About Me

Learning is my life & I love it! An avid reader & writer since my earliest memories, I continue to develop my passion every day as a middle school Language Arts teacher. [But here's a secret: I probably learn more from my amazing students than they do from me!]

I'm currently enhancing my life as a learner at the University of Colorado Denver, where I'm enrolled in the Instructional Learning Technology grad program. This blog serves as a forum where I can share my passion for reading, writing and educational technology with the world.



Thursday, September 25, 2014

Genius.com: Annotating the World

I stumbled upon a little website, RapGenius.com, a few years ago while creating some engaging activities for my middle school Poetry Month unit. The site encouraged its members to upload and then annotate rap lyrics. What a great idea! As a fan of rap and hip hop, there are so many random references and anonymous allusions in rap lyrics. Reading the annotations helped me understand exactly what those rap artists were talking about!

Flash forward to last year...I somehow rediscovered this site but now it has expanded into all other texts, including Literature. Even better, teachers can request special educator accounts that allow for special access to create text pages and provide feedback to student annotators before taking their annotations live.

The motto of Genius.com is "Annotate the World." And that's exactly what is going on here. Rap songs, poetry, chapters, essays, news articles, self-created texts...it's all fair game here! There's so much going on at this site that I plan on focusing many blog entries on various Genius know-how and methods of using the site in the classroom.

Let me close this entry with some information from the site that will help you get started on Genius.com. According to the Education site (which can be easily accessed in the footer of the page),

Education Genius works closely with teachers at all levels and across disciplines to design and implement classroom projects using the Genius collaborative annotation platform. Whether the assignment is a classic work of literatureprimary source historical document, or scientific article, Education Genius lets students analyze and discuss their coursework line by line, online. We’re updating close reading for the twenty-first century! Public school educators, check out our annotated Common Core to learn how you can use Genius to implement the standards for reading and writing.

If you're interested in joining this amazing collaborative community, hit up the Education gurus to activate your educator account at education@genius.com. Tell them JJ Eagleston sent you!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks for your comment!