Even though I have been a curriculum consultant for two years now I still have the teacher-librarian’s love of connecting teachers and resources. Although I find it a bit more difficult at the division level to really make connections for people I have found that by using a couple of online tools, Delicious and Yammer, I am able to ‘spread the word’ about the many wonderful resources that I come across via Twitter, my Delicious network and my Bloglines account.
Delicious is my favourite web 2.0 tool because it not only allows me to collect and organize resources but it also allows me to annotate them. And when I do so I am thinking in the back of mind about the teachers who might be using the resources and how they might find them useful within their teaching context. I can also let individuals within my Delicious network know about a resource that might meet their specific needs. My wish would be that every teacher in our division would bookmark my Delicious link. Yes, yes, it would be much better if they subscribed to or joined my network – but to even occasionally open the bookmark would allow them to quickly and easily find great resources.
Last fall a member of our iSITS committee (in-school instructional
technology support) started a Living Sky School Division Yammer account and several members of the committee have begun to use it share new resources and to ask for and to provide support for each other. (Yammer is much like Twitter but the participants are limited to those with a specific institutional e-mail address) It has become a very useful communication tool and I often will post links to key resources that I think that teachers might find useful.
There are others tools that I know will also be useful in disseminating information about resources to teachers and over the next few weeks I plan to experiment with start pages to create constantly updated lists of resources in as many subject areas as possible. I will keep you posted with regards to the success of my efforts.
Blogging and Reading Comprehension Strategies
Tags: blogging, comments, reading strategies
In a WizIQ seminar a conversation about blog comments recently took place with several teachers in my school division and Kelly Christopherson. Teachers said comments that indicated an understanding of their key ideas, provided a quality critique, or shared a similar learning or action extended their own understanding and learning.
Many students within our school division are now blogging as part of their daily classroom activities. As teachers have become more comfortable with the online writing format they want to extend the audience and the conversations for their students first by encouraging them to comment on classmates’ writing and then by finding other classrooms that their students can connect, write and share their learning.
While they recognize the value that commenting brings to the blogging process many teachers struggle to explain and teach students how to make meaningful comments on others’ writing.
Having students use the reading comprehension strategies to comment helps them to avoid words like nice, good and interesting in their comments.
Students, especially primary and students new to blogging can use sentence frames to…
Make Connections – e.g. after reading a blog about a puppy students use a sentence starter “this reminds me of when my puppy did….”
Question – asking questions that use starters such as, “I didn’t understand this…” “I wonder what…”
Other reading comprehension strategies can be used to respond to student blog posts:
Visualization – if an entry supports visualization – have the student draw a picture and then describe it.
Infer – (for older students) – look for inferences that the writer makes – e.g. if the blogger writes with passion – comment on the evidence that allows them to make the inference or “I see that you have lots of knowledge about this topic” and again provide the evidence.
Synthesize – paraphrase – transfer the statement from the blog into their world – “what you said makes me think about this idea in my world – how this applies to me”.
Blogging is a great communication tool but it is the use of effective commenting skills that will extend and engage global conversations for our students.