The conference was AMAZING!  We had just under 200 people. (Read below to learn why that is impressive.)  We have already discussed changes for next year’s conference.  We hope you will consider joining us.  Check RMWP.ORG for updates.

This conference schedule is a thing of great beauty.  You can now also download the conference program.

When I first started planning for this conference, I was told to expect around 30 people to show up.  As of today we have about 152 registered.  I am amazed at the support.  I have never done this before.  It has been eye-opening.If you are interested in hearing Kylene Beers and Bob Probst along with 12 other presenters speak, I would encourage you to come on down, over, or up to Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday (27 February 2010).Here is a link to the page where you can register: 21st Century Literacies Conference(I will remove the option to register at 11:59 p.m. the night before the conference.)

I purchased a copy of Janet Allen’s Inside Words this summer at a workshop. Among the AMAZING activities in the book I discovered the Frayer Method. (Click HERE to see a demonstration of the Frayer method with vocabulary).

When I saw it, I immediately thought of how useful it would be to use this to teach voice/style within your students’ writing. If you had them fill out a graphic organizer like the one used with vocabulary above, you could really get them thinking about their own writing.

Then I started thinking about how useful it would be in teaching the differences between the literary periods I teach (everything from romanticism to modernism). Because the influence of these period is often subtle and lacking a strict definition, this will certainly be useful for me next year.

Anyway…this post was more for me than my readers. Just thought I’d share, though.

Here are some PDF worksheets that feature the Frayer methods:

What is the Frayer method?

Frayer Vocabluary PDF

If you have to teach kids how to pick out the main ideas of paragraphs or note taking skills, you may want to check out awesomehighlighter.com. 

DIRECTIONS:  All you have to do is 1.)go to the site

2.) type in the website address you want to mark up

3.) and click “highlight page.”

4.) hightlight and add notes as you wish.

5.) click DONE to get a url for your work and a list of everything you highlighted.

USES:

Use it to give instructions on how to use a website
Have students to a grammar technique scavenger hunt on their favorite sites
Teaching main ideas
Teaching researching methods
Teaching note-taking skills
You could put a paper on your website for students to highlight the errors
(if you have more ideas, leave them as comments)

AWESOME EXTRAS:
The great thing about this is you can pick different colors & you can even put a virtual sticky note on there. Then, students can just print out the marked up page when turning in the assignment.

***When you click done, it gives you the website address for a page that shows what you highlighted.  AND, it will even give you a list of all the thing s you highlighted.  In other words, it takes the notes for you!!!!!  (While that takes away from lessons about note taking skills, your reluctant students will enjoy the technology and ease.)

BEFORE YOU READ THIS:

If you do not know what a digital pen is, you can simply scroll down to the bullet points below (or click HERE to read about the Logitech Digital Pen). It writes just like a real pen, but it stores what you wrote so you can plug the pen into your computer  and upload it to a document.

MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL

I have recently considered investing in a new piece of technology that would help with digital portfolios.  If you wanted to keep a catalog of a students’ mistakes, but did not want to double your workload, you could purchase one of these pens.  Once you finish writing in the margins you could save that data to add it to your digital portfolio (a word document for that student).

 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

As you grade assessments that require a progression of improvement (i.e. spelling tests, etc.), you can make corrections in the margins that will later be uploaded to your computer from the pen.

IEP/SPECIAL ED. SUGGESTIONS:

You could also have students who have IEPs get notes from other students.  I guess this would be an expensive version of the carbon copy paper.

TIP (though I haven’t used one yet): I guess you would have to keep a pad  next to your stack of papers to write to jot down the name of each student as you begin grading their papers.  The reason is because when you upload the list of notations made by your digital pen, you wouldn’t know where one students paper began and another ended.  By reaching over and jotting down the name of the student each time (and drawing a line across the page, perhaps, you would be telling the pen to do the same on the document when you upload the data.

MORE INFO

For more information about this pen (there are many different versions out there), read the information below:

• What is it? You write with the pen in the notebook.  The pen has ink.  The notebook is real paper.  What’s new?  The pen uses an optical sensor to store everything you write.  Even once the pen is separated from the paper, it stores the pages you have written.  When you are ready to upload, you place the pen in it’s USB-linked cradle and it uploads in one click of the mouse.  Now everything that was written down is on your computer.
• Cost?  Retail is $149.95 for a pen and notebook.  Of course, you can find it for a little cheaper if you look around on the Internet.  You can get several sizes of notebooks.  I was able to purchase six standard-paper sized notebooks for under $25 after some digging.
• Technical Requirements?  Pen, cradle, notebook, io software.  This all comes packaged together.  To my knowledge, this product does not work on Macs.  The pen “package” does come with many ink cartridge refills.  I used the pen for four months in six hours per week of class before it needed a refill.
• How could we use this technology in the hybrid or traditional classroom?  Every day that we meet for my hybrid (part Internet, part classroom) Intermediate Algebra class, a different student takes notes using the digital pen and notebook.  They take the notes with them, I take the pen with me and upload that day’s notes to the web site.  Very quickly, we established the rule that those students that have been absent are the ones that should step forward to be note-takers, since they get the greatest benefit.
• How could we use this technology in the online classroom?  If the technology gets cheaper, or the student could get many semesters of use out of the pen, we could use this technology to have students “show their work” for problems requiring sophisticated use of notation or graphs.
• How could we use this technology in our professional lives?  The obvious use of this setup is for those folks who are not trained to create graphs or equations using a computer, but need to be able to communicate such figures using a computer.  You can attach the jpg file to an email and send your response to a question quite quickly.
• Wish list for this technology?   I would like an easier way to convert from the proprietary .pen files to pdf files.  Right now the conversion is .pen to .jpg (using the pen software) to .pdf using Adobe Acrobat Standard.  A cheaper setup cost would also be great to get mass use for students in online math classes.  Also pen software that works with Macs would be a plus.

(The bottom half of this article was taken from THIS site.  To read more click HERE, which is where the picture above was found.)

Yesterday I wrote about using writing in math, but the post primarily focused on secondary math. Therefore I thought I would throw in a few sites focusing on lower level grades I found when poking around the net.

MATHWIRE: Seems to be a great website! It focuses on all kinds of strategies that we consider best practices. There is everything from math journals to word webs dealing with math. I highly recommend this one.

THIS is a seemingly simple website with a lot of useful ideas. I particularly like the ideas at the very bottom of the page because they deal with various learning styles.

This handout (Writing to Learn) is another resource I found helpful. It has various math writing assignments along with student writing samples.

I just stumbled across a site by PBS TV. On their kids website, PBS Kids (okay, it’s not a really original name), they have a section called Word Girl.

Word Girl is a young heroine fighting all sorts of nasty villians who shoot goop and throw sausages at people. Those villians seem a bit odd, but they’re all done in an over the top Saturday-morning-style cartoon that makes the campiness seem fun. In order to fight villians, there are all sorts of activities where you have to pick the word to describe Word Girl’s next action. If you pick the incorrect one, something goes wrong (usually something silly) and you get another chance. If you pick the right one, Word Girl defeats the nasty villian.

This site would probably work well with mid to upper elementary. It has some great and really unusual words that kids at that age likely won’t know, but could easily use. It’s just silly enough to be fun, and just serious enough to educationally useful.

(Cross posted from Befuddled.)

Okay…so, what does that mean for you? It means having students write their thoughts instead of speaking them, which is, as we all know, an important skill when one depends on the internet/email to communicate. Below I give a very basic explanation of how it works and how you can use Firefly in your classroom.

HOW IT WORKS

When you visit a firefly-enabled website, you can click anywhere on the site and start typing. When you do, a bubble will pop up with whatever you are saying. Pretty interesting.

 

WAYS IT CAN BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Have your students look at different documents. Set a timer and do virtual stations. Each time the timer sounds, students would go to a different virtual station (or page of your website) to discuss via firefly.
2. You could anonymously post various students’ work for critique. Then they can print screen when they are done.
3. Put pictures of various advertisements your website and have students evaluate it for bias and/or method of using propaganda.
4. Have students do something like a word cluster.

I like this site because it allows for quiet evaluation of materials while giving a the assignment an edgy feel.

I would love to hear from you regarding ideas for using firefly.

Since most of our students have used/are using social networking sites to reveal a little about their characters, why not enourage them to do the same with characters in the literature they read. I recently had the idea of trying this with Gatsby, but this could obviously work with any piece whether your students have experience with these sites or not.

I would suggest asking one of your students to jot down all of the categories of his/her page to give you an up-to-date list of topics. Create a worksheet that requires the task of creating a profile for one or multiple characters. To make this work pedagogically, students must be able to back their answers. You may even decide to require textual examples.

ASSESSMENT OF CHARACTER

You can assess students’ knowledge of how well they understand the characters themselves by asking them to fill the profile with contemporary movies/music/literature. That way you know if the students are thoroughly understanding the characters.

CULTURAL/SETTING ASSESSMENT

For this method you can ask students to write the profile using their knowledge of the character’s cultural/historical background. This would require research, but would be great for introducing students to frontloading materials. Perhaps a webquest would be a good idea at this point.

ADAPTATION FOR MATH/LANGUAGE Read The Full Story…