MagellanTeachers

students today are asked to read very little expository text — as little as 7 and 15 percent of elementary and middle school instructional reading, for example, is expository…Worse still, [this reading is] too often of the superficial variety that involves skimming and scanning for particular, discrete pieces of information; such reading is unlikely to prepare students for the cognitive demand of true understanding of complex text.”

by the end of 4th grade, students' reading should be half fiction and half informational. By the end of 12th grade, the balance should be 30 percent fiction, 70 percent nonfiction.

Here is a snippet of the ideas being shared in online conversations by incredible educators that you may be missing out on: Bookmarking and organizing, lesson planning, share stuff with kids, online discussions, share information among teachers—team, grade level, school or district wide Facilitating student collaboration for discovering information by doing the following: using the comment ability to analyze and evaluate websites helping students to interact with text and helps them think about what they are reading. Rather than just cutting and pasting, students are asked to consider the text and the meaning of the text. Being selective and researching skills are so important and will move the research agenda further foward. Building an online community of telegatherers and teleplanters. Customizing information using Diigo tools. Teachers with multiple sections and/or preps can easily customize information, resources, activities using Diigo’s groups, lists, and conversations. This can all even be done at the time that a bookmark is made (for example, I could send the bookmark to a 7th grade math group list, a pre-algebra group list, but not the 7th grade social studies group) Enhancing professional learning communities by sharing web resources by using the cool highlighter feature or sticky notes and extend our chat about how to help our students become better readers, then the PD would mean more to us. Supporting Diigo-based fine-grained discussions connected to a specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges where teachers can embed all kinds of scaffolding into web-based materials with Diigo: sharing questions for discussion (either online, or to prepare students for an in-class discussion); highlighting critical features; asking students to define words, terms, or concepts in their own words/language; providing definitions of difficult/new terms (in various media, such as embedding an image in the sticky note); providing models of interpreting materials. using the highlighting/sticky note feature to “mark up” our “textbook” (blog) with comments, observations and corrections to specific words, phrases or paragraphs of each post. Aggregating bookmarks the students make of websites valuable to their learning, and use the highlighting feature and sticky notes as if they were like the Track Changes feature in MS Word which lends itself more towards collaboration and the iterative process. Accomplishing peer reviews of assignments. Students place the assignment on the web and other students critique it. This removes the need for specialised peer review modules in some Learning Management Systems. Facilitating instant conversation starters. Diigo allows for the focus to go back to specific content. You bookmark a site and send it out to a Diigo group. This resource becomes an instant conversation starter or at least a common piece of content between members of a network. The diverse experiences of the network can then discuss the resource and the unique perspectives of each of the members can sprout new ideas into the collective. You get a lot of “I didn’t think of things that way” or “That would never fly for me, because…” Having students research a particular topic. The teacher(s) gather a few web sites that students can use an tag them appropriately. In the comments section, the teacher(s) might place instructions which are specific for the content to be found on the web site. This enables students to read it before even opening the page. This technique—which also includes highlighting content—is important for younger students and helps focus them on specific content. Students can also reply via virtual post-its to the highlighted text. Marking up online student work with this tool. Online students can mark up each other’s online work with this tool and engage in conversation about that work. Encouraging students to create annotated bibliographies of web resources in directed learning activities AND share and discuss them with others in the class. This resource can grow and be available for the online course from term to term.

The Times and the Common Core Standards: Reading Strategies for ‘Informational Text’r