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.
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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.
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.
Session Materials:
Website:
http://bit.ly/smith_hnez
Notes:
Digital, reproducible copies of most handouts can be found on the conference website and at http://bit.ly/smith_hnez (links to publicly accessible Google Drive folder). Thank you for attending our session!
Curriculum control and literature suppression in ELA classrooms is nothing new. But the current climate has increased the struggle to balance academic freedom with external forces looking to restrict teachers’ autonomy. As censorship efforts grow, a subtler yet equally troubling trend is emerging: teacher self-censorship. This session will explore how and why educators are limiting their own choices in the classroom and what we can do about it.
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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.
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