing some research, I decided to dip my toe into the world of interactive notebooks. Basically, take a composition book – I prefer the old-fashioned black and white style marbled composition book – and create a working resource that they can utilize whenever they want (except for the high stakes tests that we take in the spring). If you start looking at Pinterest for interactive notebooks, which we call our IENs, you can get quickly overwhelmed. Honestly, some of these things are truly works of art, and while I would love to have my students create something that is breathtakingly beautiful, in the end, I want them to have something that is functional and meaningful.

So what do we add to our IENs? Well, first, there’s a table of contents in which everything is listed. I model everything for them so that they can see what type of effort goes into organization, so if I call something “Capitalization: Practice,” you can bet the entire class does, too. I do have several things that I will print out and have them glue into their IENs such as today’s lesson on apostrophes. The first ten or so pages are all related to “Hard and Fast Rules” for conventions. Trust me when I say that a lot of students come with a little bit of knowledge about a whole lot of subjects. If we expect them to do something right in their writing, then they had better know where to turn. Even with more and more access to technology, they still need to know where the apostrophes and commas and quotation marks go. This is my one chance to get that information to them and to get them to practice. When one student grouses that it is boring, I agree! In fact, I agree so excitedly that I’m pretty sure my students are questioning who gave this madwoman a job. Today, when we were talking about apostrophes, I joked that I wanted to call our dog, Sadie, Apostrophe instead but was worried she would be bullied by all the other non-punctuation named dogs at the dog park. When they looked at me like I had three heads, I told them I was totally joking . . . I would have called her Ellipses instead.

Want to know how to use a comma? How to capitalize a title? Check your IEN!

Want to know how to use a comma? How to capitalize a title? Check your IEN!

In a week or so, we’ll start discussing narrative writing. All of their brainstorming will go in the IEN. When we start to examine mentor texts like “Seventh Grade” by Gary Soto or “And Weep, Like Alexander” by Neil Gaiman, they’ll find golden sentences that they can “clip” and keep in their IEN. Even during our presentations, the students will be taking notes based on what they need to know. Through it all, I, too, will be keeping an IEN. In fact, I’ll keep five – one for each of my classes. As I come across something I find interesting in the presentation, I’ll copy it into my IEN. I find my favorite sentences and add them to my own golden sentence pocket. Keeping my own notebook serves two purposes: one, if a student is absent, they can come grab my notebook and copy the info on their own, and two, it starts to give them an understanding of how to take notes. When they see me taking notes, they start to pick up on the cues.

They only thing that I don’t add to my own IEN are the warm-ups. For the first few minutes of class, my students complete a warm-up. Mondays and Wednesdays are Every-day Edit days (embedded errors in a paragraph), while Tuesdays and Thursdays are writing days. Fridays? Completely different . . . and another blog post. One part of the PSSAs, our high stakes tests, deals with embedded errors, and I detest daily oral language (DOLs) because the sentences are so over the top with errors. Instead, I’ve found that Every-day Edits are usually trickier since the mistakes are more like the ones that students make. The writing days are much simpler: respond to the prompt. I’m using a selection of these prompts because they are really good, someone already took the time to create the graphic, and they are aesthetically pleasing. For the warm-ups, I might circulate around the room and check on work, take attendance, make sure that Student A returned a paper I am looking for, take a drink of water . . . you get the idea. I’m toying with giving my students the choice to complete their warm-ups on the Chromebooks, but I’m just not sure.

If you’re considering creating an interactive notebook, you don’t have to start from scratch. Do a simple search on Pinterest for them. Consult the teachers in your building (there are four of us doing this now). Look on Teachers Pay Teachers; I’ve found that Erin Cobb’s work is fantastic and really easy to adapt to your own devices. No one said that you had to reinvent the wheel. But if you do, you might as well have a very lovely resource to guide you. That’s pretty much all I am trying to do with my IENs: giving my kiddos a constant resource to make them better writers.

A special thank you to Beverly for posting this Edutopia article on Facebook; she had no idea that my blog post tonight was going to be about my IENs and why I am using them.

*Yes, I’ve never read The Great Gatsby, but I am in the middle of it . . . just don’t tell my husband. I’d like to surprise him when I begin to intelligently drop Gatsby quotes into conversation. 
** It’s sad when vacuuming is one of the things that you would rather be doing, but then again, you’ve never seen the dog hair on my couch. 


Posted September 14, 2016 by mrsgreenwood in category Organization

About the Author

The path to teaching is not always a straight one. Prior to finally admitting I wanted to be an English teacher, I worked as a technical writer, graphic designer, pharmacy technician, and instructional assistant. Being a teacher, however, is the most rewarding career yet, save for one . . . being a mother to 26-year-old twin daughters. When I'm not teaching, I'm either reading, knitting, taking photographs, running, or writing, but teaching is never far from my mind. I truly love my job and am privileged to work with many talented colleagues and students alike.

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