I’m a high school English teacher, so I’m always looking for ways to help my students develop their reading skills. With the push for STEM 4 Cs, I’ve had a difficult time figuring out how I can make reading (which is a very individual skill) into a more collaborative one. That’s where Edji comes in. I love this tool.
What does it do?
Edji combines reading skills with collaboration in the classroom. When you upload a text to Edji, students log on and annotate the text. They highlight text and add comments and emojis. Students can see comments that others have left, and if you turn on the heat vision tool, you’ll visually see how many students highlights a word or phrase. The more students that highlight a word, the closer to red the word gets.
As the teacher, you can see everything students are doing. There is a feed that shows you live updates as students add comments. You have a students view that shows you what each individual student has done. If you’re teaching with a collaborative teacher, you can also add them as a co-teacher. You can also add comments and highlights from your teacher account to help guide students.
Highlights
- Heat Vision – Words and phrases get closer to red the more students highlight it. This helps you see who’s getting it and who’s not. If there is a key phrase that isn’t red, then you can use it as a teaching point.
- Collaboration – Since students can see each other’s work, they are able to work collaboratively to build reading skills. Struggling students can see what others are thinking, which helps build their skills. Student can reply to each other’s comments as well, so discussion skills work here, too.
- Images – Edji is not limited to text. You can upload images and PDFs for students to annotate.
- Co-teacher feature – Co-teachers can get on and see everything you see. This helps a lot with them being able to see the same information in real time for their case load.
- Super user friendly – Edji is incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is copy and paste a text in and then share the link with students.
- Reading database – There are already a lot of reading from other teachers in Edji. You can easily copy the reading and add it to your class.
Classroom Uses
There are a lot of uses for Edji in the classroom. As an ELA teacher, this is a no-brainer for me. Fiction and non-fiction reading and annotating. Students can read and react to articles. They can have debates on these reading. Being able to upload images really helps this expand into other content areas. You can upload a diagram or something and have students analyze it. Math teachers could upload an image of a solved equation and have students annotate whether the problem is solve correctly or not. Art teachers could upload a painting and have students discuss techniques and such.
Overall, I think that Edji is a powerful tool that can be used to really help students develop collaboration skills as well and reading and critical thinking skills.
Sign up for Edji today. Just head to this link: https://edji.it/#/?r=a58hw.
Have you tried Edji? What do you think? What are some ideas you have for different ways to use it in class?
The Educator's Quest 