Ed Tech Ideas

Tech Integration for Busy Teachers

Tag Archives: reading

Seussville for Educators

1 Comment Posted by @k_ferrell on November 14, 2010

Seussville for Educators is a section of the Seussville kids site that has activities and ideas which incorporate the great books of Dr. Seuss. There are a lot of printable activities, lesson plans, an author study section, and much more. The Educator’s Timeline (shown below) is a great place for teachers to get ideas of theme specific lessons and activities to use throughout the year.

Give it whirl and see what you think.

RLA Dr. Seuss, reading, RLA, sites for kids, sites for teachers, websites

This is Where We Live

1 Comment Posted by @k_ferrell on November 13, 2010

Amazing stop motion book appreciation video created to celebrate 4th Estate Publishers 25th anniversary. How is this video 2 years old and I’m just now discovering it? Thanks to @openculture for the find.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

video book, edtech, reading, stop motion, video

Global Book Club

Leave a comment Posted by @k_ferrell on April 6, 2010

What do you get when you connect elementary students from New York and Singapore with the single focus of books? You get the Global Book Club (GBC), a Shelfari group organized by George Haines. GBC currently stands at 76 members of students and teachers from different classes from the Diocese of Rockville Centre and Singapore American School. Each week students login to their Shelfari group and have discussions about a variety of books which are self-selected by the students. The discussions are started by the students about books they’ve recently read, and if other students have read the same book, they chime in to the thread with their two cents worth.
Here are some examples:

Students love adding books to their shelves and sharing what they thought of each book. Knowing that they have a real, genuine audience truly motivates them to write more detailed reviews and improve their spelling, grammar and word choice. Being that this project also emphasizes discussions, we encourage the students to ask questions and keep the conversations going. Students also discovered some new books they probably wouldn’t have ever found, after reading some reviews written by other students.

collaboration Book review, collaboration, connecting, differentiation, education, elementary, Learning, reading, web 2.0

A Sure-Fire Way to Improve Reading Fluency

4 Comments Posted by @k_ferrell on February 1, 2010

Telling your students that they need to become fluent readers is an abstract concept that will help neither you nor your students. You can give them examples of what fluent readers do, model reading in a fluent way; but they will not truly understand the idea until they experience it themselves.

Learn by Doing

To get this first-hand experience, I had a fifth grade class bring in a book they were currently reading. They recorded themselves reading 2 pages of the book using Audacity and exported the file as an Mp3. The next lab session, they opened up the file and listened to themselves, and while they were listening, they rated their fluency using this Fluent Reader Self-Eval checklist.

Epiphanies

Some things the students found out about their reading fluency from this activity were:

Pace – some found they read too fast or too slow
Expression – hearing themselves enabled them to decide whether or not their expression conveyed meaning
Punctuation Signals – a lot of students forget to pause at comas and periods
Voice Inflection – when reading narration or dialogue, it’s often difficult for students to change their voice. When they hear themselves reading, they really pick up on this.

Other Possibilities

You don’t need to use Audacity to record your students. Portable voice recorders can be used. Another idea is to have the students record their voice directly in a PowerPoint presentation and use the check list to add details about how their fluency can improve.