Since I am a Read 180/System 44 teacher, my 4th/5th grade students already use these software programs daily for 30 minutes to improve their reading skills. Since I only have 90 minutes a day with them, I really don't use many other digital tools other than Google Slides for final projects. As a part of my action research, I am teaching my students about Growth Mindset using the Brainiology curriculum. As a culminating project for this unit, students are creating mind maps to show what they have learned. I stumbled upon Popplet when I searched my digital toolbox for "mind mapping". It is available as an app, but I have only begun to use it on the desktops because we don't have as many ipads available. I haven't had extensive use with this yet "in the trenches", but this is what I have found so far.
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Reading Dervin's article "Qualitative Research in Information Management" made me feel like this poor woman in the photo. She put her reading glasses on so she could really focus, but she's still confused. She gathered her informational resource, but she's still confused. She even has a trusty sidekick to guide her in this process, and yet she is still confused. I felt my eyes starting to glaze over when reading the article and I was only on the second page. Maybe I needed a different environment? My quiet room might work. Nope. I found myself skimming the entire article to try figure out the core idea and using the strategies I teach my students- look at the text features like headings, captions, etc but that didn't help much either. After struggling for 7 pages, I finally began to feel frustrated. My notes in the margin say, "What can I take from this reading that can help me and my students?" Unfortunately I still don't really know. My only glimpse at understanding came midway through the article when I saw the stick figure drawing crossing the gap toward help. Hooray!- Dr. Bobbe Baggio must be right that visual representations convey more meaning to most people. After finally reading the six different exemplars, I think Dervin's main point has something to with systems thinking?
If I had to teach this content to high school students, I think I would definitely pull in Baggio's approach and try to visually represent the six different exemplars because those real world examples made more sense to me. I wasn't tripped up on syntax/vocabulary so I was able to focus more on the content. I think if we sketched out each specific example and tried to synthesize the idea into a caption like a series of cartoons, maybe some connections would start to form. I am glad that we were warned that reading this article is "dense" otherwise I think I would have wound up feeling dense! This was only my first reading and I can tell that this will require multiple reads to try and pull out something (anything!) that is meaningful for me.. My first personal step toward being a more responsible digital citizen was in searching for the image I used above. I had never given a second thought to using any image that I found with a basic Google search, but once I was made aware of alternative sites that offer free public use, I will gladly use it in the future. I think the same can be said of the importance of teaching digital communication to my students. Most of my students want to follow our school rules "Be Safe. Be Respectful. Be Responsible. Be a Learner.", but many of them have not thought about how those rules need to be followed online as well.
In creating a lesson plan designed for my 4th and 5th graders to understand the importance of tone in written digital communication, I hope to make this learning more personal for them by focusing on how to convey respect online.
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Dana HandI teach Read 180 at Northwood Elementary School and I am passionate about reading (obviously!) In my "free time" I love hanging out with my 2 teenagers and taking our two dogs for long walks. Archives
March 2017
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