'literacy' Category
Classroom Blogging Backstory
The other day Mark Ahlness posted about his students spending silent reading periods reading blogs that my fourth graders wrote this year. It may interest people to hear a little bit about the production of those Pokemon blog posts and how my students used Wikipedia, especially since Doug Johnson posted a spirited and correct [...]
How is ‘conflict of interest’ so hard to understand?
Via Schools Matter, a link to this NYT editorial, Putting More Profit Before Education (quoted in full):
Published: May 19, 2007
The United States Department of Education has been rightfully drawn (but not yet quartered) in Congress for failing to prevent the kickbacks, payoffs and self-dealing recently uncovered in the student loan business. Now it turns out [...]Taking Notes for Real Writing
The arrival of the laptop (Apple iBook) and the wireless network at our school this year has triggered some new thinking (for me, mostly) in my classroom. My students’ writing on the internet has run in waves, with one kid picking up an idea that pretty soon half a dozen are working on.
I showed [...]Informing the Citizenry
On the politics of literacy education:
The International Reading Association hosted an international forum called Literacy: A Path Out of Extremism? in Washington DC. An international panel of literacy education scholars discussed “the global challenges posed by poverty, disease, health and environmental issues, and extremist beliefs that may lead to terrorism.” Among the participants were Dr. [...]Test Prep Questions
This week my students and I have been working through practice materials the State provides us for the big tests next week.
I’m thinking about the reasons for jumping through the test prep hoop. Nobody requires it. This is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations. In doing and reviewing [...]Raven on the Wing
The totem pole in our schoolyard has a story about the panther telling the raven about love, kindness, and respect. According to the story, the raven flies in ever-widening circles from the school, to the town, and beyond, eventually out to the universe. The raven goes around spreading the message about love, kindness, and respect…until [...]
Made It This Far
It’s been a push to get through the last couple of weeks with my wits intact. I walked into the school this morning after dropping my 8th grader off at before-school volleyball practice…by the time I arrived there was a crowd of little kids in the hallway waiting for breakfast. Some of them laying down [...]
e-authoring our eduselves
I’m thinking about how the edublog genre might be like listening to a hatchling through the eggshell, if embryos could talk. It’s a public narration of the emergent self. The current Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (March, 2007), a themed issue about e-portfolios, got me going on this.
Troy Hicks and a cadre of teachers [...]In Names We Trust
One of the things I note about my blogging practice is that it lets/forces me to tie up various loose ends that would otherwise remain what they are - random threads of disjointed information. Sometimes I have a hard time coherently bringing them together. Like now. This post is a link-fest, and rather long.
Neal Postman’s [...]A Reading Continuum
“It’s important to explicitly acknowledge the downsides of any technological transformation - to “think of the underside first,” in a precautionary way.”
-Bruce Sterling, in Shaping Things
Bruce Shauble’s post, A Book in the Hand, raises an interesting question about reading. Bruce is wondering whether kids are missing the chance to read deeply because so much of [...]
