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Wallwisher: How Would You Use it in Your Teaching?
One of the reasons I love to teach teachers is that they’re always introducing me to new tools that support learning and instruction. My student Katy Jain just introduced me to WallWisher. I love it. It’s an interactive post-it board for ideas. Free. No login required. And it works. Here’s how Katy used it. She…
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Parenting digital babies: Don’t throw the print out with the bathwater
This past week, I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Informational Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) in Austin, Texas. I have plenty of thoughts to share about sessions I attended and people I met but tonight, I only have a few minutes and I’ve been thinking about this post for a while. You…
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Online Learning, Educational Transformations and Me?
One of my students, Brent Zeise, shared this infographic with me (originally published at OnlineEducation.net). I found it incredibly compelling and so I’m sharing it here. I’m currently teaching CEP 820 — Teaching Students Online, in the Master’s of Educational Technology Program at Michigan State University. For me, this infographic is a reminder of the…
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The Simple View of Online Reading — It’s Time to Push Back
Reading comprehension researchers will know that the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) presents reading (and reading comprehension) as a function of two factors: (a) decoding ability (D) and (b) language comprehension (LC), a composite skill that is not well articulated by the model, but that is generally understood to include vocabulary knowledge…
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It seems I’m not the only one worried about leveled reading…
In their article, Dear Governor: Lobby to Save a Love of Reading, Anne Stone and Jeff Nichols question leveled reading. They seem to have the same sorts of concerns that I have expressed here, in my blog. Like their sons who trade insults about reading levels, I, too, have heard my daughter say to one…
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Annotum Anyone?
I’m working with some colleagues to think about the design of a unique summer learning institute for 6th graders. One of the ideas on the table is to structure the institute around scientific thinking. The kids would spend the summer investigating “how to do things” and reporting in various ways on what they’ve learned to…
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What does authentic learning look like? A Lego man in space, that’s what.
For an example of what real, authentic learning looks like, I share this article from the Toronto Star about two teenage boys who designed, from scratch, a weather balloon that a) transported a Lego man into space b) was equipped with Canon cameras that took photos of the Lego man’s voyage every 20 seconds and…
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The Skills of Document Use: My New Favourite Book
This week, I’ve been reading The Skills of Document Use: From Text Comprehension to Web-Based Learning by Jean-François Rouet (link to publications) and it has catapulted to the top of my list of favourite professional resources. In a nutshell, it’s brilliant. For starters, Rouet’s summary of current theories of comprehension — including, Kintsch’s Construction-Integration theory…
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Leveled Texts in My Daughter’s Classroom
Last evening, I met with my daughter’s teacher. I was worried about the ways that my little one has come to identify herself as a “leveled” reader — as in “I’m a level I reader, Mom, so I don’t read level M books”. At home, she has told me, “I can’t read those words,…
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I’m a level “J” so I can’t read level “K” books…
My daughter is in the first grade and she is learning to read. Until the first grade, I would have characterized her as more interested in the pictures than the text (like most kids are) but with a keen interest in decoding words. She has always demonstrated a voracious appetite for narrative and informational texts…