This session will explore how AI tools provide real-time feedback and scaffolding to enhance student engagement and save valuable time! By leveraging AI-powered platforms, educators can offer personalized support that meets students at their level, keeping them motivated and engaged. These tools generate data that drives instruction, allowing teachers to maximize small-group time and focus on targeted support. AI-powered tools like Snorkl, Brisk Teaching, and Notebook LM offer instant feedback, personalized support, and interactive learning experiences. Integrating these tools helps teachers meet the needs of diverse learners in literacy while using data to inform and guide instruction, maximize instructional time, and foster deeperstudent engagement. Exp lore how AI tools enhance literacy through real-time feedback and interactive support, with real classroom examples from grades 3-5. These examples can be easily adapted in classrooms at any grade level and across content areas.
Blog Archives
Three Minute Poems: Mining, Crafting, Polishing, Sharing
This session will guide you through timed writing protocols designed for instant results. The initial goal is to show how students can write—in as little as ten minutes—a spontaneous, no-pressure poem draft. A draft they may eventually choose to revise, edit, polish, and even publish. The long-term goal is to help students and teachers develop a creative writing practice that resists writer’s block and channels the spirit of discovery. You will leave the session with tools to help you and your students start, develop, and finish a poem.
From Margin to Center: Moving Students’ Voices to the Middle of the Page
In research and other text-based writing situations, student voice is often marginalized—the result both of students’ reluctance to claim authority over somewhat unfamiliar topics and of the cold formality of stereotypical academic language. This session will equip teachers with ways to help students gain confidence and authority in their own perspectives while understanding their relationship with other authors and texts, allowing young writers to join ongoing (written) conversations that are meaningful to them.
Connected & Invested: Our Path to Purposeful Connections and Redefined ELA Instruction
Join us—instructional and technology specialists—as we recount our journey to transform literacy instruction for grades 4-5 in our district. Along the way, we leveraged new partnerships, fostered unprecedented collaboration among teachers, and united our entire staff as one team working together. Our common goal: transforming literacy instruction into something that is meaningful, standards-aligned, highly engaging, and that happens with intention across every content area. We’ll tell you about the grand triumphs we experienced, such as our implementation of Expert Packs as a curricular resource, and how we encountered unexpected heroes, like the students who harnessed their newfound autonomy and enthusiastically took charge of their own learning. Our quest was not without its challenges. We’ll share how we had to learn from a few failures, correct a couple missteps, and even navigate the occasional antagonist along the way. Rest assured, we’ll offer ideas and materials that can be tweaked to meet the needs of any elementary-through-middle-school classroom whether you anticipate your story will be written solo or will include a whole cast of supporting characters. With each twist and turn of our narrative, we’ll present the concrete strategies and usable resources you’re craving so that you walk away empowered and prepared to embark on your own journey toward literacy magic.
From Pages to Possibilities: A Novel Approach to Amplifying Joyful Latine Voices
Representation matters—and joyful Latine stories transform classrooms for all students. This session shares fresh, creative ways to bring vibrant Latine books into novel studies and classroom libraries. Participants will learn about high-quality books featuring Latine representation, activities to support them, and actionable ideas to amplify student voice, pride, and literacy through authentic voices.