Spark Student Motivation Saturdays: Using a Document Reader to Share Student Work

Hi all!  I'm linking up with Head over Heels for Teaching to share a way I kept my kiddos motivated this week.

We got a new toy: a document reader!

And I let my kids play with it immediately!  My students love coming to the SMARTboard to show their work for math, but sometimes that technology really slows us down.  Often the screen needs to be calibrated, or they don't leave themselves enough room to show all of their work. Another big time zapper is the work itself is sometimes so complex that I lose the attention of the room while one student shows the rest the solution.

Before we started math on Friday, I told my kids that they could use the document reader to show their work during the review portion of our workshop...but they'd need to have neat work,with all of the steps shown. To their credit, work they completed was detailed and organized!  Take a look at their work for reducing fractions:

While this student showed her I spotted an error on a subsequent problem, so I was able to fix that while she was explaining her work.

I love how neat this work is!  All of the calculations are shown and it's so easy to follow!

Lots to praise here as well.  This young lady leaves little check marks, showing that she's paying attention to the work presented by her classmates.

I am so in love with this new toy.  It is going to make it so much easier for kids to share their work with each other, for use to discuss text or to dissect text books!

Tell me, do you have a document reader?  How do you use it?