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Berylaube 00

Community Club Home Listen and Read - Non-fiction Read Along Activities Scholastic - 3 views

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    From Richard Byrne Free Technology for teacher, quoted below:Listen and Read - Non-fiction Read Along Activities Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community. Applications for Education Listen and Read looks to be a great resource for social studies lessons and reading practice in general. At the end of each book there is a short review of the new words that students were introduced to in the book. Students can hear these words pronounced as many times as they like. Listen and Read books worked on my computer and on my Android tablet. Scholastic implies that the books also work on iPads and IWBs"
Kristin Bergsagel

How To Do Things With Words : Learning Diversity - 4 views

  • the RRSG theory of reading comprehension is predominantly cognitive rather than cultural. It depicts the text as an encoded representation of a specific situation.
  • Making and having meaning, then, transcend cognition and involve a commitment to values and the pursuit of ideals.
  • These moral qualities are essential to human life, yet they seem to be completely redundant in the case of the aforementioned reader of “the cat is on the mat.”
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  • Could it be that teachers who are allegedly so obstinately unfaithful to the received theory of reading comprehension do in fact apply it in their classrooms, but fail to achieve adequate outcomes because the theory fails to explain reading as a meaningful human activity?
  • the most authoritative theory of reading comprehension misleads her into performing a futile cognitive exercise.
  • namely, instruct students to read the text creatively by transforming it into a model for exploring ideas such as self-deception, hubris, or the unintended negative consequences of well-intended parenting.
  • it doesn’t address texts adequately as media of communication between purposeful, goal-oriented actors.
  • The meaning of a message, then, is its use by the interacting parties and is therefore always much more than a mental representation. When we treat words or statements as mere representations, we fail to communicate.
  • A theory that fails to enhance communication undermines education, because education is a special form of communication dedicated to the transmission of learning.
  • The words remain his rather than theirs, conveying facts about his dream rather than becoming resources useful to them. These readers have missed yet another opportunity to make sense of the history of their nation and of their own lives in relation to it.
  • hopeful vision coupled to a darker prophecy and a threatening message.
  • This reading, then, intertwines American political history with the history of literature in a way that renders the reader herself an active participant in their making.
  • creativity, diversity, and agency
  • Readers, we propose, ought to associate the meaning of the text with its use. The texts students typically read in school, more specifically, ought to be used for the purpose of exploring ideas. Reading for this purpose is necessarily a creative endeavor because it entails transforming the text into a model of inquiry into certain aspects of the reader’s life experiences.
  • In other words, because they use the text in diverse ways, its meaning varies accordingly.
  • What is at stake is nothing less than how students relate themselves to cultural achievements that have shaped the world in which they live and the society in which they gradually mature.
  • Conversely, education researchers in universities and other research institutes are often insufficiently familiar with how children learn at school, and therefore simply do not have an adequate understanding of the problems their research should solve
Nik Peachey

Nik's Quick Shout: A Speed Reader with a Library - 0 views

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    I'm never really sure what the value of being able to read quickly is and whether this effects the amount of information you actually retain when you read, but I do know that getting EFL and ESL students to read in chunks and getting them to read as much as possible can be very beneficial to their language development.
Patrick Higgins

Reading Rockets: The Six Ts of Effective Elementary Literacy Instruction - 7 views

  • The issue is less stuff vs. reading than it is a question of what sorts of and how much of stuff. When stuff dominates instructional time, warning flags should go up.
  • In less-effective classrooms, there is a lot of stuff going on for which no reliable evidence exists to support their use (e.g., test-preparation workbooks, copying vocabulary definitions from a dictionary, completing after-reading comprehension worksheets).
  • In these classrooms, lower-achieving students spent their days with books they could successfully read.
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  • In other words, in too many cases the lower-achieving students receive, perhaps, an hour of appropriate instruction each day and four hours of instruction based on grade-level texts they cannot read.
  • No child who spends 80 percent of his instructional time in texts that are inappropriately difficult will make much progress academically.
  • These exemplary teachers routinely offered direct, explicit demonstrations of the cognitive strategies used by good readers when they read. In other words, they modeled the thinking that skilled readers engage while they attempt to decode a word, self-monitor for understanding, summarize while reading, or edit when composing. The "watch me" or "let me demonstrate" stance they took seems quite different from the "assign and assess" stance that dominates in less-effective classrooms (e.g., Adams, 1990; Durkin, 1978-79).
    • Patrick Higgins
       
      This makes great sense: children need to see what experts do when they read.  
  • I must also note that we observed almost no test-preparation activity in these classrooms. None of the teachers relied on the increasingly popular commercial test preparation materials (e.g., workbooks, software). Instead, these teachers believed that good instruction, rich instruction, would lead to enhanced test performances.
Mark Smith

The art of slow reading | Books | The Guardian - 9 views

  • Seeley notes that after a conversation with some of her students, she discovered that "most can't concentrate on reading a text for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. We're being trained away from slow reading by new technology."
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    My students have even told me that they cannot read in school because it is "too distracting" with friends and activities, etc!!! The phones are vibrating, the latest drama unfolds minute by minute--I have decided that half my job it is train them to recognize the proper environment for the proper activity. It is slow going!
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    I noticed this myself in my second year of college; the way I was reading (especially literature, etc) was changing rapidly as I became more inundated with short-message communication (Facebook, email, texting, etc.). I would even argue that our composition models are changing. I can fire off short bursts of information very quickly (like right now). However, I am finding more often that I may have to actually plan to find a place to read (frightening...?).
Adam Babcock

On a Musical Note: Exploring Reading Strategies by Creating a Soundtrack - ReadWriteThink - 9 views

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    Students begin by analyzing how specific songs might fit with a familiar story. Students then create their own soundtracks for the movie version of a novel they have read. They select songs that match the text and fit specific events in the story.
Tracee Orman

The Potter Games - 12 views

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    This is an interactive website based on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books/games. The characters of Harry Potter have been thrown into The Hunger Games (as tributes or mentors) by Lord Voldemort. The player chooses one of the characters and must read each passage, then makes a decision for that character, which could result in becoming the Victor...or "Reenervate" to try again. If you have students who like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, they will have fun on this website. New characters are unlocked daily & we plan on writing more stories - one with the characters rebelling against Lord Voldemort and breaking out of the arena. It is great practice for reading skills - some characters have longer passages, some shorter. Some have up to 144 different scenarios (that's 144 pages of text). The least amount of reading for a player is 19 pages. So think about your low readers - that may be more than they read in a week by just playing one character. The writers who have/are contributing to this non-profit project include teachers, high school students, college students, professional writers, graphic artists, musicians, librarians, and so many more. We're all fans of both series, of course. :) (For grades 7 and up) I have a free download of lesson ideas for using The Potter Games in your classroom here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Potter-Games-Using-Interactive-Fiction-to-Improve-Reading
Dana Huff

Tracking Independent Reading in high school - 22 views

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    Jeff Utecht describes how you can use Goodreads to track students' independent reading.
Dana Huff

The Great Gatsby - Studio 360 - 16 views

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    "Studio 360 explores F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and finds out how this compact novel became the great American story of our age. Novelist Jonathan Franzen tells Kurt Andersen why he still reads it every year or two, and writer Patricia Hampl explains why its lightness is deceptive. We'll drive around the tony Long Island suburbs where Gatsby was set, and we'll hear from Andrew Lauren about his film G, which sets Gatsby among the hip-hop moguls. And Azar Nafisi describes the power of teaching the book to university students in Tehran. Readings come courtesy of Scott Shepherd, an actor who sometimes performs the entire book from memory."
Nik Peachey

Authors - ELT and the Crisis in Education: Digital Reading Skills | Delta Publishing - ... - 3 views

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    We take it for granted as English language teachers that we need to develop our students' reading skills, but in most cases the nearest our students get to reading online is a printed version of a web page pre selected by their teacher. At best they may actually get to see a pre selected page on the screen of a computer, but is this enough to really develop their digital literacies?
Leslie Healey

Reading in a whole new way - 15 views

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    First time I have seen the way reading changes when reading on a screen. I can use this info with my students, understand how critical reading is changing but not disintegrating
Teresa Ilgunas

My Home - Practice speaking English while you watch great videos - EnglishCentral.com - 4 views

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    Wonderful video clips where students can record and practice their speaking. Good for improving literacy as well as English speaking skills. Any student who does not like reading aloud would enjoy! Latest: a clip from Despicable Me!
Adam Babcock

Education Week's Digital Directions: Classroom-Tested Tech Tools Used to Boost Literacy - 10 views

  • English-language learners
  • audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs
  • 2nd through 4th graders over 16 weeks as they used webcams to see themselves reading and then he identified their mistakes.
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  • at least two fewer mistakes per minute.
  • podcasting to help her students practice fluency.
  • Then they can literally see the pauses or mistakes they made in the editing program and correct them.
  • Using VoiceThread, for instance—which allows users to create collaborative, multimedia slide shows with images, documents, and videos
  • Storybird, allows students to tap into a library of illustrations to create digital books, says Lovely.
Teresa Ilgunas

21st Century Literacies: Tools for Reading the World - 0 views

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    Wow, this is a PRACTICAL guide to info literacy, from step by step on how to read a website, to how students report the info. FULL of information I can use in my classroom without having to reinvent the wheel myself!
Leslie Healey

Reading Literature, A Spiritual Practice - 0 views

  •  Do you want to get closer to God?  Settle down with a good book. McEntyre notes that, in the ancient practice of lectio di
  • It can change the way we listen to the most ordinary conversation. It can become a habit of mind. It can help us locate what is nourishing and helpful in any words that come our way—especially in what poet Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said”—and it can equip us with a personal repertoire of sentences, phrases, and single words that serve us as touchstones or talismans when we ne
  • “equipment for living
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    AMEN--you do not have to be a religious person to get this. Too often, I understand this idea, but forget to share it with my students. Reading as "equipment for living"
Dennis OConnor

150 Questions to Write or Talk About - NYTimes.com - 30 views

  • For almost two years now, we’ve posted a fresh Student Opinion question every weekday.Each question was originally inspired by something in that week’s New York Times, and all of them are still open to comment by anyone between the ages of 13 and 25.Teachers tell us they use them as “bell-ringers,” as inspiration for lessons, as jumping-off points for student research and journalism, or just to help students practice writing persuasively and responding to others around the world. (We don’t allow last names, and we read each and every comment ourselves before we make it public, so it’s a pretty civil, and safe, place to post.)Below, 1
andrew bendelow

Digital Youth Network: Creating New Media Citizens through the Affinity Learning Model ... - 9 views

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    Composing online is not writing alone, as students have done. When he produces an artifact, the networked student creates a communal effort on the Internet.
Mary Worrell

Why Class Sizes of 50 Could Be Better - Synthesizing Education Blog - 4 views

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    Interesting post by Aaron Eyler about whether a larger class size might benefit students. I don't agree, but the comments offer an interesting read.
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    Interesting post by Aaron Eyler about whether a larger class size might benefit students. I don't agree, but the comments offer an interesting read.
Dennis OConnor

Teaching to the Text Message - NYTimes.com - 9 views

  • So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers. Once, I asked them, “Come up with two lines of copy to sell something you’re wearing now on eBay.” The mix of commerce and fashion stirred interest, and despite having 30 students in each class, I could give everyone serious individual attention. For another project, I asked them to describe the essence of the chalkboard in one or two sentences. One student wrote, “A chalkboard is a lot like memory: often jumbled, unorganized and sloppy. Even after it’s erased, there are traces of everything that’s been written on it.”
  • My ideal composition class would include assignments like “Write coherent and original comments for five YouTube videos, quickly telling us why surprised kittens or unconventional wedding dances resonate with millions,” and “Write Amazon reviews, including a bit of summary, insight and analysis, for three canonical works we read this semester (points off for gratuitous modern argot and emoticons).”
    • Leslie Healey
       
      these comments are more useful than the article--we do a "welcome" every morning from the night's reading. This might freshen up the "welcome" and remind them of its relevance to their lives. Thanks.
  • And short isn’t necessarily a shortcut. When you have only a sentence or two, there’s nowhere to hide.
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  • Rewarding concision first will encourage students to be economical and innovative with language.
Dana Huff

10 Ways to Celebrate Banned Books Week With The New York Times - NYTimes.com - 9 views

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    Held annually during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of intellectual freedom and draws attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted banning of books across the United States, including books commonly taught in secondary schools. Here are ideas for celebrating Banned Books Week -- with your students, your children and anyone who believes in having "the freedom to read."
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