Goal Setting with Popplet

Popplet is an iPad app that creates quick and easy webs, mind maps, brainstorms and flow charts. There are minimal bells and whistles so students are not tempted to spend most of the creating time playing with settings and features, as can happen.

We decided to have the students write their goals for term two in Popplet, which we will be sharing with parents at student-led conferences. They can also show their parents how to create a poppet at the conference.

Popplet is a great app for visual learners, and unlike some computer programs that have similar features, it is quick and simple. We like using iPads for writing activities occasionally because it is very motivating for students, particularly if they find writing activities difficult or have written output challenges. As the students were working it was easy for us to do a quick visual check if students were understanding how to create categories and subcategories of their ideas. One student had popples (text boxes) all over her screen, completely unrelated to one another, with ideas randomly listed, so I was able to get her back on track without having her start all over again.

This student has included several photos to illustrate his goals and objectives. He should have had each objective
come from the main goal, rather than linking to each other.

At various points throughout the class I asked several students if I could show their popplet to the whole class using the projector. We discussed aspects that we liked and things that we noticed, which helped give ideas and suggestions to struggling students.

Goal Setting Project Criteria:

• student goals must be school related (can include fitness, organization, friendship, writing/reading, math, etc)
• all goals have to be one colour, and the sub-goals, or objectives, must be another colour
• take a photo of themselves using the iPad camera and import it into their popplet
• use the largest font for all popples so that it is easier to read when we print them (the medium and small fonts were almost unreadable when we printed them from email)

As can be seen with this poppet, the smaller font sizes are difficult to read. The drawing feature is illustrated
on the left side of the popplet,

Popplet features we like:

• students can change colours of each "popple" (box) to categorize their ideas
• they can include photos from the camera roll or take a photo using the in-app camera
• students can use the drawing feature to create doodles
• additional popples are created with a single tap to the grey circles on each popple
• the popples can be moved and resized at any point during the creating process

Now that our students have learned how to use Popplet we can use this in other content areas, such as for our study of Japan in Social Studies. 

Blackout Poetry

Doodle Buddy app

We enjoy teaching poetry with our students because we learn more about them as writers and thinkers. Sometimes we are surprised by students when they reveal perspectives, through their poetry, that we have not seen from them before. Many of our students look forward to poetry because it gives them the opportunity to write in a format shorter than paragraphs and essays.

Sometimes poetry can be challenging because we push them to use figurative language, descriptive phrases and powerful vocabulary to describe their experiences. For those students, I like teaching blackout poetry, a type of found poetry, because they do not have to write the poem themselves or from their own experience.

Created on the iPad using Doodle Buddy

The idea is to create a poem by selecting interesting and descriptive words or phrases in newspaper or magazine articles, books or websites. Then the rest of the words or phrases on the page are blacked out, or coloured over in some way, to highlight the chosen words. I begin by modelling how to create a blackout poem by using a newspaper article, and through the gradual release model we work toward the students creating their own.

Last year when I taught blackout poetry we used the camera in the iPads to take photos book pages, then Doodle Buddy, a drawing app, to choose words and create the blackout artwork.

This year we used Doodle Buddy again to create a draft of the poem, but the students decided that they wanted to complete the final product by hand. We have used iPads for several projects this year and they wanted a change and a chance to do go beyond what they could do artistically on the iPad.

As with last year, they took a photo of a page from a book and circled words and phrases. Using the iPads for their draft only gave them a chance to edit freely without having to erase on the hardcopy, thereby creating pencil marks and smudges. Once they felt ready and had conferenced with me, they were free to doodle and create on the copied page. The iPad allowed us to reduce the amount of photocopying necessary because students could try many different pages until the found one that worked for them.

Blackout poem draft on the iPad using Doodle Buddy

Their final poems were all brief, with few lines in their stanzas, but many contained depth in the meaning or message.

Others were more simple or basic, but the students created interesting designs and patterns that are visually appealing.

This is always an enjoyable and creative project and the students like the art component. As you can see from the samples, their blackouts can go from merely interesting design, to images that relate to the meaning of their chosen words.