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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Clint Heitz

Clint Heitz

ASCD Express 13.16 - The Keys to Content-Area Writing: Short, Frequent, and Shared - 17 views

  • Examine your students' background knowledge on a new topic of study by asking them to write about it. Pass out index cards and instruct students to fill only one side with their related thoughts and experiences. Provide a minute to write followed by a minute to discuss their ideas with a nearby partner. Collect the cards and set them aside until the end of the unit. Then, ask students to revisit their original notes and, on the backs of their cards, describe how their thinking has expanded or changed on this issue. The initial card writing gives you an insight into background knowledge, while the final card writing offers students insight into their thinking and learning.
  • If we continue to believe that we must collect and grade every piece of student writing, our exhaustion will result in students writing far less. Sure, if necessary, we can award points, checks, or stamps, but these should simply be records of whether the students gave a good-faith effort (full credit) or not (no credit), not grades that attempt to assess the writing (Vopat, 2009).
  • Offer students an intriguing content-area prompt. For example, if the topic was e-waste, you might ask students to write about the importance of e-devices in their own lives or you might project a photograph of a mountain of discarded, obsolete cell phones. Let students think and write for a minute or two. Then, working with a partner, have each student read aloud what they wrote and discuss their ideas. Another very social writing activity is written conversation. Starting in groups of three or four, students silently respond to a content-related prompt, writing for several minutes until most class members have about a third or half a page of writing. Then, within the group, students pass their papers to their right. Now, each student must read the previous writer's thoughts and expand the conversation by exploring ideas and asking questions. After a few minutes of writing, papers are passed again, and the conversation continues to blossom as more and more ideas and responses are added. When the paper returns to the owner after several passes, each student gets to read a very interesting conversation that began with their initial written response. Of course, this written conversation could continue as an out-loud discussion, as well.
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  • If you want students to be better readers, writers, and thinkers in every content area, then writing every day in every class is key. Be sure to make that informal and spontaneous writing short, frequent, and shared.
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    "Examine your students' background knowledge on a new topic of study by asking them to write about it. Pass out index cards and instruct students to fill only one side with their related thoughts and experiences. Provide a minute to write followed by a minute to discuss their ideas with a nearby partner. Collect the cards and set them aside until the end of the unit. Then, ask students to revisit their original notes and, on the backs of their cards, describe how their thinking has expanded or changed on this issue. The initial card writing gives you an insight into background knowledge, while the final card writing offers students insight into their thinking and learning."
Clint Heitz

Supporting Students With Chronic Trauma | Edutopia - 16 views

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    "De-escalation strategies can help prevent students' emotional outbursts, and aid them and their peers in finding calm after one."
Clint Heitz

Screen Reading Worse for Grasping Big Picture, Researchers Find - Digital Education - E... - 27 views

  • Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem,
  • The findings align with other emerging research on how students process information differently in print and digital forms. A 2014 series of experiments found that while taking more notes overall was better than taking fewer, students who typed notes on their laptops rather than writing them on paper tended to take down information verbatim rather than summarizing concepts, and the more students wrote verbatim, the less they remembered a week later. 
  • For example, she said, teachers should consider the format of information when designing different types of activities, to help students focus on details or overall themes. 
Clint Heitz

Department of Psychology | JMU - 10 views

  • If the new trend in textbooks is moving them to computer screens, the switch could have negative consequences as many suggest that people skim more, process more shallowly, and may retain less information when reading online, Daniel said.
  • he readers’ goals are different: Individuals reading an e-book for enjoyment aren’t required to pass a comprehension-based test afterward. While they found that learning is possible from both formats, learning from e-textbooks takes longer and requires more effort to reach the same level of understanding, even in a controlled lab environment. At home, students report taking even more time to read e-textbooks as well as higher rates of muti-tasking (e.g., Facebook, electronic chat, texting, email, etc.) than do their peers using printed textbooks.
  • In their preliminary findings, the scanning pattern produced when the student read a textbook showed consistent reading from line to line down the page. But the scanning pattern from reading on the screen was less intense.
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  • Daniel and Jakobsen argue that the information dense textbooks characteristic of natural and social science subjects are not a good fit for current e-textbooks, but there are exceptions for subjects like chemistry and math that include doing formulas and other activities. The liability, Daniel emphasizes, comes when math and chemistry teachers hope their students will learn the explanations, not just the formulas, “Students tend to skip the text and go straight to the formulas, especially if they are graded.”
Clint Heitz

This Is How The Way You Read Impacts Your Memory And Productivity - 17 views

  • Studies have shown that taking notes by longhand will help you remember important meeting points better than tapping notes out on your laptop or smartphone. The reason for that could be that “writing stimulates an area of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system), which filters and brings clarity to the fore the information we’re focusing on
  • says one explanation for the benefit of reading analog books may come down to something called metacomprehension deficit. “Metacomprehension refers to how well we are ‘in touch with,’ literally speaking, our own comprehension while reading,” says Mangen. “For instance, how much time do you spend reading a text in order to understand it well enough to solve a task afterwards?”
  • “Length does indeed seem to be a central issue, and closely related to length are a number of other dimensions of a text, e.g., structure and layout. Is the content presented in such a way that it is required that you keep in mind several occurrences/text places at the same time?” says Mangen. In other words, she says, complexity and information density may play a role in the importance of the medium providing the text.
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  • “It is not–and should not be–a question of either/or, but of using the most appropriate medium in a given situation, and for a given material/content and purpose of reading,”
  • As the study cited above mentions, like other digital readers, you probably think you are absorbing the information better than you actually are, and thus move through the book faster.A simple solution to this is to simply slow down and take more time reading the material, and you might absorb the information just as well as those who naturally take longer to read a paper book.
Clint Heitz

Which is better -- reading in print or on-screen? - 12 views

  • In a review of educational research published by SAGE Journals in July, Singer and University of Maryland professor Patricia Alexander discovered that readers may not comprehend complex or lengthy material as well when they view it digitally as when they read it on paper. While they concluded with a call for more research, the pair wrote, “It is fair to say that reading digitally is part and parcel of living and learning in the 21st century … No matter how complex the question of reading across mediums may be, teachers and students must understand how and when to employ a digital reading device.”
  • In an interview with “Inside Digital Learning,” Singer confirmed, “Digital devices aren’t going anywhere. This no longer is a question of, ‘Will the digital device be in your classroom?’ but ‘What do we know about the digital device, and how can we make this equal to print?’”
  • For example, she said instructors should take the time to show students how to annotate a PDF and make them aware that most people read more quickly on a screen than in print and therefore could lose some comprehension. She also suggested that teachers ask students to answer, in one sentence, what the overall point of the text was every time they read a chapter or an article online.
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  • “Sometimes students only need to get the main idea,” Singer said, “and then digital is just as good as print and a lot quicker … But if you want deep comprehension and synthesis of the material, have the students print it out and navigate the material that way. Think about what you want students to get out of a lesson” before assigning a printed or digital reading.
  • Donovan added, “I do agree that we’ve got to figure this out … because it isn’t going away, for sure, for lots of reasons: accessibility, cost, sustainability. We have to figure out how we can support students in comprehending from this format.”
  • But he said he believes “we can still get as much meaning out of digital text. We just haven’t found the right transitions to do what we actually do with a physical book, with digital text … We haven’t found the digital equivalent of interacting with text. We haven’t really trained people to do that.”
Clint Heitz

Do we read differently on paper than on a screen? - 9 views

  • In total, there are more than 180 researchers from 33 different countries participating in the COST-initiated research network E-READ, reading in an age of digital transformation. This network examines the effects and consequences of digital developments in terms of reading.
  • It is not a case of "one size fits all," but patterns are beginning to emerge from empirical research into the subject. The length of the text seems to be the most critical factor. If the text is long, needs to be read carefully and perhaps involves making notes, then studies show that many people, including young people such as students, still often prefer a printed book, even if it is available as both an e-book and in electronic formats with options for making notes, enabling the user to search for and highlight the text digitally. This is not the case when it comes to shorter texts.
  • When reading long, linear, continuous texts over multiple pages that require a certain amount of concentration, referred to as "Deep Reading," the reader often experiences better concentration and a greater overview when reading from a printed medium compared to a screen. When we are reading from a screen, only one section can be seen at a time and the available reading surface area is limited. If you read a printed medium such as a book, several text areas are available simultaneously and it feels easier to form an overview and make notes in the margins.
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  • However, an interesting finding in some of the empirical studies is that we tend to overestimate our own reading comprehension when we read on screen compared to on paper.
  • it has been found that we tend to read faster on screen and consequently understand less compared to when reading from paper. This is a very new research topic and there are studies that have not found any differences in this area.
  • such findings do highlight something very important, namely that we may have a different mental attitude to what we read on a screen. This has very significant implications, including in the context of education.
  • For example, reading literature has proven to have a stimulating effect on the imagination and encourage the development of empathy. Reading has an effect on our ability to concentrate and for abstract thinking. We want to discover if such processes are influenced by the reading medium.
  • There is a need for more empirical research on reading comprehension in terms of screen reading and also on the subjective reading experience.
Clint Heitz

Study Finds Difference In Recollection From Screen Reading Vs. Paper Reading | HuffPost - 25 views

  • The study followed people who used computer screens for learning versus paper reading to learn, and found that while screen learning helped solidify the details of the learning, paper reading helped readers better understand abstract concepts.
  • Better put, concrete memory from reading involves the who and when, whereas abstract concepts tend to lean towards where and why.
  • The results showed that abstract thinking was impacted by computer screens but concrete memory was not.
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  • The basic gist that we can take from it is that when learning something, it may be in your best interests to digest the information from multiple media forms. For example, if you want to recall the dates of certain events, a computer screen may help you better remember them when studying. However, if you want to recall why such an event occurred or where, paper may be your best bet.
  • The next time you go to study something, consider this twofold approach. Perhaps read up on the topics online and then print out the cliff notes. Next, study those as well. See if this helps you store all of the abstract and concrete information better.
Clint Heitz

The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens - Scientific ... - 25 views

  • The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.
  • Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
  • Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
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  • At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.
  • Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
  • An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.
  • In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
  • Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do.
Clint Heitz

Flippity.net: Easily Turn Google Spreadsheets into Flashcards and Other Cool Stuff - 98 views

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    Turn Google Spreadsheets into slick quiz shows, flashcards, madlibs, and more!
Clint Heitz

CATME | Smarter Teamwork Tools - 1 views

  • Assigning students to teams: CATME Team-Maker Self and peer evaluations and rating team processes: CATME Peer Evaluation Training students to rate teamwork: CATME Rater Calibration Training students to work in teams: CATME Teamwork Training Making meetings more effective: CATME Meeting Support
  • Gather information from students and provide feedback to students. Understand their student teams’ processes, team-members’ contributions, and students’ perspectives on their team experience. Be aware of problems that are occurring on their students’ teams Hold students accountable for contributing to their teams. Use best practices when managing student team experiences.
Clint Heitz

How To Manage Group Work - The Learning Scientists - 3 views

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    A look at tools and resources regarding effective group work in the classroom.
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