With the release of the “Common Core” standards, the phrase “Close Reading” became a buzz overnight. In many classrooms, the idea of “Close Reading” resulted in kids failing at tortuous lesson, and teachers drowning in pre-planning with very little student results. In this session, presenter Kevin Baird discussed highest impact strategies for implementing College & Career Ready standards by looking again at the concept of Precision and Precision Reading.
Storytelling is an ancient tradition that has evolved over many centuries. With digital tools, teachers and students now have the means to create stories and non-fiction narratives that will last beyond the spoken or written word and be published and shared with worldwide audiences.
Writing has been reinvented, but most schools can’t get past the paper. Notecards, filing cabinets, notebooks, journals and more have new electronic equivalents. In this webinar for the Leadership 3.0 community, Vicki Davis, presented the nine ways writing has been reinvented in schools along with the specific objectives we should teach with them.
Non-traditional forms of assessment, such as peer-to-peer learning, can produce useful information for the teacher. Another idea is to include an assessment component in warm-up, group, and closure activities during class. Teachers can make students more responsible for their own learning through technology-enhanced self-assessments.
Empower students to publish one-of-a-kind books using photos, text, drawings and audio with Shutterfly’s Photo Story for iPad App. This free app is ideal for Project Based Learning and enriching your classroom literacy program, while enabling students to achieve many of the College and Career Readiness Standards in English Language Arts, Science, Math, and Social Studies.
One of the critical Common Core skills is to summarize the main ideas contained in a text. Writing a crisp summary depends upon distinguishing key ideas from details. This month, edWeb community, Instructional Strategies for Reading Improvement K-8, hosted a webinar providing strategies for helping students improve their abilities to write and understand the components of summaries.
Opinions matter! Many students are eager to weigh in on issues that are important to them. By teaching them how to write sound arguments, we can help them persuade others of their point of view now and in the future.
The Developmental Writing Scale (DWS), which ranges from emergent writing (scribbling) to cohesive and coherent paragraph level writing, serves as the anchor measure and was developed to be sensitive to small changes in writing quality in beginning writers.
Writing is the process for illustrating thought, and is the key element for more than 75% of the new Common Core Standards in English Language Arts.
The quality of a thesis statement determines the quality of an essay. A powerful, or at least clear, thesis statement makes for a powerful, or at least clear, essay.