Learn, Grow, Change

Okay! I am using purple text to emphasize my passion about this kind of professional learning!  And while I did some perusing of the main page of K12 Online Conference, I think I hit on a session that is “just right” for what I attempt to do with my own students when it comes to reading and comprehension. I chose a 2009 session entitled Keeping Literacy in 21st Century Literacy by Wesley Fryer and presented by Drew Schrader, a high school English teacher in Bloomington, IL.  My attention remained glued for the entire session, and I even took three pages of notes – proof that note-taking is such an important skill for our students. Drew opened the session by sharing some assumptions that he had about his viewers – and I liked this because his assumptions further convinced me that the session was perfect for my viewing, listening and learning. Drew assumed that a viewer was fairly new to Web 2.0 technologies, but interested in learning about them. His second assumption was that his viewer cared about student engagement – or else we wouldn’t be watching such an online session. Finally, Drew assumed that his viewer was busy because of our choice to visit an online session to LEARN.  So, I decided that I liked the person “inside-my-computer-who-was-talking-to-me-that-I-of-course-could-not-see”!   Drew drew on (no pun intended)  concepts from teaching theory, literacy pedagogy, and tech integration to talk about issues surrounding reading and writing fluency and then provided strategies and respective 2.0 tools to achieve the solution.

ISSUE #1: Many of our students are not able to metacognate about their own reading. I agree with this observation – and this is one of my first questions and interactions I have with my own students as we set out to do the “Business” of English class: read!  I ask my students: Just what goes on in our minds as we read? as an entree to metacognition. I insist they learn the word, what it means, write it down, and then bring it up at the dinner table that night as polite conversation!

Drew’s STRATEGY to this issue is to do Think Alouds with the 2.0 TOOL ScreenToaster – a creative way to gather discussion about a particular literary piece and capture it. Important Note: I return to this blog to bring you an important update: Screentoaster will no longer be available after July 31, 2010. The site is shutting down.

A second ISSUE, again related to comprehension, is that students struggle to make use of text conventions. A STRATEGY to support this is to annotate texts as a guide. And the Web 2.0 TOOL  Drew demonstrated is Diigo, a social bookmarking site which allows a user (students and teacher) to highlight text and add sticky notes – very neat and very useful.

A third and final ISSUE  Drew presented has to do with students’ need to organize their ideas. A useful STRATEGY that many of us employ has to do with mindmapping, but the next time I have my students do a presentation, we will skip past Powerpoint and use Drew’s suggested Web 2.o TOOL: Prezi. I like this much more than power point and am going to close this rather lengthy blog so I can go check out all three of these tools. I am going to push myself to do all my presentations using Prezi – one big screen that holds everything, but the creator can move around in and in and out of. Far out!

I found this “couch conference” absolutely wonderful – informative, useful, educational, and worthwhile. I am eager to go right now to explore the three TOOLS that I just learned about. This a new kind of professional learning that I will use often, and that I am eager to share with my colleagues.  Hope I don’t “turn off” potential participant bloggers from reading and responding to this post – I know it is lengthy.