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You can use technology in your next read aloud. Here are some great ideas,

"Second-grade students who read aloud to dogs in an after-school program demonstrated improved attitudes about reading, according to researchers at Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction at Tufts University. Their research appears online in advance of print in the Early Childhood Education Journal. Reading skills are often associated with improved academic performance and positive attitudes about school in children. Researchers wanted to learn if animal-assisted intervention in the form of reading aloud to dogs in a classroom setting could contribute to improved skills and attitudes."

"You are more likely to remember something if you read it out loud, a study from the University of Waterloo has found. A recent Waterloo study found that speaking text aloud helps to get words into long-term memory. Dubbed the "production effect," the study determined that it is the dual action of speaking and hearing oneself that has the most beneficial impact on memory."

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

So we decided to add a backchannel to the reading. While one of us reads, the kids in both classrooms and the other teacher chat in a today's meet room, discussing the text, asking questions, making predictions and dropping in great pieces of the text as it is read aloud over skype.

improving teen literacy by teachers reading aloud, even using picture books, in literature, math and history

Parts of the site require a subscription, but the free parts are valuable none-the-less. The simple non-fiction book are read aloud.

"In the award-winning documentary Children Full of Life, a fourth-grade class in a primary school in Kanazawa, northwest of Tokyo, learn lessons about compassion from their homeroom teacher, Toshiro Kanamori. He instructs each to write their true inner feelings in a letter, and read it aloud in front of the class. By sharing their lives, the children begin to realize the importance of caring for their classmates."

An article in last week's Education Week looks at the increasingly common practice of reading aloud to middle and high school students. In discussing the practice with Mary Ann Zehr (I'm quoted briefly in the piece) I made the point that while there is certainly nothing wrong with reading out loud to teenagers, it is symptomatic of what I call "literacy creep" - the tendency of elementary school-style instructional techniques to find their way deeper into K-12 education across all content areas.

Yet another beautiful analysis of a major problem in education today by the good people at Core Knowledge.

Attention: 4th and 5th Grade Teachers Starting February 1, 2010, join @ewitt43 as he invites you and your class on a reading adventure with classes from around the country. They will be discussing and reading the story "The Invention of Hugo Cabret." It is an amazing story that takes the students on an adventure of over 500 pages of words and illustrations. He does this as a read aloud and the students will be answering the questions on the blog on their own so they can communicate with other students of similar age.

We must take ownership of our own culpability... It's not 'the tests.' It's our unwillingness and/or inability to do something different, something better. It's not 'the tests.' It's us.

"No film set of a 1950's primary school classroom would be complete without the serried ranks of neatly dressed children chanting times tables aloud at their wooden desks. Since those days, learning through repetition has fallen in and out of vogue. That's why it's so interesting to witness the recent resurgence in support for rote learning, backed by high-profile figures from the world of politics and education alike."

"Storytime: While reading to children has many benefits, simply speaking the words aloud may not be enough to improve cognitive development in preschoolers. A new international study, published in the journal PLOS ONE and led by researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, shows that engaging with children while reading books to them gives their brain a cognitive "boost.""

We all get overloaded from time to time, especially toward the end of a term when your todo list turns from being measured by points to metres. We all have our own capacity to deal with the issues at hand, and the ideas behind Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) attempt to maximise our bandwidth while streamlining the signals. The origins of the theory go back to the 1980s when a plethora of digital innovations changed how presentations were done in the business world. This trickled down in the following decades into how teachers presented ideas, moving away from blackboard and Over-Head Projectors to digitalised PowerPoint presentations. As with any new innovation, form overcame function, and for a period in the early noughties, I swear it must have been the law to cram as many animations and sound effects into every PowerPoint, and reading every word from the screen aloud was mandatory.

Very interesting article about Silent Sustained Reading.

Futrelle's story "The Problem of Cell 13" makes a great introduction to the mystery genre for junior high students. It takes two or three classes to read aloud, with plenty of opportunities for students to guess the outcome.

Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully-for the next day or the year ahead-by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

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