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Manitoba Education’s Literacy with ICT Across the Curriculum provides some very impressive information and resources for the use of ICT in all curriculum areas. It is developed around the philosophy that teaching ICT skills should not be an educational goal. Rather, we should be developing good instruction, providing students with rich learning experiences into which the use of ICT is integrated.
Must come back to this resource!

EduBlog Insights »Six traits of writing metaphors

As I read Wil Wheaton’s post the mystery hotel, I am reminded of an idea that I had a while ago for a writing project with the kids. Unfortunately, in all of the insanity of work, the musical, work, family, work, and vacation (oh yeah, work too!), I forgot about it until I read this post. Wil’s post actually makes things clearer because it has a ready-made example.

The Images Canada site has thousands of archive photos of various places across Canada. My thought was to have the kids pick a particularly interesting photo (of our community? perhaps another place?) and have them write a story (letter? travel brochure?) using the photo as the setting. I wish I could find a good narrative voice and write a story about this one.

Wil’s story reminded me of the possibilities of this exercise. While I’m sure you’ll never see this, thanks Wil!

In his post Representing Information, Clarence makes a good point about “How we represent information, what it looks like, and the forms that are possible, shape our thoughts about it.”

I have thought about the other side of this, but this makes so much sense. I am comfortable with the idea that we make meaning in what we read based on our own experience. It seems so obvious then that we continue to shape our understanding of a concept when we represent it. I recently went to a workshop on differentiated instruction, and Clarence’s statement makes me think about strategies whereby the students are given more options in the way that they demonstrate their learning. If the way in which we represent information helps to shape the way in which we view that knowledge, it stands to reason that we need to give students as many opportunities as possible to select those strategies that best suit their own learning.

Will we encounter students who will take the easy way out and select those strategies that simply require the least effort and which lead to minimal learning? Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s going to happen, if we allow it. I suppose it comes back to us to guide the kids to choose the strategies that will be most effective for them (we should know or kids well enough to have a good idea what will work best).

What about a topic like mixing colours of light, for example? Which kids will benefit from demonstrating their understanding of this concept through a structured written task? What about a demonstration with ray boxes? How about a computer-based activity in which the students demonstrate their understanding by mixing colours of light in the cells of a table? They all address the same curriculum expectations, but each student could develop his/her own understanding of the topic through the mode of presentation/writing representation that he/she chooses.

I have a meeting on Monday morning and I think I might refer back to this.

This week at school, we were discussing how to help the children learn how to learn how to write adventure stories. I stumbled across this great lesson idea for hypertext “choose your own adventure” stories (from ReadWriteThink). As I read the lesson, I tried to think how best to allow the students to write their stories and create new pages for the different branches of their stories. The challenge - for me, anyway - is to do this with younger students.

I thought about how best to tackle it. With older students, I wouldn’t hesitate to have them create a series of interconnected web pages. I opened up my wiki - my own little brainstorming area - and began to jot down a few ideas. That’s when it hit me: a wiki! It would be so easy for the students to create the pages they needed for the different branches of their stories. With a little bit of tweaking, we could set the ACLs so that students could only edit their own pages. I realize that this is somewhat heretical in the world of wiki, but it also recognizes reality. I know that it is easy enough to undo changes that other students might make, but I don’t want to discourage any students from sharing their own stories when we are just starting out. The next step could involve some sort of shared authoring of a story.

The next question is: which wiki engine do we use? I have played a bit with Wikka, but it would be nice to have some sort of control (there’s that word!) over group permissions. WikiniMST offers convenient group management, but I don’t have the time to translate all of the text into English. I think we may go with MediaWiki in the end. I guess we’ll see how it goes. I’m excited by the thought of the experiment.

I love being a teacher!

Remember these novel studies?

I love it when this kind of thing happens!

I am at a workshop today and tomorrow. We are talking about what it means to be literate in the 21^st century and how to teach students to be literate in the here and now, and in the future.

I came back to my hotel room and began to catch up on some reading. I had a look at John Pederson’s blog. In particular, I read his post Getting Disruptive, Part 3. It dealt exactly with what I was discussing today with some colleagues. We even watched the cat herding video that (I think) he mentions in this post.

I love it when the pieces of the Universe come together!

The latest campus craze? Freshman reading - From CNN
This article talks about reading programs at American Universities. These programs include real-life links to the texts. While the specific examples given in the article are beyond junior/intermediate students, some of them could be adapted for younger students.

The workshop I attended was given by David Booth from OISE/UT. It was all about boys and literacy, but was a lot more than just “boys need books about cars”. Mr. Booth is a very engaging and informative speaker. Much of what he said was not entirely new, but it pulled a lot of threads together and helped to plant some seeds of ideas. One of those seeds was for a project that I began to plan with another LL teacher from my board, a project that we began to discuss after the workshop.

I took notes on my Palm as he spoke, as I wanted to hang onto some of the ideas that came up. Here they are as I jotted them down:

• “what boys want, we don’t”
• why do we do book reports? -not that useful
• let them play to their strengths, but expose them to new things
• we tend to do things in school that aren’t used later in life
• reading is perceived as a “girl thing”
• novels developed in the 17^th century for women
• boys need to see reading, or any kind of learning, as valued
• boys are often only called upon in class as behaviour control
• music lyrics are today’s most popular text
• “the enemy is worthlessness”
• “literacy is a culture”
• boys’ egos can be damaged easily
• computers have allowed men to feel comfortable writing - don’t have to worry about handwriting
• computers have allowed people to write more than in all of history - reminds me of The World is Flat
• even text messaging is literacy
• I was one of only two in a room of 50 teachers to know what blogging is
• read whatever the hell you want to read
• new literacies will become more and more important
• students who take shops (usually boys) don’t get the same type of enrichment activities that music students do
• you get as much or more from books on tape as from real books
• 2/3 of all men print rather than write cursively
• get them to read more, more in-depth
• literacy is making sense of any text we get
• “the literate guy will be the one who wins”; the one with the most options
• Cris Tovani - an excellent resource
• we don’t have students read contemporary scripts
• allow students to make meaning
• It is gratifying to hear some of these things from someone from up above.
• graphic novels are huge trend - biggest thing from publishers - give boys something they want to read
• boys used to read comics, but we didn’t recognize this as literacy
• video games require high degree of cognitive ability
• we need to expose kids to full range of literacy opportunities
• idea - have students make core list of books for students in younger grade
• create context for reading - give students background for text to be read
• the more meaning you make, the better understanding you have
• get the kids to read what they want to read
• make your own video - get kids to talk about their view of literacy in school

This was really fascinating/engaging stuff. This is what I would love to use for my practicum or for Master’s. I am trying to figure out something specific that I can create as a final product for my practicum. I was lookng at some sort of a technology plan, but I would like to make it something practical and link it to literacy, particularly boys’. Overall, this was a great day.

I still want to try to do something with the “real men read” idea. I also want to try to set up some sort of blogging reading response space. Perhaps a shared reading/writing wiki space could be use as well. This would allow students to share the writing process.

Another suggestion was to set up a staff book club. The school could have assemblies through the year to allow teachers to share (model) their reading with students, particularly for the boys.

Mr. Booth also suggested guysread.com when I was talking to him after the presentation. I think I have visited this site before, but I’ll have to check it out.

I attended day 1 of the NOEL literacy conference today (I can’t attend day 2 due to family commitments) and was very pleased that I did. I could start with details of the breakfast, which was pretty amazing for a conference buffet, but it was the speakers that really shone.

The day began with children’s author Sheree Fitch. She spoke a lot about the value of poetry, particularly nonsense poetry. She told us how nonsense poetry and tongue-twisters are great ways to get all students involved, because those students who have difficulty with reading can feel safe about making mistakes. It reminded me of something I wrote in a course last summer regarding the use of tongue-twisters in the FSL classroom. The idea was that all students could participate because all of them would make at least some mistakes. They could develop their fluency and have fun while they made mistakes, not something that normally happens.

Probably the most important thing that I took away from her talk was the idea of giving children the chance to find and use their own voice. I will definitely take that with me through the year as a literacy teacher.