literacy
Turning “I Hate to Read” into “I Love to Read”
As educators, we have to find ways around these obstacles in order to give them the gift of reading and that sometimes means going a bit outside the box.
Smart List: 30 Next-Gen Literacy, Language & Math Resources
This month Getting Smart is acknowledging people and organizations making a difference with a series of back to school top 10 lists. During August we will run about 40 ‘best of’ lists, not in order, not exhaustive, just people we appreciate.
Teaching Reading in the Digital Age
What does it really mean to teach reading in a digital age? It means teaching both ways and also in new ways. It means going back to school and learning to read along with our students, in a world in which we are surrounded by text from which we must derive meaning.
Newsela: Read closely. Think critically. Be worldly.
A cool new news-as-literacy platform launched this week. Newsela “is an innovative way for students to build reading comprehension with nonfiction that's always relevant: daily news.”
How I Learn
The way we learn has changed from 30 years ago with the use of technology and resources at our fingertips. Tom outlines several new ways he and others are learning today.
Gates Foundation Launches Literacy Courseware Challenge
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be making grants of up $6 million to organizations that develop software that supports students in "mastering literacy skills for writing, writing to read, and writing to learn."
More than Words Alone Can Say: Writing with Images in the Digital Age
Last week, on the day before Thanksgiving vacation, several of my fifth-graders voluntarily stayed after school with me to work on a project for which they would receive no grade: producing calendars based on poems and illustrations they had created for a class project.
The 50 Best Books of All Time
OK, these are probably not the best books of all time but these mostly non-fiction titles were important to me when I read them over the last twenty years.
Q&A: Hey, We Invented Blended Learning
After I described blended learning at a recent conference, Diana Frezza from Scholastic came up to me and said, “Hey, we invented blended learning with READ 180.” Having seen a lot of READ 180 classrooms over the last 20 years, I knew it was a proven multi-modal reading intervention. But I wasn’t up to date on READ 180 Next Generation so I called Scholastic president Margery Mayer.
i-Ready is Ready for Prime Time
i-Ready's two components, adaptive diagnostic and standards preparation, provide a visually appealing and fun approach to educational materials. Both programs allow teachers, parents and administrators to follow the progress of every student down to the skill level. The diagnostic program not only identifies the grade level a student is at, but pin points the skills needed to improve and adapts lessons accordingly.