Skip to main content

Home/ Content Literacy/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Jill Griebe

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Jill Griebe

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
10More

NEA - Turning the Page - 1 views

www.nea.org/35939.htm
shared by Jill Griebe on 17 Dec 09 - Cached
  • Getting students engaged in 400-year-old drama is usually a challenge, to put to mildly. But in Seale’s classroom, classic literature gets the Web 2.0 treatment. During Romeo and Juliet, for example, Seale used Ning.com to create a class-only social media group called Verona Lifestyles, where her students, posing as characters in the play, created profiles and posted updates and discussion forums. “Posting in character got them more engaged,” explains Seale, “and gave them confidence to tackle the language. They even took a stab at writing couplets and shared them on Ning
  • “It’s about initiating higher levels of engagement,” says Seale, “and making the learning more self-directed and self-motivated.” “Let’s face it,” she adds, “being literate today means more than reading words on a printed page and writing an essay.”
  • Digital technology, however, still suffers from an image problem. To their more boisterous critics, blogs, video games, wikis, and other social media have stunted the attention span and diluted the concentration of an entire generation. What’s more, Web sites provide not knowledge, but the lesser currency of “information,” broken down into bytes to be skimmed over and hyperlinked.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Consequently, say the detractors, young people no longer have the time or inclination for books—not to mention proper grammar, smart writing, or reasoned thought.
  • In other words, Johnny can post, friend, update, and tweet, but he still can’t read.
  • Instead, her students take To Kill a Mockingbird to the blogosphere and discuss the novel with a ninth-grade English class in Illinois, led by a teacher Seale met via Twitter. She also plans to have her students use Flip video cameras to record each other acting out different parts of the novel as they explore character motivation and perspective.
  • The key for students today, says Hogue, is the “authenticity” of the audience—in other words, creating for and sharing with someone other than the teacher. “Students are reaching literally global audiences online,” she explains. “Why would they be motivated to write an essay for only one person, who is only reading it because it is his or her job?”
  • “Kids have the passion, the technical know-how, and the creativity,” says Hogue, “but they need educators to teach them how to use digital media constructively and responsibly. There’s a huge difference between blogging for a friend or posting an update on Facebook and writing for a prospective employer.”
  • a ninth-grade English teacher in Bryant, Arkansas, was confident that her students were enjoying the unit on Romeo and Juliet. But she didn’t realize the extent of their enthusiasm until the day she pulled out an audio CD of actors performing the Shakespearean classic.
  • Jill Griebe on 17 Dec 09
     
    Literacy in the digital age.
18More

Why Talk Is Important in Classrooms - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...s_Important_in_Classrooms.aspx
shared by david cook on 14 Jul 09 - Cached
  • Our experience suggests that these students will fail to develop academic language and discourse simply because they aren't provided opportunities to use words
    • Jill Griebe
      Jill Griebe on 14 Jul 09
       
      Unfortunately, this is how many of us were taught to be teachers. Why did it take so many years before educators realized that students needed to talk to each other in order to show comprehension?
  • children learn that language is power and that they can use words to express their needs, wants, and desires.
  • The problem with applying this developmental approach to English language learners and language learning in the classroom is that our students don't have years to learn to speak before they need to write
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • English language learners need access to instruction that recognizes the symbiotic relationship among the four domains of language: listening, speaking, reading, and writing
  • We know that opportunities for students to talk in class also take time. So, given the little instructional time we have with them, how can we justify devoting a significant amount of that time to talk? We would argue, How can we not provide that time to talk? Telling students what you want them to know is certainly a faster way of addressing standards. But telling does not necessarily equate to learning. If indeed "reading and writing float on a sea of talk," then the time students spend engaged in academic conversations with their classmates is time well spent in developing not only oracy but precisely the high level of literacy that is our goal.
  • Classroom talk is frequently limited and is used to check comprehension rather than develop thinking.
  • Questioning is an important tool that teachers have, but students also need opportunities for dialogue if they are to learn
    • Jill Griebe
      Jill Griebe on 14 Jul 09
       
      It seems that with the dialogue examples as well as what I do and see in classrooms is that we need better questioning skills in order to allow the students to show their thinking.
  • We've divided the opportunities for talk into four major categories. These categories are consistent with a gradual release of responsibility model of instruction, which acknowledges that students must assume increasing responsibility if they are to learn (
  • Teacher Modeling
  • questioning can be used during teacher modeling, but teachers can also activate their students' background knowledge during this time
  • After modeling, students can reflect on what they learned through both writing independently and talking with a partner.
  • Guided Instruction
  • teachers use talk to determine what students know and what they still need to know. This is an opportunity to use questions, prompts, and cues to help students complete tasks.
  • Collaborative Tasks
  • Talk becomes critical when students discuss tasks or ideas and question one another, negotiate meaning, clarify their own understanding, and make their ideas comprehensible to their partners. It is during collaborative tasks that students must use academic language if they are to focus on the content. Here again, their understanding grows as they talk with their partners to reflect on their learning.
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page