Teacher Magazine: Why I Hate Interactive Whiteboards

Teacher Magazine: Why I Hate Interactive Whiteboards

I'm catching up today on some of my "Read It Later" list, thus the flood of blog posts today. This is an article that was in my list to read and gets at something I've been thinking for a long time. In my school we have installed SMART Boards in all of our math, middle school, and science classrooms. Now I think the math teachers are making great use of the technology and using it in interactive ways, in contradiction to the linked article. Beyond that, however, I think I agree with much of what the article says. In fact, it is clear to me that much of our staff do not really know the difference between a SMART Board and an installed projector. Most of us, in fact, are really just enjoying the installed projector/speakers and not taking advantage of the SMART technology. Perhaps I have not taken enough time to really learn how to use this technology, but for me, my time is best spent learning tools that I can teach students to enhance their learning, more than my teaching. I don't see interactive white boards in that way, so I'm not a big fan. What do you think?

Canter Video Links

Canter Video Links

Donald Leu (University of Connecticut) is one of, if not the, leading researcher in the literacy community when it comes to online reading. On this site you will find some great videos of Don discussing elements of online reading, along with links to some of his publications. I highly recommend checking out the videos and his other work.

How music training primes nervous system and boosts learning

How music training primes nervous system and boosts learning

I recently ran across this article and find it very interesting. I have for many years felt there was an important connection between music and reading & learning. For example, when our middle school does auditions for our annual musical, it is usually pretty clear which students have had the greatest struggle with decoding issues, as they are usually the ones who have the most trouble matching pitch. This article makes a great case for the importance of musical training and therefore the importance of including music in our schools.

Website Watch: Bringing the World to You

Feeling overwhelmed with keeping up with all the information that is out there on so many different topics? You are not alone. I recently ran across a term “infowhelmed” that I think sums this problem up nicely. Especially when it comes to the Internet, it is hard to keep up with all of the different sources of news and information out there that are both personally and professionally interesting to us.
That’s where RSS comes in. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Think of it like the ability to subscribe to many sources of information. You may subscribe to print materials such as a daily newspaper, a weekly news magazine, a popular magazine, professional journals and newsletters, etc. You would not dream of having to get into your car and drive to various locations to pick up these individual pieces. Instead you have them delivered to your home or office. (Of course that means that some of this is at home when you want it at school or at school when needed at home!) RSS along with an RSS reader can do this for many of the sites you might frequent on the Internet and pull in even more useful information. And it is all available to you wherever you have Internet access! For a quick visual introduction to RSS and RSS readers, click here for a great video explanation then come back and read on.
So now that you know a little more about how RSS and RSS readers work, let’s talk about setting up your reader. One of the easiest to use is probably Google Reader. (For you visual learners, click here to get a quick video introduction to Google Reader.) If you already have a Google account, you already have access to Google Reader. If not, it is free to sign up, and you really should be taking advantage of the many great tools Google has to offer anyway. Just go to reader.google.com, sign in or create an account and you are ready to get started. There are two ways that you can add what are called news feeds to your reader. A news feed is simply the way that many blogs and website allow you to subscribe to their updates.
The first way to subscribe is to click on the “Add Subscription” button in the top left corner of Google Reader. There you can enter a search topic and Google will provide you with a list of blogs and other sites with news feeds on that topic for you. You can preview the feeds to decide if any look appealing. Perhaps you have a website that you frequently visit already. For example, if you want to keep up with news in the field of reading, you might visit the Reading Today Daily website.To subscribe to IRA’s daily news feed, click on the RSS button they have prominently located near the top center of the page. (It is orange and looks like the picture above.) Then cut and paste the URL address from the page that appears (yes, the page looks like gibberish) and paste the address into the “Add Subscription” box in Google Reader. Some sites make it even easier. Education Week makes subscribing even easier in some ways. If you go to their website and click on the RSS icon in the upper right side of the home page, it takes you to a whole list of topics that you can subscribe to and all you need to do is click on the button next to the topic and then click the “Google Reader” icon on the page that appears and Reader does the rest for you. It is that simple.
Be careful – once you get started bringing the world to you through RSS you will find it quite addicting. Start with just a few sites and check in on your Google Reader feeds at least once a day. Google Reader also allows you to set up folders to organize your feeds. For example I have a folder on “Literacy” sites, one on “Technology” sites, and many more. If you find you are not reading a certain site’s feed anymore because it is not helpful, you can always unsubscribe.
There is so much more that can be said about RSS. And it is not just useful for teachers, either. Think about students doing research or keeping up with current events and having information flow to them! If you are interested in learning more about RSS, you might check out the books Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson (Corwin Press, 2010) or Web Literacy for Educators by Alan November (Corwin Press, 2008). Learning about RSS has been one of the most important tech tools I’ve learned about in the last two years. As Will Richardson writes, “RSS is a powerful, flexible tool that I think will be changing our information gathering habits for years to come. If you don’t try any other tool …, you have to start using RSS. Remember: Resistance is futile.” I agree and encourage you to give it a try today.
(This post was originally written for The Keystone Reader a publication of the Keystone State Reading Association. Become a member today!)

Making Connections

It looks like a number of my prompts for writing entries lately have been to share videos that have gotten me thinking. Well, here’s another one. Interestingly, the subject is math. Now if I had to pick one subject that I feel least prepared in, the one that I think I would struggle with the most, it would be math.

However, this video, while about math, raised questions about problem solving and education that I think go beyond math education. I wonder how we in the reading field might react to the ideas presented in this short talk. I’m just beginning to think this through.

Social Media and the Classroom

I know that I have been quite unpredictable in blog posts. My goal is to become more regular. Truth is, I have many ideas to share, but do not take the time to write. I need to change that.

This video, however, struck me. I wanted to post it here in part so I would not forget it, but also so that anyone who stumbles on this blog might see it and share their thoughts.

The ideas contained in this video raise many questions for education. The e-mail statistic was interesting as I have found it harder to communicate with students in a timely manner using e-mail. More important, though, is the question of how we leverage social media for education. I also found myself wondering how struggling readers – I mean those who really struggle – can make it in the world of social, online networks where there is a lot of reading and writing (and, granted, graphics).

Take a look at the video and share your thoughts!

Amazing Future – Gesture Computing

This video came to my attention in an e-mail from the National Reading Conference/Literacy Research Council list-serve. It is an amazing view into the not-too-distant future of computers. It raises more interesting questions about literacy. Will reading/writing literacies be more important? Less important? Different? This is worth the 14 minutes needed to watch!

Revisiting Digital Nation – Do Books Have a Future?

In one of my last posts, I recommended watching the PBS program Digital Nation. It is a fantastic program that examines our society, particularly our children/young adults’ digital experiences. As I said in that post, it raised many questions in my mind.

I revisited the web page this afternoon and watched clips of an interview of Marc Prensky. This interview was titled, “Do Books Have a Future.” In short, his answer seems to be, “Only a little bit.” As someone who has spent his professional career teaching reading – teaching the love, I hope, of books, this is an unsettling thought. He raises many important questions in this short video of about 5 minutes. I encourage you to take a look at it and comment with your thoughts.

Marc Prensky Interview

Technology as Change-Agent

The end of my unexpected winter break has come and on the last day I spent some time reading a book that has been sitting on my “to read” pile for awhile. The book was Alan November’s Empowering Students with Technology (second edition). As with the earlier book I reviewed in October 2009, November’s book is quite clearly written, with numerous student examples and suggestions for implementing his ideas. I find myself mulling two major questions/ideas after finishing the book.

How do I view the role of technology in education? November presents two ways technology can impact/change a school or other organization. Technology can be “automating.” Here’s how this is explained in the book:

Automating essentially means “bolting” technology on top of current processes and procedures. When an organization automates, the work remains the same, the locus of control remains the same, the time and place remain the same, and the relationships remain the same. (2)

According to November, automating can provide incremental improvement, but it can also produce negative results. This was seen in an example from General Motors’ adoption of technology in the 1980s that actually led to lower qualities vehicles.

While automating can have benefits, especially procedurally (think online grades, computer card catalogues, etc.), November encourages readers to think of the use of technology as informating – with the focus on information/learning. Here’s how he contrasts the two approaches:

Perspective and leadership – not technology 0 are what distinguish automating from informating. When automating, the goal is to preserve the current structure. The essential question is, What technology can we buy and install to improve what we are currently doing? Informating revolves around a perspective of asking what new and timely information we can give people in the organization and what new relationships we can nurture to improve the quality. (4)

In many of the chapters that follow in the book, November shares how teachers focusing on informating or information utilize technology to more effectively reach their goals and how to help students more effectively, efficiently, and critically utilize technology tools to access information.

I know I often fall into thinking of technology for automating and need to be more focused on informating. I like this way of thinking about technology integration and particularly like how he points out that it puts the emphasis on what do we want students to learn and not on what technology we need to buy. In my own school, I often feel we discuss what technology to buy first and then “hope for the best” that it will find a good use.

The second question that came to me, however, is the one I am constantly wrestling with. Is a constructivist approach to learning really the best approach, especially for struggling learners? Related questions include: How does explicit strategy instruction relate to a constructivist approach? Can all that students need to learn be problem-based learning? I don’t have the answer, and at the moment I honestly struggle to find ways to even experiment with such learning in my classroom.

If I had the answers, I wouldn’t have the questions. So, if anyone stumbles across this blog, I welcome your thoughts and comments. I also encourage you to take a look at November’s book.

November, A. (2010). Empowering Students with Technology (second edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Two Thought-Provoking Resources on Reading and Technology

            Snow days are a wonderful day for reading and for watching online video. Having just had two snow days (and praying for no more snow for several winters!), I had the opportunity between rounds of shoveling to do both. One of the videos I watched online was the PBS program Digital Nation. While nearly 90 minutes long, this video was a fascinating look at what it means to live and teach in a digital world. It raises many questions that we as teachers, and particularly teachers interested in literacy, need to be considering.

            Among the most important questions that struck me involved the future of the book. One of the people interviewed for the program raised the question of whether the book, a vehicle for teaching for centuries now, is still the best vehicle for teaching in the 21^st century. When humans learned to read and write, we certainly gained, but it probably also impacted our memory. We gained certain things from this transformation, while losing others. What might be the gains and losses as we move to a more digital world – or for us a digitally-oriented literacy?

            I often wonder what this digital transformation means for reading teachers - we lovers of the book. What that we have taught needs to be held onto and what do we need to be willing to adapt and change? Are we as a profession going to ask these questions in time to not be “left behind?” Will we adopt the teaching content and processes needed to meet the challenges of digitally native students moving into an increasingly digital world?

            One book that addresses aspects of this for literacy educators, in terms easy to understand for the less digitally native, is Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet Inquiry by Maya B. Eagleton & Elizabeth Dobler. While somewhat long, the book provides a framework for teaching research that embraces digital resources. The first two chapters of the book provide one of the best overviews of the reading process and teaching reading that I have read. The rest of the book develops their QUEST framework:

Questioning – What do I want to know? What is my plan?

Understanding Resources – How will I find out?

Evaluating – Is this what I need?

Synthesizing – What does this mean?

Transforming – What will I do with it?

The authors provide clear explanations and descriptions about how to present each element of the QUEST framework, with numerous reproducible handouts. What is so appealing about this approach is that it integrates both print and digital resources. It will make sense to both the least technologically inclined teacher and the most digitally adept student. You can check out some of the book’s resources at the following website: http://readingtheweb.net/

            So, do not wait for another snow day, especially since as you are reading this I hope it is getting warmer and sunnier. Spend some time watching Digital Nation and find a copy of Reading the Web. Then find some colleagues to discuss these with, whether in person or in a virtual world.

References:

Dretzin, R. & Rushkoff, D. (2010). Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/

Ealgeton, M.B. & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet Inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.

Free and Low-Cost Online Graphic Organizer Tools

Reading and literacy educators love graphic organizers. Today there are a number of wonderful online tools for teachers and students to create great graphic organizers of all kinds. This is especially useful since the tools in Word are often cumbersome and software programs can be expensive. Here is a sample of the free or low-cost online tools available for creating graphic organizers:

Webspiration – www.mywebspiration.com

This is an online version of the popular Inspiration concept mapping program. It’s interface will be familiar to anyone who has used the program and it shares many of the same features. One of the benefits of this online version is the ability for users to collaborate on concept maps without having to e-mail files back and forth. One of the limitations, as can be found with many online graphic organizers, is that printing is cumbersome at best. Currently the service is free.

Bubbl.us - bubbl.us/

Another online concept mapping tool. It is pretty intuitive to learn to use and also provides some collaboration features and the ability to share concept maps. For example, students can create a concept map and then share it with the teacher. Free.

Gliffy - www.gliffy.com/

Gliffy is a diagraming tool, so can be used for concept maps, flow charts, and other diagrams. Diagrams can be shared and published to a blog or website. The basic service is free.

Exploratree - www.exploratree.org.uk/

This site provides numerous pre-made “thinking guides” that can be customized and either printed or completed online. You can also contribute to the site by submitting your own guides. Free.

Mindmeister - www.mindmeister.com/

Many businesses utilize mind mapping, which in many ways is just another form of concept mapping, for project planning. Mindmeister is a great tool that provides collaboration tools for easy classroom use. The basic plan is free, but you are limited to 3 mind maps. They do offer an academic license that offers great classroom benefits. I used this for a year in my social studies and English classes and many students really liked it. Basic is free. $18/year/user or $600 for an entire elementary school.

Thinklinkr - thinklinkr.com/

Thinklinkr is an online outline tool. The benefit this tool provides over the built-in outlining available in word processing programs is the addition of collaboration tools. Multiple people can work on the same outline either synchronously or asynchronously. There is a chat feature that can also aid collaboration/discussion about outlines. Free.