Online Book Group

I've been participating in an online book group for Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. I was already familiar with the Marzano text, and I had owned this new book for almost a year. I will take away from this experience some powerful and exciting tools that I know will change my teaching and my students' learning for the better when I am able to implement them.

What I like about this book is that it shows us how to use technology with many of the teaching/learning strategies that we already use in our classrooms: KWLs, thought webs, newsletters, and bulletin boards. I am excited to learn that I can use some technology tools to expedite feedback for my students. This is an area that I struggle with as an English teacher. I believe I can use email and online tools for one-on-one "conferencing" with students. I am also excited about creating an Excel version of our school-wide writing rubric that would allow me to (perhaps) provide better feedback.

I am encouraged by the tools I could use on my computer with the LCD projector. I believe that most of these strategies will work best only when all of our students and their parents have Internet access at home. I was frustrated by how often the authors expected some students to complete assignments at the library if they didn't have Internet access at home. I believe the digital divide is the root of today's achievement gap.

Using Blogs for Reciprocal Teaching
The authors describe using a blog for reciprocal teaching. Technology plays a supporting role in the classroom during this lesson. Students watch a BrainPOP movie as an introduction to the unit. One student engages in reciprocal teaching, leading the class discussion while creating a blog on the big screen. This blog serves a record of the lesson, accessed later by the students and easily shared with other classes or parents.

I think it would be incredibly powerful for any student to enjoy the focus of the class for a couple of days. In this secondary role, the technology facilitates students’ learning from one another. The structure of the reciprocal teaching strategy keeps the students focused on higher-level thinking. I think it would be easy for the teacher to provide a blog template for this lesson.

My Next Big Project Is About Essay Writing
I want to develop a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank survey that collects data from students as they turn in an essay:

Rate your interest in this topic.
What sort of brainstorming activity did you use?
How long did you brainstorm?
What kind of prewriting did you use?
How long did you prewrite?
What sorts of editing did you do?
Did anyone help you edit this essay?
What is this essay's Lexile level?
According to the AutoSummarize tool, what is the thesis statement?
Is this correct?
ETC.

Then students will complete a follow-up survey when they receive their graded essay:

How many spelling errors did you make in this essay?
How many subject-verb agreement errors?
How many pronoun-antecedent agreement errors?
How many run-on sentences?
How many sentence fragments?
What was your Ideas and Content score?
Organization score?
Word Choice score?
Sentence Fluency score?
Conventions score?
Citing Sources score?
ETC.

All of this data will go into a spreadsheet where students can track their own growth as writers and learn the importance of adequate time and thoughtfulness and editing. I will also be able to collect class data about students' success with various prompts and their needs for Conventions lessons or editing lessons.

In the past, I have tried to do a very limited version of this using paper and pen, but the technology version will be much better. I hope the students will think it's more fun and easier, and I hope that I will be able to track individual student's needs, class needs, and grade-level needs more effectively.

Now, if this were a perfect world, an energetic graduate student would swoop in to save my day!!