Resources for ETA NSW

This list of curated resources represents work that I have produced from March to May of 2020, all aimed at helping educators as they transitioned to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The full article. “Critical, creative, and compassionate: Resources for teaching English in an era of COVID-19” appears in Australia’s English Teachers Association NSW’s journal, mETAphor (openly available through their website and as a PDF here).

The links here are presented in the order that they appear in the article, which I will provide a link to (once the issue is published online).

March 2020

April 2020

May 2020

Summer 2020

Books

Updated on June 30, 2020 to include article link.


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Saturday Morning Sessions for NYSRA 2019

This morning, I am honored to facilitate a two-hour workshop at the New York State Reading Association’s annual conference, “Creating Your Digital Writing Workshop,” as well as a one-hour session, “Research Writing Rewired: Examining Multimedia Non-Fiction as a Mentor Text.”

Creating Your Digital Writing Workshop

Guiding Student Writers as They Work with Digital Tools” post on Middle Web

GDoc Handout (Force Copy)

During the first session, we will be delving into a number of digital writing tools such as blogs, digital stories, and infographics that can contribute to what you are already doing in your writing instruction as well as appeal to a new generation of students. In this interactive session, we will explore how new ways of thinking about well-established practices in the writing workshop—student choice and inquiry, conferring on writing, examining author’s craft, publishing writing, and broadening our understandings of assessment—can be updated for the digital age. Tools might include:

Research Writing Rewired: Examining Multimedia Non-Fiction as a Mentor Text

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GDoc Handout (Force Copy)

In the second session, we will explore how, in our networked world, the research writing process that we once learned has become obsolete. 3×5 cards and outlines are giving way to bibliographic management tools and mind mapping software. Moreover, students are now able to engage in the research process by reading and evaluating the work of others while simultaneously using the technology in their pockets to do their own primary research. By exploring a Pulitzer Prize winning multimedia piece from the New York Times — “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” — we will think critically and creatively about how students can combine media to create an informative, engaging work of non-fiction using tools such as Adobe Spark.

Also, we will draw from resources from my co-authored Corwin Literacy book, Research Writing Rewired, and the book’s companion site.


Photo by Lilly Rum on Unsplash

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A Snapshot of My Daily Digital Reading Habits

In order to rethink my relationship with ed tech, I need to start by thinking about what my current relationship entails. My goal is to blog for about 30 minutes a day, so this creative constraint/daily deadline will keep me focused. For this week, I want to focus on how I read about educational technology (and, by extension, digital reading, new literacies, and other related topics). Of course, I try to stay on top of the normal news, too, and sneak in some pleasure reading from time to time. Yet, I am going to focus on the aspects of my daily patterns, mapping out an arc of what I do in a typical day in order to stay on top of ed tech news. In short, my reading patterns look like this:

  • Wake up/breakfast time: Quick scan of social networks, especially if I have been tagged, and to see what Nuzzel has automatically generated in my own daily newsletter (which is intertwined with my Twitter)
  • Daily triage of the inbox: here, I parse out email updates that I want (as compared to the countless promotions sent by the companies and services I use). There are three general genres of email updates that I pay particular attention to. While the amount of time I spend on any one of these items on any given day may be small, they each offer some insights that are useful and often having me clicking open anywhere from 2 or 3 to 8 or 10 new tabs for later reading.
  • I then usually attack the day’s email, which, for purposes of this series of blogs posts, I will not count as “reading,” since it is quite utilitarian.
  • Later in the day, depending on the academic work that I have at hand, I will do additional reading, returning to the tabs that I have opened and diving into Google Scholar or my library database. Sometimes those tabs stay open a long time. I’ll write through that problem more, too.

Over the next week, I will explore each of these sources in a bit more detail. I will also describe some reading strategies that I use, hearkening back to a series of posts that I did while Kristen Turner and I were working on our Connected Reading book (here, here, and in a six-part series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). I also want to make a concerted effort (as I have many times over the years) to get back into RSS reading, and to think about how I use Zotero to keep track of my reading. I am thinking that there must be a better way to do all this, and perhaps I can think through it with a concerted effort in January. And, with that, I have hit my 30 minutes(+). So, I will look forward to writing a bit more, later in the week, about how I am using these reading practices and what I may be able to do different in the year ahead to be more focused and efficient (at times), as well as more substantive and with intention (at other times).


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Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Preparing to “Build a Better Book”

As often happens in my professional life, earlier this year, I was invited to lead a session broadly related to teaching writing and digital literacy, specifically for middle school students. Unlike my previous experiences, however, this particular opportunity came from CMU’s Center for Excellence in STEM Education‘s partnership with the Build a Better Book Project. In short:

The Build a Better Book project, based at the University of Colorado Boulder, works with school and library Makerspaces to engage youth in the design and fabrication of accessible picture books and graphics… Through the Build a Better Book initiative, middle and high school youth develop technology skills and learn about STEM careers as they design and create accessible, multi-modal picture books, graphics and games that can be seen, touched and heard!

So, in this case, I was invited to lead a session on a topic that I had quite a bit of experience with (teaching character development in writing), but needed to think critically and creatively about how to present the idea, taking concerns about accessibility into account. And, as often is the case, I turned to my PLN for help.

Originally conceived as the “Tactile Picture Books Project” at the University of Colorado Boulder, I quickly discovered that another digital literacies scholar, Bridget Dalton, was part of the research team. Reaching out to her, she shared her scholarship about the project and the four core experiences for any tactile book workshop:

  1. “Introduction to the design task and audience”
  2. “[t]actile sensory immersion”
  3. “[t]eams’ making of tactile pages to retell a picture book” (and presentation of that book
  4. “[r}eflection on the experience.”

In the sense that students will already be immersed in the process, I’m fortunate that my lesson will come on the second day of a multi-day experience, focusing mostly on steps 3 and 4. They will have had some experience understanding the design task and the audience of visually impaired readers, as well as some tactile sensory immersion. When I see them on day two, my goal will be to help them think about ways that authors describe and develop characters in picture books. So, I am working on the retelling, but also the annotating. Taking what I learned from Margaret Price at DMAC earlier in the summer about annotations for accessibility, I will ask students to both write descriptions of the character as well as to use tactile materials for creating far, mid, and close-up representations.

The challenge, of course, is that helping them figure out how to create tactile books – as well as annotations – that accurately and creatively represent those characters.

Thus, I wanted to find a children’s picture book that – both literally through images as well as figuratively through language – “zooms in” on a character. I want them to write/create three different perspectives of the character – long shot, medium shot, and close up – both in writing and with crafting materials.

To that end, I again turned to my PLN to find an appropriate picture book, and Colby Sharp suggested Mother Bruce, by Ryan T. Higgins. His suggestion did not disappoint. Mother Bruce is perfect, with images of Bruce the bear from afar, from nearby, and in extreme close-up. Coupled with a flipped lesson from Aron Meyer on “Using the Zoom-In Strategy to Enhance Narrative Writing,” I will use a series of images from Mother Bruce to then have students think about descriptive words for illustrating characters in terms of shape, size, and proximity.

So, these slides represent my general thinking about how I will approach the lesson. We will look at the generic images, do a read-aloud of Mother Bruce, then look again at the images in the book more carefully, with a lens for both annotation and tacitly illustrating them:

Build a Better Book Lesson - Slide 1
Build a Better Book Lesson – Slide 1 (Images from Mollie Bugg)
Build a Better Book Lesson - Slide 2
Build a Better Book Lesson – Slide 2 (Images from Ryan T. Higgins)
Build a Better Book Lesson - Slide 3
Build a Better Book Lesson – Slide 3 (Resources adapted from Sight Word Games and Interesting Things for ESL Students)

So, the lesson focuses on the words…

  • What would a description of Bruce need to include when we “see” him from a distance? At a mid-range? Close up?
  • How can we use different words to describe shape, size, and proximity?

And the tactile elements…

  • What would his fur or nose feel like from far away? Close up?
  • What about the additional features of his body and face? Eyebrows? Snout?
  • How can we change shapes and texture to help the reader know that the image is a far shot, mid shot, or close up?

My goal will be to have them create the three tactile representations, as well as write the annotations for the tactile books as a way to supplement the readers’ experiences. Though we will probably not have time in my workshop to invite the students to audio record these annotations and connect them with Makey Makeys, that would be one extension that could make the text even more accessible, and is in line with the Build a Better Book pedagogy.

In sum, this is an interesting way to cap off a busy summer of professional learning. When the CMU STEM Ed Center invited me to do this work at the beginning of the summer, I had no idea what I would do. Yet, the challenge was given to me, and I kept thinking about the possibilities with each opportunity that I had to learn throughout the summer. I look forward to seeing how students responds to the lesson and, in turn, what they might do to more completely and complexly represent Bruce through both their annotations and tactile pages.


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With Literacy and Learning for All (NWP Midwest)

With Literacy and Learning for All

As students move from novice to expert in various fields of study, they must become familiar with specialized vocabulary, patterns of thinking, and specific uses of language. More than just integrating reading and writing strategies across the curriculum, as effective teachers we must invite students from diverse backgrounds to become fluent in what are now being labeled as “disciplinary literacies,” the spaces where content knowledge, literacy skills, and critical thinking all connect. Bring your favorite device, because in this interactive keynote we will explore a variety of tools and ideas that can help our students learn how to read, write, and think like disciplinary experts in our own classrooms and beyond.

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Resources

Activities

  1. See, Think, Wonder with Padlet Wall
  2. Frayer Model/ Definition Map
  3. “4Cs Activity” – Connections, Challenges, Concepts, Changes
  4. 4As Activity” – Assume, Agree, Argue, Aspire
    • Wonderopolis: “The excitement of learning that comes from curiosity and wonder is undeniable, and Wonderopolis helps create learning moments in everyday life…”
    • Tween Tribune: “… a free online educational service offered by the Smithsonian for use by K-12 grade Teachers and students…”
    • Examples
  5.  Lightning Round

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

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Ramping Up Revision – ISTE 2018

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RESOURCES TO TRY


Photo by Štefan Štefan?ík on Unsplash

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#MichEd Chat – 4-11-18 at 8:00 PM EST

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING NETWORKS

#MICHED CHAT 4/11/18

Wednesday, April 11th, 8-9pm EST

The idea of a professional learning network has existed for quite some time, built on some of the foundational work related to “situated learning” and “communities of practice” developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in the 1990s.

With the emergence of Web 2.0, Stephen Downes described “learning networks in practice” in a 2007 paper, arguing that “The idea behind the personal learning environment is that the management of learning migrates from the institution to the learner.”

Combined with the 2006 emergence of Twitter, a new idea had taken form, and educators began using hashtags to start a variety of ed chats, including our own #MichEd which was inaugurated Nov 7, 2012.

Chat Questions

This week, we reflect on our own experiences being a part of the #MichEd network and, more broadly, what it means for each of us to develop our own PLN. We will be joined by students from CMU’s Doctorate in Educational Technology, and the chat will be hosted by Troy Hicks. During the chat we will consider:

  1. What motivates you, personally, to create and maintain a PLN?
  2. How do PLNs change with time, for you personally and across the network? Think about #michED and who was there at the start, who has joined, who has left (or is less active) and WHY?
  3. How do we keep our networks diverse in thought? We don’t want them to be echo chambers for our ideas, but to be constructive spaces for dialogue. How can we achieve that goal?
  4. Besides sharing great resources, what can a PLN teach us about how to be an educator? How does participating in a PLN become part of your professional persona?
  5. OK, let’s get specific. What, exactly, can we learn from PLNs? Along with soft skills of collaboration and sharing resources, what other digital or pedagogical skills can we learn?
  6. Finally, what’s next for PLNs? How can we nurture and sustain them? How can we invite new voices? What should a group of doctoral students studying educational technology be thinking about?

https://www.smore.com/kngch

Resources from Moving Writers Forward: Using (Free) Dictation, Audio and Screencasting Technologies to Provide Feedback

Moving Writers Forward

Using (Free) Dictation, Audio and Screencasting Technologies to Provide Feedback

Webinar for CMU’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

When they are engaged in the writing process, students need timely, specific and goal-oriented feedback. During this workshop, we will briefly discuss research-based elements of successful writing instruction that focus on feedback. We will then explore how to make textual feedback more efficient with a comment bank and voice-to-text dictation, audio recordings and screencasts to efficiently provide feedback to our writers.

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash
Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

Resources to Try


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Recording of “Exploring the Craft of Digital Writing, Grades 2–8”

Enjoy this archived recording of “Exploring the Craft of Digital Writing, Grades 2–8” with Dr. Troy Hicks and the Center for the Collaborative Classroom.

More and more, our students encounter a daily dose of digital texts, ranging from websites to social-media messages, from class assignments to YouTube videos. As they encounter these texts, what are the strategies that they need to be close, critical readers and viewers? Moreover, as students craft their own digital writing, what do they need to be able to do as writers, producers, and designers?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO0SFvy5B9s?rel=0]

Resources from the Session

Additional Resources


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Wisconsin Education Chat – 1-23-18

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Tomorrow night — Tuesday, January 23rd from 8:00 to 9:00 CST — I will be facilitating the #WisEduChat with a focus on “Teaching Digital Writing.” Here are the questions we will explore over the hour:

  • Q1: Thinking about writing instruction in your classroom, what’s going well? What’s puzzling you? What do you want to try?
  • Q2: Now, let’s talk about digital writing. How would you define it? How does it compare to typical “schoolish” kinds of writing?
  • Q3: How does digital writing change our work with students?
    What changes with our curriculum, instruction, and assessment?
  • Q4: When assessing digital writing, what are we looking at? Process? Product? Quality of writing? Quality of digital workmanship?
  • Q5: What are some of the digital writing tools that you are using…
    or that you want to try?
  • Q6: What specific assignment ideas do you have in mind? What genres, audiences, and purposes (as well as tools) might you explore?

Also, I’m pleased to note that I will be in Wisconsin at least twice in the year ahead. This conversation via Twitter will be a good one to get things started!

  • Wisconsin Literacy Research Symposium in Appleton, WI, June 21-22, 2018
  • NWP Midwest Conference in Madison, WI, August 3-5, 2018

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