Term 2 Week 11 - blogging, web tools and "Teach Like a Champion"

Professional Readings

• What students want - information gleaned from student focus groups about what they want from school and their teachers and what they need to do themselves in order to succeed.

e-Learning Readings and Strategies

• Fostering Student Creativity and Responsibility With Blogging - When sixth graders enter middle school, they are masters of some aspects of digital technology and lost when it comes to others. Despite their familiarity with some digital technology, they often lack specific skills needed for interacting with particular digital tools and interfaces. Many of them also lack the perseverance necessary for troubleshooting tech issues. This blog post also has links to other readings and resources about using blogs in education.
• Summer PD: Web Tools Collectives Part 3 -- Collecting, Organizing and Making Sense of Information - Access to the Internet brings an almost unlimited amount of content to our fingertips. Effectively collecting, organizing, and making sense of this information is critical to learning. Ubiquitous access to information provides many opportunities and challenges for "formal" education systems. After all, what good is memorizing the atomic number for Iridium when you can just text Cha Cha? This blog post has lots of great ideas about how to teach and support students as they conduct research online.
• Edutecher newsletter for July 2011 - This "Mega-Newsletter" shares some great new tools and resources, but you can also learn more about all of the new apps they have just released and see some of what went on at the ISTE conference last week.

General Strategies

Teach Like a Champion — Technique Number Two: Right is right. This technique accepts no half answers, but asks for complete and correct answers to questions.

Term 1 Week 9 - differentiation, critical friends & some resources for research

Professional Reading "Critical Friends" by Deborah Bambino Although this article is from 2002, it explores ideas which are still relevant to teachers, especially the professional support we can get from each other. This article explores the notion that by providing structures for effective feedback and strong support, Critical Friends Groups help teachers improve instruction and student learning.

Differentiation Strategy

"Establishing classroom routines that suppport the differentiated classroom" by Jennifer G. Beasley This presentation covers:

• What do students need?


• How can teachers and students work together to meet those needs?

including, tips and ideas on how to create classrooms that support flexible teaching and learning. I especially like the idea of using coloured cups for managing groups.

General Resources - focus research skills/ information literacy skills Many of us are focusing on the explicit teaching of information skills and using the i-lit model with our students. These resources will help with this process.

• i-lit wiki - this wiki was set up as a place to store online and hardcopy resources for each of the stages in the i-lit model: reflecting, defining, retrieving, processing, creating and communicating.


• online research tutorial - When students hear the word 'research' they might think of work that is done in a lab or out in the field. Research also includes the process of gathering, analyzing and communicating information.


• online websearching tutorial - An online tutorial which helps students to be more successful with their internet searches.


• online plagiarism tutorial - what plagiarism is and how to avoid accidentally plagiarizing someone's work.


• online tutorial on finding credible sources - shows students how to evaluate information with a critical eye; use criteria to determine credible web sources; spot other reliable sources they can use.