Sorry, I switched into acaemic mode there for a second.
Basically, I'm writing about how to help my multilingual students engage an understand A Raisin in the Sun and other texts we read in that unit.
It's not about simplifying the readings. I want to help them be full participants. Because I also team teach students with IEPs, many of these strategies will help those students. In fact, interacting, discussing, connecting to prior experiences should benefit everyone.
Shoot, just getting kids to talk about the play and make predictions will be a win.
One thing I'm exploring, and would love to hear your thoughts about, is how AI tools can support student learning. Diffit will create texts at various reading levels. MagicSchool will create discussion questions and sentence stems. Class Companion will autograde and give feedback to students on their questions. Curipod will even create interactive slideshows that respond to students' questions and answers.
I haven't tried all of these AI tools, but I have messed around with a few of them (with mixed results). They could be amazing tools to help us do our jobs so much better, but they also can be unrealiable, dehumanizing, devalueing of the work we do, and used for nefarious purposes.
My students had a reading test on Friday. We generally give them the readings a few days in advance so they can study and annotate them to prepare for the test. This time, I invited them to try a tool like Diffit to help them study. I showed them how to feed the reading into the tool and choose an appropriate reading level. I modeled getting the AI to give them a full length version of the reading (instead of just a summary) and highlighted all the sample questions (multiple choice, short answer, and discussion) that it provided for practice. I also pointed out the vocabulary words Diffit highlighted and asked why those words might be important for the text.
Before I turned them loose, I also reminded them to compare the original text to the Diffit version, to notice discrepencies. I shared that sometimes the AI misunderstands the story and that they needed to use their own human judgement.
I don't think we can get kids to avoid AI completely. I'm curioius if we can convince them to use it carefully, responsibly, and effectively.
How do we feel about teaching kids to use Diffit to make their own accommodated texts?