Professional Reading
3 edtech realisations
This blog post by David Truss explores how educational technologies are transforming education. Here is the introduction to the post:
There is a lot of talk about ‘New Literacies’ and ’21st Century Learning’ and about transforming education these days. As I approach my 5th year ‘blogiversary’ I have come to some simple, but I think important, realizations about how educational technology (edtech) has and will continue to transform what it means to be an educator today. I believe that together, these three realizations are key to sharing and advocating for technology integration.
An article about the importance of Literacy Strategies and Activities
This article from the Adolescent Literacy website (adlit.org) emphasises the importance of all teachers explicitly teaching reading comprehension strategies to help students better understand what they read. There are strategies given to support students to overcome the main difficulties they have when reading, which are:
- difficulty monitoring their own understanding while reading,
- difficulty making sense of unfamiliar content,
- difficulty making sense of specialized terms and concepts,
- difficulty making sense of familiar words used in specialized or unusual ways.
Literacy Strategies: (from adlit.org)
Before Reading - Vocabulary
Concept sort - A concept sort is a strategy used to introduce students to the vocabulary of a new topic or book. Teachers provide students with a list of terms or concepts from reading material. Students place words into different categories based on each word's meaning. Categories can be defined by the teacher or by the students. When used before reading, concept sorts provide an opportunity for a teacher to see what his or her students already know about the given content. When used after reading, teachers can assess their students' understanding of the concepts presented.
Comprehension
Previewing Texts - Textbook previewing strategies focus not only on the structure of the text — such as the table of contents, index, chapter introductions, and so forth — but on a content overview, which focuses on the concepts and questions covered in the chapter and their interrelationships.
General resource:
This document by Peter Leech on behaviour (Responsible Behaviour: Teaching children to take responsibility for their own behaviour)- covers how to set the school and classroom environment for Responsible Behaviour- focusing on teaching children to take responsibility for their own behaviour. It offers a step-by-step pathway for teachers wanting to improve the learning climate in their classroom. It is quite long but it is in a slideshow format so it is easy to read.
