Cool Technology Ideas to Use with Teaching Language Arts

I read an amazing and enlightening article entitled "Incorporating Technology into the Modern English Language Arts Classroom" by Steven A. Carbone II (2011). 

Before reading this article I tried to think of all the ways I've tried to incorporate technology into teaching language arts and the list came up rather short.  

This is what I've tried in the past:

Storybird.com--This website allows students to create a story centered around professional illustrations

Edublog-I created an edublog for my classroom. I have students comment about their AR books that they have been reading.  You can't imagine how anxious and excited the students get to post their reactions!

So, onto this pretty cool article, which I will add was written in 2011, meaning there are probably several more current technological ideas that could be added to this list.  

Here are some of the ideas the author offered:

Literary Remix:  Carbone (2011) uses this term to refer to the traditional process of reading, comprehending, writing.  Putting a new spin on this process in which students build on their own connections of the reading material to regurgitate their understanding. Typically this is done on a piece of paper in which the student writes responses to the reading. 

ICT Instruction:  ICT standards for using contemporary activities that involve information and communication technology.  This replaces the use of paper and pencil texts and writing.   

Carbone offers some new ways to do this involving technology. 

-Comic Life: a software program that allows students to create a fictional, comic-book-style dialogue between themselves and one of the authors. 

-Digital Tools: students can easily mix text, sound, video, and images, to create an original, multimodal text. 

-Wiki Pages:  Students organize information about summaries, vocabulary, and characterization on these pages.  Because these pages are public content, students tend to put forth more effort in designing, creating, and posting content than they would on traditional worksheets or packets. 

-Text Messages:  This is one of my favorite ideas.  Carbone offered the example of a teacher having his students create text messages between Romeo and Juliet.  This idea can be carried to any book or set of characters. 

-Video Montages:  iMovie, Animoto, or Photostory are just a few of the options out there that allow students to create quality videos honoring, introducing or reacting to a story or book with the use of photos, music, and video.  The results can be quite powerful and students put forth great effort to produce quality results.  These videos can also be used to promote digital storytelling. 

-Writing Screenplays:  While this technique does not necessarily employ technology, it does focus on the academic and creative aspects of storytelling and can be highly engaging. 

Ultimately, these methods don’t try and fight against the technology that the digital natives that exist amongst our students are using on a daily basis outside of the classroom.  Rather these methods embrace this technology and welcome it inside the classroom to motivate and engage students. 

Reference:

Carbone, S. (2011). Incorporating technology into the modern english language arts classroom,
         Student pulse, Vol. 3 (No. 1), p. 1-3.