Group items tagged

"With this strategy students will have a chance to: remember, understand, analyze, evaluate, and create. Students work in teams of four to answer four questions about an article they read, a chapter from a novel, or a video they just watched (or whatever you want to assess). After careful analysis of their teammate's work, students will come up with a summary of each question to share with the class."

This is an excellent (and fun!) reading comprehension activity!

A short introduction to the concept of social bookmarking, using Delicious.com. (Great overview of social bookmarking, even if you don't use delicious.)

This is the video we watched the first day of class.

Weekly features include Cartoons for the Classroom, Front Page Talking Points, Geography in the News Quiz, Audio Webcasts, Interactive New Quiz, Topical News Videos and Discussion Prompts, Use the News lessons, Words in the News Vocabulary Quiz.

"Speakaboos is an educational resource for the classroom and home. Our award-winning videos teach reading skills, life lessons, and creativity in a fun and safe environment. Each story comes to life with educational worksheets, activities, and games. Speakaboos timeless tales are ideal for kids of any age."

This is a 25 minute video about how helping tutor students helps the community. Please take a few minutes and see what people are doing to help school age children read and write, hopefully you'll be as inspired as I was about spreading this message. 18 March 2008 Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to engage with their local school. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs.

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"The mission of the Michigan Assessment Consortium is to improve student learning and achievement through a system of coherent curriculum, balanced assessment and effective instruction. We do this by collaboratively Promoting assessment knowledge and practice.Providing professional development.Producing and sharing assessment tools and products." Includes resources and archived videoconferences

This article was about labeling "readers" and how teachers identify students by whether they were or were not "readers". Not everybody has the same definition or meaning of the word "reader". What characteristics do we as teachers assume someone possesses when he or she is (or is not) a reader? The article suggests that most people refer to the word "reader" as someone that possesses the ability to recognize letters and decode some words and sentences. Yet the people in the study often categorized reading as an activity that they regarded as more focused, literary, and part of high culture, not daily life. Also, the reading that happens every day is not what most teachers mean when they talk about a student being a reader. This article further states that being a "reader" is generally a positive identity for young children and often negative for adolescents. The following paragraph was meaningful to me and truly hit home: I believe it is important that we talk more with our students about what kind of qualities we expect from the people we identify as readers. For one thing, we need to explore with students the multiple and varied nature of reading. We need to remind them that they are constantly being readers as they go about their lives, and we need to talk with them about all the ways they engage in reading and for what purposes. (We can also remind them that reading is often pleasurable and can be so in school as well as outside of it.) After reading this article, I believe teachers should take into account that outside of the classroom students are reading such texts as video game magazines. I plan on emphasizing to my students that good readers do not necessarily read fast, do not necessarily understand what they read the first time, usually read important works more than once, and often finish reading with more questions than they started.

"I plan on emphasizing to my students that good readers do not necessarily read fast, do not necessarily understand what they read the first time, usually read important works more than once, and often finish reading with more questions than they started." This is so important, Renee! Students need to know that even adults as experienced readers sometimes struggle with text or go back and re-read. Kelly Gallagher talks about how, as a high school English teacher, his kids don't realize that he "gets" all the symbolism, etc. in the Shakespeare works because he's read them 20 times. This article also gave me a different perspective on our "Me as a Reader" activity. Thanks for sharing!