Great Tool for Young Writers That Struggle with Fluency
Community Review for Educreations
My Take
I think this is must have app for anyone wanting to reach the needs of all their students in a Writers' Workshop. I love that the app is rather simple in that students are only using limited drawing tools and the audio recording. With ease students can take a photo of the graphic organizer or other planing tool presented in a focus lesson and then fill it out with illustrations and audio recording. Overall, it is a great product for students and teachers!
How I Use It
While this product was perhaps intended for teacher use in lesson developing, I have found the uses unlimited in my Writers' Workshop! With a high EL population, high class size, and full inclusion of students with special needs in my 3rd grade class, Writers' Workshop present many challenges. With the use of this app, many of my low literacy students can take the mini-lesson concepts and first develop their writing pieces on the interactive whiteboard. The ease of creating through pictures and audio recording frees their thoughts up without the frustrations of pencil and paper.
Once the students have recorded and illustrated their ideas on the app, they can then replay it and dictate their own writing in their Writers' Notebooks. The ability to pause and replay lowers their stress levels of sounding every word out or struggling with the conventions of Standard English. When I conference with struggling students, I am no longer looking at a blank paper, but instead having deep conversation based off if their ideas and development of a story.