Digital Poets: Activities, Web Tools & Apps

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." - Robert Frost

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April is around the corner and when we are encouraged to inspire learners to celebrate National Poetry month. No matter what subject you teach, poetry can engage learners or stir their creative juices. Use shape, acrostic, haikus or short poems as a lesson introduction for science, math, history, or any other subject. Even better, get students to create their own poems similar to Bob Grumman’s long division poem or get them to tweet haikus, such as @ScienceHaiku. They can create shape poems, with a word cloud tool like Tagxedo, to describe an event or famous person. Below are more tool and app suggestions for getting students to animate their poems. 

Digital Poets! Web Tools, Apps, & Lesson Ideas from Shelly Sanchez Terrell

Tips

Students can:

• animate their poems with digital poster tools, like EduBuncee, Adobe Express, Canva, Visme, ThingLink, Biteslides, and Genially.
• produce cool videos of their poems with Powtoon, Touchcast, WeVideo, iMovie, Animoto, Magisto, or other video creation tools and apps.
• create digital poetry portfolios with free web tools and apps, like Weebly, Educlipper, Blendspace, Pinterest, and Livebinders.
• share their poetry in digital books with web tools and apps like Storybird, LittleBirdTales, and Book Creator (IOS / Android) app.
• evaluate poetry with the Voicethread web tool and IOS app.
• use this heart shaped word cloud tool to share what they love about the subject matter.
• view animated text poetry like Television is a Drug then create their own animated text poetry presentations with multimedia tools like Powtoon, Thinglink Video, 30 Hands, Tell Me About This (IOS), and Narrable (IOS).
• create talking avatars to recite their poetry with Adobe Voice, Yakit for Kids, Tellagami, and Voki.
• create sonnets with the the Poetry Engine, an online interactive.
• create their own magnetic poetry with these themed sets (mustache, nature, geek, love and poet).

Resources

• Here’s the Youtube video of my webinar on creating poetry with digital tools.
• Here’s my poem, A Brown Cinderella, and lesson plans to go with it.
• Poetry and Video Lesson Plans by Lesson Stream

Bookmarks

Find the tools listed above and many more resources in the bookmarks below.

Poetry, by shellyterrell