Oct26

21st Century Standards for 21st Century Skills? #CommonCore

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21st Century Standards for 21st Century Skills? #CommonCore

I’m passionate about the integration of technology into literacy instruction. We’re in the midst of a literacy renaissance. Literacy will never be the same.  As we progress, quality literacy instruction must be the focus and 21st century tools integrated. Too often we see the new tools becoming the focus of instruction. 21st century tools are a means to skillful thinking, sharing ideas, reading, and writing… Life is the goal- tools help get you there. Make no mistake though, 21st century literacy is different from any other time. It necessitates new instructional tools.

My wondering- are our 21st century standards up to par? I’ve spent some time in the literacy standards. www.corestandards.org has been my primary resource. To date, my impression is nothing but positive. I love the idea that education isn’t dependent on your zip code. Have you had any experiences?

Oct25

Transitioning from an Overhead Projector to a Smart Board

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Transitioning from an Overhead Projector to a Smart Board

Using a Smart Board is different from using an overhead projector (obviously). Even though I was quite familiar with the Notebook software that comes with the Smart Board, and was highly motivated to put it to good use, I struggled for 3 months before it felt like a normal part of my routine. My advice? Start small. Start by using it in the similar ways that you used your overhead. Here’s some ideas to get you started. For all of these, you will need to use the Smart Notebook software (which can be installed from www.smarttech.com as long as you have a product key from when you registered the board).

  • Morning message Many teachers use morning message and daily news* as an opportunity to model reading, writing, and language skills for students. Use your Smart Board to post your morning message, split the screen to make space to have a shared writing about the daily news. Keep all your work in one file and save it in a place that’s accessible to students. This way students have the opportunity to revisit those conversations and that learning.

    This isn't very different from what would be done on an overhead

  • Non-linguistic representations**- On an overhead projector, you were dependent on your own drawing and animating. Now, at your fingertips, you can access anything available on the Internet. Additionally, you can take a picture of the website you’re viewing and it will easily import into your notebook software.
  • Record your process- In the floating tools- add in the video camera to that set of tools. When you record, it records everything that’s happening on your screen. You can also include audio. You can play this back in a loop as you walk around the room supporting students. For example, you could take a video of the technical aspects of an assignment (how to open/save a file…) and have that on a loop. This would free you up to support kids in the content you’re working on rather than the technicalities.
  • Save your notes- When you’re modeling a process and taking notes, save that work. Sort it and organize it, and save it where students can access it later. This also saves time if you need to re-reference it later.
Start small! Don’t try to make any huge shifts to start with. First try to fill the hole that was left when they took your overhead projector away!

 

*Balancing Reading and Language Learning: A Resource for Teaching English Language Learners by Mary Cappellini **Classroom Instruction that Works published by McRel

Oct16

21st Century Writing

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21st Century Writing

We’re in the midst of a literacy renaissance. Literacy is being reborn. It will never be the same. The average person writes more than they did 5, 10, 15 years ago. Why? We have an audience. Texting, blogging, tweeting, Facebook posts… Having an audience for our writing has made all the difference. Unfortunately, our instruction hasn’t kept pace. Writing instruction tends to fall into one of the following categories:

  • quality- Instruction that is explicit and teaches students not only why writing is relevant, but also how to do it.
  • non-existent/presumed We ask students to use writing, but we never teach them how to write. We assume they learned it the year before.
  • or misguided- Sometimes we think we’re teaching kids to write by focusing very heavily on how to form letters, spell words, and create grammatically correct sentences.

Our students will all be writers. They will all have an audience. They will all write more than the children of the 20th century. Yet, we fail to give them any guidance. Teaching students how to write with an audience in mind will be a critical life skill. While proper writing skills hold a necessary place in writing, we can’t stop there. Writing helps us communicate, process, reflect. Writing helps us live.

To demonstrate the importance of writing, and how large of a role it plays in our lives today. I’m offering a challenge. Try to skip writing- all forms. Just try! It’s next to impossible!

Oct10

Have iPad- Will Teach #2- Use your iPad as a document camera!

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Have iPad- Will Teach #2- Use your iPad as a document camera!

Just as I was saying here, I’ve been wondering how useful the iPad can be in an elementary classroom. Today, I came across a great post by Classroom in the Cloud about one great way to use your iPad in a classroom.

It shows how you can convert your iPad into a document camera. I haven’t tried this, but can definitely see how beneficial it would be. Being able to make one child’s work instantly accessible to the class has obvious benefits. Additionally, you could take a picture of it to reference back to later.

Oct9

Kids on Facebook

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Kids on Facebook

An ostrich with his head in the sand. This is the visual that comes to my mind when I think of how we often treat kids about Facebook. It’s too big to manage, so we end up taking no action. While the head in the sand trick is often wildly successful, in this case, it may not be the best path. We hear about bullying gone viral, kids posting throughout class, and kids obsessed with Facebook, but we get stuck in inaction. The problem feels too big and too fast. I will not be so arrogant as to undermine the complexities of the problems with having kids on Facebook. But I will offer my ideas on how it might be improved upon. 

  1. Lead the way. Be on Facebook and be a model for how to use it. Help kids understand that they’re living out loud and that their actions can and will be referenced later by others. Their future includes snap judgement about them based on their web presence. Once something is out there, it’s hard to take back.
  2. Talk about digital problems just as you would face to face problems. Get together with other adults involved and establish some common expectations about how your children will interact digitally. When it’s not happening, talk to each other and follow up with the kids. It still takes a village to raise a child.
  3. Respond to problems quickly. Ignoring it never seems to help in the digital world.
  4. Keep yourself as “in the know.” You may not always be one step ahead, but you at least want to stay current for the sake of having discussions. I just read a great post about the new Timeline version of Facebook. Read it, anticipate the impact on your students. Be proactive! (Here’s that post if you’re interested)

How does this connect to literacy instruction? Public writing is or will be a part of life for most of our students. Learning to consider their audience when writing is a skill that is more important now than ever!  Additionally, if we teach kids to use these tools well, they can be a huge asset rather than something that causes us to bury our heads in the sand.

Oct9

Have iPad- will teach

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Have iPad- will teach

The expectations for education in America have greatly increased. Kids failing is no longer acceptable. Teachers are expected to meet the needs of many types of learners. When we integrate technology into our classroom, it has to be in support of quality instruction. It must strategically improve student learning.

The iPad 2 is one of my favorite toys. I love it. But I’ve struggled with how it can be meaningfully integrated into elementary classrooms. What’s common is people throwing a bunch of free app on the iPad and letting kids take turns on it. This isn’t strategic or quality instruction. Following are a few ideas I think have merit.

  1. Listening Center-  iTunes has a Read Aloud section of kid’s books. They look and feel just like a printed book, but students can access much higher levels of text because the stories can be narrated (with the words highlighting as you read). This is a great activity for students to hear fluency modeled.

    The start of my iBooks library (from iTunes)

    Additionally, they can choose to not have the book narrated to them and they can read it themselves.

  2. Reader’s Theatre (on steroids)- Puppet Pals is one of my favorite apps. It lets kids put on a mini puppet show. They can use pre-made characters, or generate their own. This app could easily be pared with a Reader’s Theatre script. Then, kids can re-read and re-read until they get their performance just how they want it. Then they can publish their puppet show for a larger audience! You’ll have to point out that they’re practicing fluent reading or they might not notice!
  3. Guided or Independent Reading- www.readinga-z.com is a great resource for printable books and lesson plans. Now they also have their leveled books available through an app. If you have a set of 7 iPads in your classroom, you can download the reading A-Z books and use them without the hassle of printing! I have a vision that someday the book closets will be obsolete and teachers will be able to access all their leveled readers though a digital reading device. Imagine being able to key word search an entire library, or filter results by level! Too many books get lost in corners because teachers simply don’t know they’re there.

I think iPads have potential to impact instruction in primary grades, but we’re just on the cusp. We’re not quite to the point that any of these ideas could be implemented with ease by a general teacher. That said, put an ed tech teacher in with the general ed teacher and sparks could fly!

Oct8

Take Pictures when you go on Field Trips

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Take Pictures when you go on Field Trips

Zoo field trip

Literacy includes more than just reading. Literacy is about reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Field trips are an amazing opportunity to build a student’s vocabulary, language, and schema. When you go places with kids- give them your camera. Let them keep a record of everything they experienced. When you get back to school- immediately download the pictures and use them to record the experience in a digital book. It’s a great shared writing opportunity.  Print the pictures and the book and keep them visible and accessible in the room. The more they see it, the more it will reinforce their learning.

This isn't one we printed or spent too much time talking about!

Talk about the field trip again and again with your students. Relive those stories. Use the vocabulary from the trip. Write about the experience in your morning message… Milk that experience for all it’s worth. Too often we think of field trips as a reward. We go, we celebrate, we leave. Field trips provide shared experiences that the whole class can read, write, speak, and listen about.

 

 

Oct8

The Pen that Changed My Life

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The Pen that Changed My Life

When we think of literacy, we generally think only of reading. Literacy is much broader. Literacy includes reading, writing, listening, and speaking.

Writing is critical. It’s not just a means of sharing. It’s a way to slow down your thinking in order to analyze and improve on critical components (Swartz). I write. I write a lot. It’s the only way I can sort out and hold onto my ideas. Some people can write through typing, but my preferred method of writing is on paper. I simply don’t retain the information I write as well if I’ve only typed it.

This has been a bit of a stumbling block for me. Everything else in my world I access digitally. But when I am trying to process large amounts of information. I have to physically write it down. Getting a digital pen has allowed me to record and capture that thinking in a more accessible way. I don’t have to keep all my old notebooks anymore. My pen captures a digital version of everything I write. This is huge because it lets me store and access that information easily. I don’t even have to keep the notebook I wrote it in. Now, when I need to reference my thinking on a particular topic, I simply open the software that came with the pen and type in a key word from my writing. IT SEARCHES MY HANDWRITING!!! It pulls up any pages I’ve written with that key word. It’s been endlessly useful. The pen does many other useful things, and there are many classroom applications for it, but I don’t want the power of being able to easily access  my ideas in a digital format lost. I’ll save those for another day.

Resources-

The digital pen I use is a refurbished 2 gig Pulse pen from www.livescribe.com it cost me just under $60.

Thinking-Based Learning Swartz, Robert J. et al. Thinking-Based Learning: Promoting Quality Student Achievement in the 21st Century

Aug6

Reading to your child with your iPad- Kindle App vs. IBooks

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Reading to your child with your iPad- Kindle App vs. IBooks

Since the iPad came out, I’ve been waiting for children’s books to show up. There are so many possibilities to have easy access to amazing literature- all right in front of you. My wait is finally over. They’re here!

Kindle app- While visiting my brother up in Alaska, we took the whole gang- kids and all- on a back-woods cabin trip. We stayed for 3 days in a cabin that had no running water or electricity. I knew that we’d need some good books, but didn’t want the weight. So I opened up my kindle app, which is my preferred reader, and searched for some kid books. There were several books available for cheap- older books that are now out of print and some titles I wasn’t familiar with. Of course I didn’t’ plan this until a few hours before we left, so I picked about 5 titles that looked promising and moved on. When it came time to actually pick a story to read… I was pretty disappointed. All the books were very text-heavy. Some of them had a few pictures, but the pictures seemed out of place within the app. The quality of the books also seemed to match the price. I ended up not reading ANY of them to the kides. Luckily I’d brought one printed book as a back-up!
In short-
Pros- cheap
Cons- Not engaging enough for a kiddo

iBooks-  I was looking for an audio book for my son. I came across the Read Aloud collection on iTunes. I could download a short selection on each book I was interested in. The titles were generally ones I recognized (Fancy Nancy, Dr. Seuss…). This was promising. Then I actually downloaded a few samples and…. drumroll please…. The books actually look like the printed book! On top of that, there is an option to have the story read aloud (the words even highlight as you go). These “books” literally feel the same as reading the print versions. The only downfall is the price- generally the books felt like they might be the same price to the print versions. Ouch! I’ll definitely be choosing my titles carefully.
Pros- Looks and feels like the “real” book, option to have the story read aloud,
Cons- Higher price

Winner- iBooks- hands down
Dec7

Re- The Dangers of Letting your child use your iPhone

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Re- The Dangers of Letting your child use your iPhone

In the NY Times, Hilary Stout published an article about concerns many have around their toddlers using iphones (Oct. 15th, 2010

My son, almost 2, using my iPod Touch

Toddler’s Favorite Toy: The iPhone). As a parent who bought her toddler an iPod Touch at age three I was a bit defensive… but it also got me thinking. It all depends what you’re doing with it, and what parenting decision you’re making around the activity. If you let your child sit and watch videos on your iPhone for hours on end… well then that’s cause to be concerned. If your child is throwing tantrums because you aren’t able to set clear limits around using your iPhone, well that’s cause to be concerned. But there is so much more to this technology! Following are a couple things I’ve done with my kiddo using his iPod Touch or my iPhone. Read the rest of this entry →