More on Adolescent Lit

I like how Tom phrased it when he said, “We must come to believe that our writing is worth reading by others.” Students must believe this in order to do their best on writing assignments. I am so excited about the opportunity to give my students an authentic audience to show them that what they have to say matters outside of the classroom.

I’m in the process of figuring out how I am going to ask my students to organize their notebooks for next year and it was nice to have Linda point out the importance of having a place to put ideas. Now I plan on having a journal section in their notebook where they can reflect on how they are progressing through the material in class.

Last year I had several students who enjoyed drawing (and were very good at it). I plan to give students the option of making a story board as one of their drafts whenever we write in class.

Content Area Writing

This textbook makes a great case for writing in content areas, and has me very excited about bringing writing into my science class. Some of the strategies I plan to try are
Write to Learn
Writing breaks (I got to experience this at the ASCD conference…it did help)
Drawings/Sketches with stories/explanations to describe material
I also like how Toondoo helped with this
Clustering (to help students connect ideas)
Learning Logs
Dialogue journals (SILENT conversations!)
Maybe even with a classroom mailbox…
Double-Entry Journals (I like how these help organize thoughts with passages and the possibilities for differentiation)
Reflective writing (via blogs)
KWL (with posters – so we remember what we thought at the beginning)

Comics in the Classroom

Here is the comic that Ryan and I created and presented during class today.

Vocabulary

I really enjoyed the vocabulary site...it made podcasting seem more do-able for my class. I like that it was short, demonstrated what students had learned and gave them a chance to practice what they studied. Something simple like this would be a good place for me to start...

Story Board-Feed

Title (Binary code)
Futuristic Person
Imagine a world where the entirely of knowledge isn't just at your fingertips but ready to be tapped into straight from your brain
Moon with message on it
Where you can message your friends from wherever you're at
Personal Shopper
Have a virtual shopper designed just for you
Virtual Reality Player
and can play virtual reality games whenever, wherever and with whomever you want
City overview
it would be perfect, wouldn't it?
girl in water
wouldn't it?
Plastic Surgery Patient
but in a world where you're always plugged in to the constant stream of information
Tree of Knowledge
What do you really know?
Hand with cord
And just who is really making the decisions?
Feed (zeros and ones)
Credits
Book cover

GIST

I was starting to avoid summaries with my students, so I am very glad that I got to read this article. As a science teacher, I've always felt inferior in my ability to teach things that involved writing or anything "language arts-ish" to the point that I had our instructional coach come in and prep my students on how to attack their first ORQ and bugged her for weeks to help me come up with a content area portfolio piece for my students to do. I'm thankful for how they broke the process apart in such a manner that even I have hope that I can help my students become better summarizers. The only thing I worry about is being able to pick appropriate "stop spots" for my students along the way...I guess we'll learn together.

Chapters 16 and 17

I felt really bad reading chapter 16. I ask my students all kinds of questions at the beginning of the year, even things like how do you learn best, do you prefer group or individual projects, etc. But I don't think I have ever directly asked them, what's most needed for you to learn. I guess I had always figured that they wouldn't be able to directly answer that...I don't know if I could answer that really well even about myself. But I think that I will have that one their "welcome to class" questionnaire.

I enjoyed how they set up the chapter on assessment...I had thought it would be really boring, but it was more fun "listening in" on their conversation. I felt that they articulated the frustration that has become part of my life very well. I agree that if we would teach the way we know we should and not cling to the core content guide that students would do better on the KCCT. But they voiced my concern well...I'm not just worried about "my scores" or how my students do on their tests as much as the risk that I could do something wrong and set them up for failure, when they could have succeeded if I had just "stuck with the plan."