How quickly do you click on a link when your search results pop on the screen? How quickly do your students “click?” If your experience is like mine, students have already clicked off the page before I have finished looking at what is there. (Many of my younger colleagues do the same.) Often students will click on the first link that “kind’a” looks good without really looking at the description and the source.
The New Literacies group terms this skill: Locating Information Using Search Engines. This is similar to helping students understand what type of resources they should look in to find certain types of information. For example, use an almanac if you want to find the average rainfall in Tanzania. Try an encyclopedia to get an overview of a topic. Search Engines make the search task so much easier to find information, while simultaneously, making it more difficult to find the exact information you want.
The new reading research skills that students need involves understanding how search engines report out search results. Which sites have paid for their location on the page? What does the url tell us about the type of site it is and whether the site creators are trying to sell something. Taking these extra steps to preview and evaluate search results takes additional time just as previewing a textbook chapter takes extra time; however, it is time well spent for it may well save time in the long run. The best way to teach this to students may be conducting mini-experiments by giving students a question to answer and seeing which approach results in the answer most quickly. Unless students can see that taking a minute to look through search results to find the best possible sources will actually save them time, I doubt they will move from “click click .. click.”
Don Leu and his research team at the University of Connecticut identified key skills needed for reading on the internet. These skills are termed the New Literacies. I thought I would look at each of these skills and compare and contrast them to traditional reading instruction. The first skill identified is: Identify Important Issues or Problems. This skill appears to be the equivalent of Setting a Purpose before reading. Students need to know what they are reading to discover. When conducting research on the internet, it is even more important to know what the purpose of the research is. A click here and there on links may yield some interesting information or fun sites, but does it relate to the issue or problem being researched? This different context makes clarity of purpose even more important.
Recently, I heard Don Leu and his research team from the University of Connecticut share their ideas and research about the new reading comprehension and learning skills needed for effective internet research. Leu and his team identified the following skills as key:
“Identify important questions or problems.
Locate information using search engines.
Critically evaluate online resources for accuracy and reliability.
Synthesize information across texts.
Communicate information using email, blogs, instant messages, wikis, Nings, social networking sites, and other media.”
This presentation started a quest to understand this topic and learn how and what to teach today’s digital consumers. The New Literacies Research Team at UConn provides a great starting point. It provides resources and links to understand the ways in which our more traditional reading instruction needs to change to teach the skills our students need for survival in this digital age.
In the meantime, I would love to have interested adults try this site and share your thoughts. Signing up is free as are some of the books. I know I will be starting with a free book. Try it out. Please let me know about your experiences.
An author chooses great descriptive words and powerful verbs to help her writing “come alive” and help the reader visualize what s/he is reading about. Often students have difficulty evaluating their own writing. It is difficult to see their own writing as another reader will view it. Wordle comes to the rescue! In creating a “word cloud,” students quickly spot overused words and “dull” words. Moreover, students enjoy seeing their writing in a Wordle and do not gripe about this phase of the editing process.
As usual, time seemed to run out as the end of the year approached. Last year I created a Voice Thread describing all the major things we studied in 7th grade reading. Students then commented on what they liked and disliked. This was then shared with parents, but this year there was no time to get all this done. So I asked each student to write down everything they remembered learning or working on and developed it into a word cloud using wordle.net. This allowed me to determine what students remembered or found memorable.
I was somewhat disappointed that the students did not list more of the reading strategies that formed the bulk of instruction. And yet, they certainly remembered the contexts in which these strategies were embedded. They remembered watching the movie Akeelah and the Bee as the culmination of our study of Greek and Latin root words. They remembered learning camera “shots” and The Door Scene when we were working on the power of visualization. The wordles also helped me see room for improvement. I want students to remember the strategies we learn. The activities should just be the “touch stone” or memory point for retrieving the strategy and how to use it. Using the word clouds proved to be a quick and easy to summarize and assess a year’s worth of work. Next year I will try to do better.
In manufacturing, the “just in time” philosophy means that the materials needed for the production process arrive exactly when they are needed. The same philosophy applies to presenting ideas to teachers for how technology and web 2.0 resources can be used. I often post a url to a site I have found helpful to me. When I hear back from teachers it is often to mention how they were just thinking about a new way to do something when they received my e-mail. This happened most recently with the newspaper generator (http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp). I shared an “article” I had my students generate, and I received a reply e-mail from a teacher saying how perfect it was for helping her students connect the answer to who, what, where, when, and why questions in a coherent article. The students loved the idea of their own newspaper article that looked like the real thing.
The fact that this idea arrived in her e-mail mailbox just in time for her classroom focus made all the difference.
Most of us love to share our horror stories about bad things that have happened to us … especially when someone or something else can be blamed. So, if you want teachers to use technology, spend some time listening to what went wrong when they tried. If someone asked me, you might hear about the lap top cart that was not re-charged or the computers that did not recognize the microphones we were using for Voice Thread or the band width that slows everything down or even the great reinforcing game that is blocked.
Using technology must be easy. Every glitch means lost instructional time, frustration, disruptive or bored students, and a hesitancy to try again. While not all problems can be anticipated or easily fixed, knowing that the technology specialist knows about our frustrations and helps to resolve them goes a long way to encourage most teachers to try again.
Technological resources should be evaluated as to how they further student learning. Technology can help students learn, reinforce learning, or showcase learning. These are some of the resources that I have found helpful to teach vocabulary to middle school students.
Most educators would list lack of sufficient time as one of the big teaching frustrations. Consequently, all instruction and support activities must be directly connected to the curriculum and standards of performance. Reading instruction has four major foci: decoding, reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. At the middle school level, the decoding aspect of reading often emphasizes morphology, i.e. the smallest unit of language that carries meaning such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words. This approach to decoding blends into vocabulary expansion.
When evaluating what technology resources to use with my instruction, I look at what purpose technology can serve. 1. Does it aid or enhance the actual learning itself? Does it reinforce things learned? Or 3. Does it showcase student’s demonstrated learning? Many technology applications serve more than one purpose. Also, as a teacher, I know that our minds like new things, unique things, or exciting things. Consequently, I look for at least 5 different ways that I can use technology to accomplish the same purpose. For example, I know how excited my students have been to play the “Mouse” hang man game on Spelling City, but if that is the only reinforcing activity I do for a week, they will soon tell me how boring it is! The task, then, is to use sufficient resources to keep the students interested and learning; and yet not overwhelm the students and teachers with too many options.
Since the technological resources vary for each instructional area, I will focus on each reading instructional area and some of the resources used one at a time. The resources cited should in no way be considered inclusive. They are simply ones that I have used and found effective. Part 3 will focus on Decoding and Vocabulary instruction.
