Tech Teach-In Brainstorm

For the Tech Teach-In I have a few ideas that I've been kicking around. So far I have a solid idea of what objectives the students need to complete as part of this lesson, but I'm not sure which technology tool I want to leverage to help the students complete the objectives. I want the tool to be integrated into the lesson in order to enhance learning, not just additional "fluff" that I add to the lesson to include technology only for technology's sake.

While this plan is still very much in development, here is what I would like to do as part of the Tech Teach-In:

Currently, as a class we are reading The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I'm hoping to implment technology here to accomplish two goals. My first goal is to hopefully organize the characters in the novel for the students, and my second goal is to hopefully use technology to help students explore some of the deeper thematic elements of the novel.

With my students I anticipate that the number of characters in The Things They Carried will be an issue. Here's why I want to use technology to help my students. I'm hoping to use a tool such as Padlet to organize the characters for the students. Each character will have its own box on the Padlet canvas with a description of the charater along with both the physical/emotional burdens that the character must carry throughout the novel. My hope is that by using Padlet the students will have the multitude of characters organized, and writing their final paper will be easier because they have this accessible organizer to reference while writing.

The second plan for this lesson is to use it as a writing assessment for the students. From a content perspective I want the students to start seeing that one of the themes of the book requires students to recognize that the "things" you carry don't necessarily have to be physical. I'd like the students to start writing on this subject so I can assess if they're grasping this particular theme of the book. I'm thinking it would also be nice to make this lesson social by having students work in groups to write the character descriptions that would end up in the Padlet.

While I'm still trying to figure out the details for this lesson, there are two main concerns that need to be addressed prior to the lesson being written. Is Padlet the best tool I can use for this lesson? Would it be just as helpful to use a tool that the students are already familiar with such as Google Drive? From a content standpoint, I'm still wondering what the writing prompt for the students will look like. So, I need to make sure those details are solid prior to planning out the full details of the lesson.

Overall, I see great benefit in using technology to help the students organize the novel while also making it more accessible (our students only have a classroom set of the book), so I'm hoping that Padlet can be the vehicle to carry out the objective, but I'm still open to any changes that could be more beneficial to the lesson.