If you’re a K-12 teacher, student, administrator, librarian,
etc. convert your space to our teacher plan by emailing us
(help@wikispaces.com) or start a new K-12 space today!
Details are here:
http://www.wikispaces.com/t/x/teachers100K
DyKnow Monitor Lets You See Every Screen
31-Oct-06
DyKnow that Big Brother is here.
Low Stakes Writing Assignments
31-Oct-06
* Written accounts of trips to the library, reports on investigation of basic reference works or Internet sites. * A short “I-Search” report following up on some interesting reference in the class reading (person, place, or thing: e.g., Aaron Burr, Tanganyika, Pandora’s box). Report also on the reference works in which the information was found. Ken Macrorie’s influential textbooks, among them The I-Search Paper (Heinemann, Boynton/Cook), are recommended teacher resources. Essentially, the “I-Search” is shaped by the student’s wish or need to discover the answer to a real question. * Written vocabulary work (e.g., quotation of interesting phrases [using quotation marks] from the assigned reading, with definition of especially meaningful or effectively used words as they appear in those phrases). * Written responses to reading that aren’t structured as formal essays: e.g., What puzzled you in this reading? What questions do you have about it? Do any points in this essay seem to contradict the previous essay that we read? * Ask students to select and copy exactly – using quotation marks – one passage or one sentence that impressed them, and then to write a paragraph explaining why they chose it. * Short analyses of difficult material, like written interpretation of the graphs that accompanied a newspaper article. * Memos and letters: To the teacher, to fellow classmates. E.g., “Write a letter to a classmate in which you explain your new understanding of social class.” * Journals: Having students keep journals is a good way to be sure that they read more than the essays that will be discussed in detail in class. Guided journals can be especially useful: Students’ entries are guided by questions (usually fairly general questions) from their instructor. * Dialogue notebooks: On the right-hand page, students make copious notes from their reading. Then on the left-hand page, they comment on those entries, asking questions, admitting confusion, making connections, relating to other materials and experiences.
Email to Zero Everyday
31-Oct-06
Merlin Man’s Excellent posts on getting your email inbox to zero everyday.
A book review from New Media Studies critiques to books on managing the paper load. More Ways to Handle the Paper Load: On Paper and Online, by Jeffrey Golub. Urbana: NCTE, 2005. 160 pages and Papers, Papers, Papers: An English Teacher’s Survival Guide, by Carol Jago. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2005. 128 pages.
Todd’s Summary (I recommend Googling the Title–>having trouble linking today):
- Student writing is resistant to suggestion, even by the best intentioned commentary:
When researchers examined traditional methods of providing feedback, their conclusions were disheartening. In an early review of research on written teacher commentary, published in 1981 in this journal’s predecessor Freshman English News, C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon found “scarcely a shred of empirical evidence to show that students typically even comprehend our responses to their writing, let alone use them purposefully to modify their practice” (1). Five years later, George Hillocks concluded his more comprehensive study by reporting that “teaching by written comment on compositions is generally ineffective” (167).
- Because commenting doesn’t work, this lead to led to experiments with “peer review, portfolios, conferencing, workshopping, and both criteria-based and holistic scoring.”
“While none of these innovations has solved the problem of getting students to read and consider feedback seriously, they have provided teachers with a wide range of tools to use in the writing classroom, many of which reduce the burdensome paper load.So I was surprised to find that so few of the essays included in NCTE’s recent publication, More Ways to Handle the Paper Load: On Paper and Online, demonstrated an awareness of either the research on feedback or the alternative practices that have evolved in the last quarter century.”
- Most teacher (incorrectly) feel they have to mark every written assignment.
“Some sort of backlash against student-centered pedagogy must be at work when two-thirds of the articles in this collection advocate teacher-centered strategies and two-fifths in the section on peer review reject outright the notion that students can provide useful feedback. I can’t help but wonder what’s going on in our profession.”
- Maybe the classroom is to blame.
“The in-class peer-response model is not conducive to learning or discussion revision,” she argues, because such feedback “is often . . . scribbled in response to a few teacher-prescribed questions” (45-46). She assigns her students to take their peers’ essays home, write letters of response, and hold mini-conferences with their peers during the next class.
- Help kids respond better through role-play offered as an alternative from Arizona State University.
- Don’t use tech to reproduce copy/paste bad commentary
- Richard Johnson’s “First There Is a Mountain: On Getting Out of the Way of My Students’ Learning” has students publish their essays online, in an electronic classroom magazine.
“Online publishing,” he claims, “costs me nothing” because Johnson neither grades nor marks their essays (151). Instead, students have to “write and revise their papers to suit the quality demands of their classmates.” Not only does Johnson use technology to provide students with an audience to write for—each other—but he teaches them to develop criteria which identify papers ready for publication, and to write to meet those criteria—all without marking any papers. Johnson’s article exemplifies the potential of a volume like More Ways to Handle the Paper Load. There are too few like it in the book.
- Williams gives in to the temptation, suggesting teachers who feel “guilty” about not marking every paper might compromise by marking errors on just the first page of each student’s paper.
- Jago says quite clearly “there is no evidence that more red marks are equal to improved student writing” (88)
Please listen/watch these–part of the amazing TED (Technology Education Design) Talks. You’ll thank me.
—————————
—————————-
Problems With FireFox 2
29-Oct-06
When I downloaded Firefox 2 it deleted all my toolbar buttons. What a pain. The best part is that I used the Firefox Gmail extension to update my email and it looks cool.