Comparing and Contrasting Text in the Digital Age

These week I am working on a very important standards with my students: Comparing and contrasting two informational texts about the same topic. In the past, I have had students read two informational texts and compare these texts in their reader's notebooks. With the PARCC test looming around the corner, I thought it was time to venture into the 21st century!

I was lucky enough to attend a workshop earlier this month about using the Microsoft suite to update instruction in this digital age. After the workshop, I was itching to give these new tools a try. This is my first attempt!

For this lesson, I used OneNote. Unfortunately, my district only purchased accounts for the teachers and middle schoolers. Elementary students will receive accounts next year. For this reason, I had to make a few adjustments to my plan.

I created an "online binder" for this lesson. Normally I would assign elements from this binder to my students, but since they do not have accounts, I created a page for each students in my "binder."

To begin, students watched a video about how a robot called the VGo is being used in schools. The students had very little background knowledge about this topic, and the video really sparked their interest.

Then, students read two articles using the OneNote app on the iPad. Both of these articles were about how schools are using the VGo robot. Each article had one question that required students to type a response, while also highlighting evidence from the text.

We continued to use our RACE technique! Then, students created a Venn Diagram on the iPads comparing and contrasting the two texts. As the final activity, students answered a short answer question requiring students to analyze the way information was presented in each text, including the text structure. This answer was also constructed using the RACE strategy on the iPads.

Overall, the students were highly engaged in this lesson. They loved using the iPad for every step of this lesson. They're typing skills definitely need some refining. I am going to continue using OneNote for many lessons in the future!

How do you prepare students for reading and analyzing texts on the computer?