Interactive Storybooks

This article presents how to create and how to use electronic books in the classroom. Electronic books are great resources for all students, especially students with reading difficulties and English Language Learners. These electronic books can easily be created in a program like Power Point. After reading a story, students retell the story and teachers put text, pictures, and animation on each slide. They then put a voice that reads the story on each slide as well. Students can play these books during reading time and it helps reinforce the story they read in their own words. They can track print, without having to turn pages, and receive additional scaffolding while reading the story.

This article helped me to make my interactive storybook for this class. I liked the suggestions it gave and the quick tutorial on how to create your own. I would like to learn more about actually recording my voice to read the story aloud. I do think that this article made it seem like creating these storybooks is less time consuming than it actually is. I spent quite a bit of time working with powerpoint, choosing the right graphics and animations to create my storybook. I would like to know more about how to adapt this practice to use with middle school students. I think it would be extremely time consuming to create these books for young adult novels. I think it would be fun though for middle school students to create these books for younger students in the school building! 

Citation for article used: Rhodes. J. & Milby, T. (2007). Teacher-Created Electronic books: Integrating Technology to Support Readers with Disabilities. The Reading Teacher,  61(3), 255-259. Retrieved July 14,2008, from Education Research Complete database.

Lights, cameras, pencils! Using descriptive video to enhance writing!

This article Demonstrates the uses of descriptive videos in the classroom to improve literacy skills. Descriptive videos are originally created for those with visual impairments, can be used by teachers to introduce students to content area vocabulary and foster comprehension. Descriptive videos identify key vocabulary words that normally are not introduced in the video, and offer students a rich description of the setting and actions taking place. Students take this description information presented and transfer it into their writing. This technique can be used with students of all ages and ability levels.

I would love to teach middle school science and I think that this technique would be very helpful. Using a video will motivate middle school students and the descriptive feature would introduce students to vocabulary words in context.  Using vocabulary words introduced by the description, students can write about what they watched and have accurate and precise terminology.

Citation for this article:

Hoffner, H., Baker, E. & Quinn, K.B. (2008). Lights, cameras, pencils! Using 
     descriptive video to enhance writing Reading Teacher, 61(7), 576-579.

Blog #1: NCLB

No Child Left Behind is a hot topic of conversation among educators. I believe the idea behind NCLB is commendable, but a goal that is impossible to fully reach. It is impossible to expect 100% of students to be reading on or above grade level by 2014. I do believe that teachers should teach using research based best practices, but NCLB does not take in account students who have learning disabilities, are English Language Learners, or simply just had a bad day and did not test as well as they could have.

When I was student teaching last year, I was placed in a school in Pennsylvania. Earlier that year, a new student came to the class I was in (I'll call him K). K had just moved to America from India with his family. K spoke very limited English and after a few months of ESL, he learned to decode English words, but did not comprehend much of what he read.  When it came time for state testing, we were told that K did not have to take the Language Arts exam, because he was taking ESL, but he had to still take the math class, because "Math is the same in any language". I was shocked that his math scores would count, because the exam wasn't just simple arithmetic facts. Many of the questions were word problems, and required extended written responses. K struggled with the math exam and ended up crying at this desk from frustration.

NCLB is supposedly research based, but I think that it ignores all of the research that stresses how all students learn in different ways, at different rates, and that standardized exams are not the only way to assess students. I do believe that the government needs to step in and help improve the education system, but NCLB was not effective.