My first goal was to begin to integrate more mini-thinking skills into my lessons. Upon rereading this goal I am surprised just how vague this sounds. My first step in reaching this goal is to determine what sort of tools my students need.
Upon some reflection, I know that my students are always remedial reading students, so I need to begin looking for technology that is going to engage them. Still sounds vague, right? So I continue to think... my students do not do well with self-led reading. Why? Engagement? Interest? Or is it really skill based? Well, that sort of determines my next move.
If it is an engagement issue: I need to look for a program that will allow students to preview a book and get excited about it. I need to find some way to force students to engage the text-- more than just fix up strategies.
If it is an interest problem: Could I find a way for students to preview books (see above) but without losing the aha moment of the plot? A review site for uninspired readers? I've introduced Shelfari to them before, but it only caught on with some students. Could we reintroduce the site with new plans?
If skill based: Oh geez. Where can I find skill exercises? Is there something out there with Artificial Intelligence to work with them?
Second major goal: work more with collaborative learning.
I have a great way to work this into my senior class. Students there work with a senior Capstone project which includes a mentor ship, a fifteen hour project, and research paper. I would like to model the collaborative methods before I let them loose with their mentors.
Perhaps I could choose my Capstone topic with some sort of tie in to education and then begin by showing them the way mentor ship works in class. Also, perhaps we could look at some more multicultural items from different perceptions (science, social science?) and allow these teachers come offer some opinions on these ideas.
It's a work in progress, what can I say?
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Hey Rebecca,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate you allowing me to get a glimpse of your thought processes through your blog. Enagaging students in a good read is always a challenge for me as well. I have wanted to try something my department chair suggested a while ago in which I would read the first page only to the students and then we only discuss that first page. Students make predictions, share their thoughts and feelings toward the book, and basically get a feel for the entire novel only based on the first page. I am unsure if you plan on engaging students in terms of a self-selected novel or course novel, but if it is self-selected, you could always do some sort of ebook previewing activity using the first page only of the novel? You could create an online blog in which students preview a particular book and share their thoughts/predictions about the book on a school blog before actually choosing one to read? I found the following website which provides 20 free websites to download ebooks from? Just an idea:-)
oops....forgot to give you the website:-)
ReplyDeletehttp://www.hongkiat.com/blog/20-best-websites-to-download-free-e-books/