Recently, the Ohio Board of Regents asked me to hold a webinar as part of Ohio’s celebration of Digital Learning Day. Today, I finalized the details of this event and I have shared them below. I’m looking forward to this webinar, as I have the opportunity to present with an outstanding second grade teacher from Green Local Schools, Ms. Kourtney Denning. Kourtney was part of my Digital Text Initiative back in the 2011-2012 school year and continues to be a leader in the classroom when it comes to digital pedagogies. Please join us for what promises to be an interesting and entertaining event!
EdCamp Columbus was held yesterday at Gahanna Lincoln Clark Hall, which is a beautiful facility. It is also a really nice example of ways private and public sectors can come together to create learning spaces that benefit the entire community. The photo below from Sean Wheeler is a great example of the type of learning space you find in Clark Hall.
One of the conversations I submitted to the Big Board was “Textbooks are Dead, People: The Relevance of Student Created Ebooks in the Common Core.” I’ll admit, I went for a somewhat controversial title in hopes of gather a decent crowd for the conversation.
We had a nice crowd and the comments, questions and suggestions were really good. You can review the Google Doc from the conversation if you’d like to see how the conversation broke down. Not everything discussed made it into the Doc, but there were a few people tweeting from the session. Their Storify story is below. Read the rest of this entry…
The Google Site I created as a resource can be found here. I included quite a bit of background information that covers the current research on ebooks for young children, types of ebooks, selecting ebooks and also evaluating ebooks. This content is Flash-based, so if you’re trying to review it on an iPad, you’re out of luck. Sorry! But trust me, it is good stuff, so find a desktop or laptop and go through it!
The BYOD activity for the session is here. Please feel free to borrow, steal, use or remix with your students or teachers. If you’re just looking for my app recommendations from the session, here are the FREE ones and the PAY ones. If you want to learn more about how the session went, read on…
Boy, times have changed when it comes to teaching our kids in the classroom.
Used to be a teacher relied on books, rulers and a chalk board to instruct the class. Today, books are being replaced with tablets and e-readers, rulers are replaced with smart phones, and chalk boards are replaced by monitors and laptops.
In this edition of Cleveland Connection, we talk to three local educators who are on the cutting edge when it comes to technology in the classroom.
We know that lots of parent-child book reading, pretend reading, and book browsing with traditional picture and storybooks promotes children’s development of literacy knowledge and skills in ways that support reading success (Mol & Bus, 2011). Reading storybooks exposes children to print and starts the process of learning how speech is written down. But can that very same process be nurtured when reading e-Books as children start to learn basic reading skills? Can parent-child sharing of e-Books help children gain an understanding of concepts such as, knowledge of letter names and how letters relate to sounds, identification of meaningful parts of words, awareness of book language as different from everyday language, and the insight that print has meaning? After all, at their core, e-Books are still books, right?
These very questions are some which I have been exploring with a small group of colleagues for the past 3 years. So, I was extremely excited to review the Cooney Center E-books QuickReport titled “Print Books vs. E-books.” The QuickReport explored parent-child interactions as they were reading print and/or digital books together. The Cooney researchers refer to this type of activity as “co-reading.” Read the rest of this entry…
I’ve been off the blogging path for a while, sidetracked by a number of projects that I have kept me quite busy for the last 3-4 months. One of those projects was an eTech OhioTeacher Planning Grant program I have been leading called the Digital Text Initiative. Over the course of the 2011-2012 school year, I’ve been working with 9 K-2 teachers in 3 local districts to study the ways elementary teachers incorporate eBooks in their classroom.
This has been a great project, and one that was noticed by a writer from the New York Times. He published a piece titled “Bringing up an E-Reader” back in March that featured students, parents and a teacher from the DigiTXT program. I’m currently working on data analysis from a variety of sources and also starting to put together some of the greatest hits from the project for the a final report. This report is slated to be released as a white paper about mid-June. I was asked for 3 DOs and 3 DON’Ts for using eBooks that we could use in the white paper. Here they are.
DO:
Look for eBooks with content that has direct ties to your curriculum and student’s personal experiences.
Allow students opportunities to self-select eBooks for independent and shared reading experiences.
Consider the role space plays in the reading experience and design a quality-learning environment for browsing/reading eBooks in the classroom.
DON’T:
Select eBooks with multimedia or interactivity that is extraneous and/or not relevant to the story.
Use an eBook with students until you have thoroughly previewed and evaluated its potential as an instructional resource.
Underestimate the “WOW” factor that eBooks bring to the table. Use their natural engagement to capture reluctant reader’s interest and motivate them.
The iPad revolution is here! Even our youngest students expect a learning space that integrates digital tools, accommodates a mobile lifestyle, adapts to individual learning styles & encourages collaboration. Teachers must become proficient in an mLearning pedagogical approach grounded in an understanding of mobile technologies hardware, software & OS. How does a teacher incorporate all these technology tools into meaningful learning? Help your students use iOS apps to tell their own stories, boosting reading and writing skills. Find out which apps work best for what grade levels and learn management techniques for projects. Attendees will learn about many different iOS apps to support and enhance the reading and writing process. This session will prepare K-5 administrators, teachers and parents to support student use of iOS devices in the elementary classroom.
