Example 1: You can ask ChatGPT to write you a narrative in the first-person perspective about someone who bought a new house but does not like it as much as their old house in Spanish (or any other language). Then you can get more specific and ask ChatGPT to compare and contrast each room in the house.
Example 2: you could ask ChatGPT to write a dialogue with two people arguing over the prices of coffee in Paris in French. Table 2 below shows the output for a dialogue about expensive coffee.
Make More Texts Based on your First Text
Once you have generated the texts you can also ask ChatGPT to make the text simpler (See Table 3) or more complex.
Generate Comprehension Questions, Expansion Questions, and Vocabulary Lists
What Kind of Activities Can We Design around ChatGPT?
Compare AI-Generated Texts to Authentic Texts
Compare AI-Generated Texts to Student Texts
Compare Student-Generated Texts to other Student-Generated Texts
If you're a teacher or parent trying to figure out some creative activities to do with your children for the new school year, please take a look at our special page on 25 Ways to Use MakeBeliefsComix.com in the Classroom.
I promise you, you'll like the ideas, such as having the children create autobiographical comic strips introducing them to you and their fellow students. So much fun, so very valuable!
Here's the link -- http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/How-to-Play/Educators/
This collection of printables, graphic organizers, lesson plans, and activities helps teachers to build learner’ creative writing skills. The resources include poetry writing activities, journal topics, art projects, short-story writing exercises, scoring rubrics, and other printable worksheets.
These resources aim at helping students improve their handwriting. They include learning to write letters with activities for each letter of the alphabet, mastering cursive and free printable books on cursive handwriting, penmanship practice with social studies themes, and exercises for improving hand motor skills and coordination.
Similar to Essay Punch, the resource described above, this website guides students through the process of composing a basic paragraph, including a topic sentence, body, and a conclusion.
This website has a rich collection of materials for teaching writing to young learners. Teachers will find free lesson plans, workshops on a variety of topics, printable worksheets, graphic organizers, writing prompts, word games, writing across the curriculum resources, and more!
This interactive website is designed for students to help them improve their spelling. The materials are organized according to the levels of difficulty and provide words in the context of a full story. Students will hear the audio (a story) and spell the missing words in the script. The results are calculated after each activity.
This resource includes model papers to help students with writing biographies, book reports, compare-and-contrast essays, personal narratives, and other papers. This website also includes tips from writing professionals on how to beat writer’s block, use prewriting strategies, write introductions and conclusions, and do revisions.
This page offers free graphic organizers in PDF format, including “Outlining, ” “Paragraph structure,” “Story pyramid,” “A map to organization,” and others that the teacher can use to help young learners master their writing skills.
As the website indicates, “Students work with authors, editors, and illustrators in exclusive workshops designed to guide them in developing their skills.” The interactive workshops include biography writing, descriptive writing, news writing, speech writing, and writing book reviews. The website also provides a variety of student model essays.
- See more at: http://blog.tesol.org/teaching-writing-to-young-learners-10-online-resources/#sthash.zrHV2kpK.dpuf
Busuu在全球有5000萬用戶，是相當受歡迎的語言學習平台。和Livemocha一樣有線上社群，可以和全球各地的母語人士練習，此外還有由專家舉辦的單字字彙比賽。在英語學習方面，Busuu提供全球規模的英語檢定測驗（Global Scale of English Tests，簡稱GSET），供想測試自己實力的用戶嘗試，通過測驗的用戶可以取得證書。
6.Learn a Language
Learn a Language是由美國語言協會（U.S. Institute of Languages）所開設的學習平台，成立宗旨在於弭平不同語言帶來的溝通隔閡。網站視覺化的語言選項分類讓使用介面一目了然，便於用戶操作。
Veronica Lu 老師分享:
超棒的電子書📚－Cool to be Clever－Edson C. Hendricks
（The Genius Who Really Invented the Internet）這本自傳型式的電子書有文字和音檔，品質超好；最後一章作者還鼓勵讀者： If you have some really interesting ideas, don't be afraid to talk about them or to pursue them. 很難相信居然免費！❤
For each school day of the past three years, I've started my ninth-grade English class with a poem. When I first made this commitment, I feared that I might not have the stamina (or enough engaging poems) to sustain us for the full 184 days of class. And I wasn't the only skeptic. Each year, I get a few sideways glances and furrowed brows when I explain our daily opening routine for class. But before long, students are starting English class with Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and Robert Pinsky, Rumi and Basho and Shakespeare. These voices, contemporary and classic, have helped define my classroom culture to such an extent that on the rare occasion when I postpone the “Poem of the Day” until later in the class period, my students interrogate me about it. I confess that it makes me smile.
So if this year's National Poetry Month inspires you to give daily poetry a go in your classroom, maybe even just for the month, consider these four reasons why starting class with a poem each day will rock your world. Just for good measure, I've included a few poem suggestions as well.
1. Poems Are Short
Time is a teacher's most valuable currency, and though it sounds cliché, there is never enough. In fact, a teacher's first reaction to the idea of beginning each day's class with a poem might even be, "Where will I find the time?"
But remember, poems are short. Not all poems, but I never committed to starting class with pages of Milton's Paradise Lost. Even the shortest poems can lead to potent discoveries.
After we read a short poem twice, I invite the students to engage in what I call microanalysis through an interpretive sentence frame. They fill in the blanks in my sentence: "When the poem says _______, it suggests that _______." Students can find plentiful interpretations in just a few lines of verse. And the best part is that a short poem can be read, dissected, and discussed in just a few minutes, providing an excellent warm-up in a lesson on close reading.
Other times, I lead a lesson on word choice with a poem that is less than 15 lines long, like Carl Sandburg's "Fog" or Anne Porter's "Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake". We identify and discuss the mood created by the poem, and then I challenge them to change the mood dramatically by changing just five words and the title. The results are hilarious, focused on the lesson's objective, and quick.
The short poems "Keeping Quiet" by Robert Bly, "The Balloon of the Mind"by William Butler Yeats, and "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar have all generated particularly rich discussions in my classroom. Their brevity makes them sharp, but their themes are provocative and appealing to adolescent readers.
A novel may take chapters and hours to establish an emotional connection through the characters and plot -- poetry can do so in seconds. Even reluctant readers can be captured quickly by the right combination of words arranged into a powerful rhythm.
Each year, I incorporate "Shock Week" into our poetry routine. I advertise it as "more intense than Shark Week,” which piques the curiosity of my Discovery Channel crowd. We read "Tariff" by Michelle Boisseau, a short, blistering poem about guilt. We read Wislawa Szymborska's "The Terrorist, He Watches", a poem chilling in both subject and tone, giving us pause about the dark ramifications of being a bystander when others suffer.
Even funny poems can be intense. Students always enjoy this kinetic typography rendition of Taylor Mali's spoken-word poem "Speak With Conviction". While it makes us laugh at ourselves, it also urges us to scratch at the underlying issues that may cause our lackadaisical patterns of speech.
3. Poems Connect (to Other Reading)
Poetry can open a door to discussing those meatier, longer works of fiction and nonfiction that often define our curriculum.
Try using Gwendelon Brooks' classic poem "We Real Cool" to introduce an underlying conflict in S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.
Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, has written some poetry that beautifully echoes specific lines in Romeo and Juliet, that standard freshman introduction to Shakespeare. Incorporating writing from a completely different culture that speaks to the same aspect of the human condition sends a powerful message about inclusion and diversity.
I once used a haiku about a falcon by An'ya, a reclusive naturalist poet from the Pacific Northwest, to draw a comparison to Atticus Finch's treatment of his children in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The discussion was brief, but the haiku gave us a lens through which to evaluate Atticus and his actions, leading to more specific close-reading that we would have achieved without the poem. (The fact that both texts allude to a bird was just a happy accident, by the way, but the kids loved pointing that out, too!)
4. Poems Inspire (Writing)
Poems make such excellent inspirations for writing. When we share poems with students and invite them to respond with their own ideas and musings while imitating the writer's form or style, we empower them to develop a voice, to work at something that will eventually become their own. A colleague in my school district, Elizabeth Jones, introduced me to Elizabeth Coatsworth's poem "Swift Things Are Beautiful", and I challenge you to read this poem without immediately wanting to write about finding the beauty in other opposites and inversions. Our students have chosen things to write about that are small and large, rough and smooth, foreseen and surprising, and they always uncover beauty as they write.
Penny Kittle, of Book Love Foundation fame, first introduced me to Anis Mojgani's notable spoken word poem "Shake the Dust". Its message of kindness and welcoming cadence provide an invitation to write about the people in our world who are not given a voice. In so doing, your students can find their own.
In truth, I could write for hours about the positive experiences that I've enjoyed with students over the past three years of using a poem to start class each day. If this is a strategy that you ever wanted to try, I encourage you take a test drive during National Poetry Month 2016. I suspect that you (and your students) will be hooked!
7 Tools for Creating Flowcharts, Mind Maps, and Diagrams
This morning on Twitter I was sent a direct message from someone who was looking for recommendations for a free flowchart creation tool. Lucidchart was my immediate recommendation. Over the years I've reviewed a lot of other flowchart, mind map, and diagramming tools. Here is my updated list of suggestions for flowchart, mind map, and diagramming tools.
Lucidchart is a mind mapping tool that can be used in your web browser or on your iPad. The app and the website are both easy to use to create flowcharts, mind maps, and graphic organizers. Lucidchart offers a simple drag and drop interface for creating flow charts, organizational charts, mind maps, and other types of diagrams. To create with Lucidchart just select elements from the menus and drag them to the canvas. You can re-size any element and type text within elements on your chart. Arrows and connecting lines can be re-sized, rearranged, and labeled to bring clarity to your diagrams.
When it comes to organizing their thoughts some students prefer to use an outline style while others see large concepts better when they're in a mind map format.Text 2 Mind Map bridges the gap between the outline format and the mind map format by providing a tools for creating both on the same page. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use Text 2 Mind Map.
Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping service that is very easy to use. To create a Coggle mind map just sign-in with your Google account and click the "+" icon to start your mind map. After entering the main idea of your mind map you can add branches by clicking the "+" icons that appear next to everything you type. To re-arrange elements just click on them and drag them around your screen. Coggle is a collaborative tool. You can invite others to view and edit your mind maps. You can also just invite others to view by sending them an email through Coggle. All Coggle mind maps can be downloaded as PDFs or PNG image files.
MindMup is a free mind mapping tool that can be used online, with Google Drive, and on your desktop. MindMup works like most mind mapping tools in that you can create a central idea and add child and sibling nodes all over a blank canvas. MindMup nodes can contain text and links. When you're ready to save your MindMup mind map you can save it to Google Drive, save it to your desktop, or publish it online. If you publish it online, you can grab an embed code for it to post it in a blog post or webpage.
Sketchlot is a free collaborative whiteboard service that works on any device that has a web browser. I tested it on my MacBook, my iPad, and my Android tablet. Sketchlot is designed for teacher and student use. Teachers create their own accounts and then inside that account they can create a list of students. Each student is assigned his or her own password to use to join a drawing shared by his or her teacher. Teachers can create as many drawings as they like and share them on an individual basis. Teachers can share their drawings to one or all of their students at a time. Students can create their own sketches to share back to their teachers through Sketchlot.
Connected Mind is a free mind mapping tool that you can find in the Google Chrome Web Store. Using Connected Mind you can create free-form mind maps or use a template. A lot of mind mapping tools lock you into using straight lines between elements, but Connected Mind is not one of them. Connected Minds allows you to create mind maps in any configuration that you like. As it is a Chrome Web Store app, Connected Mind allows you to save your work online using your Google Account credentials.
Stormboard is a slick new service designed for hosting collaborative online brainstorming activities. Stormboard allows you to create an unlimited amount of "idea boards" or Stormboards with up to five collaborators on each one. Each of your Stormboards can include sticky notes, images, videos, drawings, and word documents. Moving items around on your Stormboard is a simple drag and drop process like the one you may have used on services like Padlet. Each item that you add to your Stormboard includes a commenting option that your collaborators can use to give you feedback on your ideas.
1. I double-sided it with a prediction worksheet that the students were to fill out later.
2.Before we read the story, and even before I told them what we were reading, I asked them to take a look at the Wordle. We did a quick refresher as why some words are bigger than others.
3. Group Discussions (for the following questions):
Q1: guess who the main characters were in the story.
Q2: write down words they thought were significant.
Q3: make a prediction as to what they thought the story would be about.
4. After circulating the classroom, and having some students share, many of the students made very accurate predictions.
5. Reading the story
6. When we finished the story, I had the class answer the fourth question on the worksheet and decide whether or not their prediction was correct.
USING WORD CLOUDS TO ENHANCE YOUR READING INSTRUCTION
I love making Wordles as much as my students! Whenever we have free time in the computer lab, the students are always eager to create one on new topics. Because they are really intrigued by them, I try to incorporate it into my instruction as much as I can.
First, let me explain a little about what a Wordle is. A Wordle is a Web 2.0 tool that creates text into word clouds. It takes the most used words and makes them bigger than words used less often. My students made one on the first week of school with characteristics that describe them. They typed specific qualities more often if they thought it applied to them more than others. We used this as the cover of our binders for our portfolio conferences that will be coming up in about a month.
Today, in reading, I used a Wordle to introduce the story that we will read this week. To prepare, I sat down and typed the whole story, Aero and Officer Mike. Yes. I actually typed it all. After typing it, I chose a layout that was appealing and printed it out. I double-sided it with a prediction worksheet that the students were to fill out later.
Before we read the story, and even before I told them what we were reading, I asked them to take a look at the Wordle. We did a quick refresher as why some words are bigger than others. The students had time to read as many words as they could. After reading the Wordle, the students were to complete the other side of the paper. First, they had to guess who the main characters were in the story. Then, they wrote down words they thought were significant. The last question asked them to make a prediction as to what they thought the story would be about. After circulating the classroom, and having some students share, many of the students made very accurate predictions.
The class was eager to read the text to see if their prediction was correct. Many of the students were so excited when they read something they predicted! When we finished the story, I had the class answer the fourth question on the worksheet and decide whether or not their prediction was correct.
What Materials Can You Create with ChatGPT?
Make More Texts Based on your First Text 
After typing it, I chose a layout that was appealing and printed it out. I double-sided it with a prediction worksheet that the students were to fill out later.
