Very Versatile Tool With Some Potentially Wonderful Uses
Community Review for Genius
My Take
Genius ends up being a very capable tool for the classroom but takes a bit of effort to become accustomed to using. The plethora of content and ease of distraction for students can be a downside but the ability to annotate and share on the spot while your peers do the same is extremely helpful. If Genius extended their features a bit more and allowed private sessions where a teacher could host a particular work and session that would be an incredibly useful step up. As it stands, Genius is a very helpful tool that could use some tweaking to be better streamlined towards the classroom. The upside of this tool, as well, is it allows students to search a variety of things such as songs that can then be used as a reference to a work in the classroom discussion or for a paper.
How I Use It
This product has an excellent range of uses in teaching. Students can annotate texts found through Genius as well as see descriptions and annotations by other users. A teacher can have students view Poetry, Stories, Songs, etc and have them comment or explore other user comments to gain additional information as well as give their own input. It is very helpful to pull up a piece on the projector in the classroom and have students give their input through Genius while also engaging in instruction. The only issues I could see with Genius is the task of sorting through the content they have as well as emails being required in order to annotate a work. It would be nice if there were a feature that allowed a verified teacher to host an anonymous session with a work of their own uploading that is in a private session.
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A great way to promote close reading
