SNewco: RT @califone: 50 Useful Apps For Students With Reading Disabilities Whether you’re the parent of a child with a reading disability or an educator that works with learning disabled students on a daily basis, you’re undoubtedly always looking for new tools to help these bright young kids meet their potential and work through their disability. While there are numerous technologies out there that can help, perhaps one of the richest is the iPad, which offers dozens of applications designed to meet the needs of learning disabled kids and beginning readers alike. Here, we highlight just a few of the amazing apps out there that can help students with a reading disability improve their skills not only in reading, writing, and spelling, but also get a boost in confidence and learn to see school as a fun, engaging activity, not a struggle. Helpful Tools These tools are useful for both educators and students with reading disabilities alike, aiding in everything from looking up a correct spelling to reading text out loud. Speak It! Fundamentals Reading Writing Spelling
Multiple Intelligences Howard Gardner Lecture In January 2005 Institute of Critical Thinking hosted lectures by Professor Howard Gardner. Members of the education community in Trinidad and Tobago including the teaching fraternity were invited to participate. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences Professor Howard Gardner, a psychologist and professor of neuroscience from Harvard University, developed the theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) in 1983. Gardner posits that human beings have nine different kinds of intelligence that reflect different ways of interacting with the world. What is Intelligence? For Gardner, intelligence includes the following: the ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in a culture; a set of skills that make it possible for a person to solve problems in life; the potential for finding or creating solutions for problems, which involves gathering new knowledge. Typography of Nine Intelligences 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Howard Gardner’s Webpage at Harvard
The Challenges and Realities of Inquiry-Based Learning Inquiry Learning Teaching Strategies Getty By Thom Markham Teachers in a rural southeast Michigan high school were recently discussing the odd behavior of the senior class. It seems the 12th graders were acting more civilly toward the junior class in the hallways. The prom was also quieter and more well-mannered than in previous years. The teachers’ explanation: Project-based learning. Here’s the back story. Stories like this are about to become more important to educators. This is a steep challenge because it forces education to cross a philosophic divide. Standardizing Valuable Skills To put a new system in place, a first key step is to disseminate and train every teacher on a clear set of performance standards to assess skills required for effective inquiry, such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. The challenge: Right now, a standards-based environment forces teachers to straddle the inquiry process. Assessing Collaborative Learning Figuring Out Knowledge
Thinking Dispositions: Thinking Dispositions: A review of current theories, practices, and issues by Shari Tishman and Albert Andrade Introduction What does it mean to be a good thinker? In an effort to account for the affective and attitudinal dimension of high-level thinking, many scholars and educators involved in the thinking skills movement have urged attention to what are often called "thinking dispositions." There are three parts to this document. Part Two is a brainstorm of issues and questions concerning thinking dispositions that occurred in the Summer of 1994 at the 6th International Conference of Thinking, held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Part Three is a bibliography of books, articles and programs that either are directly about, or relevant to, thinking dispositions. We recognize that, although interest in thinking dispositions has increased in recent years, it is by no means a new concept. Part One: Overview of Recent Work in the Field 1. 2. 3. 4.
The Inquiry Process Explained Visually for Teachers Learning is all about being curious and inquisitive. It is a process in which learners explore the unknown through their senses using both sensory and motor skills. Being involved and engaged in the learning task is the key to a successful learning journey and to elicit this kind of engagement from learners, teachers need to nurture a learning environment where students take responsibility for their learning and 'where they are only shown where to look but not told what to see'. Such environment definitely requires a solid approach and an informed strategy to learning one that is dubbed: inquiry-based learning. Inquiry-based learning is essential in developing the most solicited 21st century skills : problem solving and critical thinking.As a teacher, you might be wondering about ways to inculcate the precepts of strategy into your teaching and lesson planning.
G7_Unit4_StudySkills.pdf YA Highway: Homophones, or, See Those People Over There? They're Their Worst Nightmare Nothing drives the Grammar Groupie more crazy than improper apostrophe usage. Coming in a close second place, however is misuse of homophones. Perhaps that’s because the two are often related, as in the case of the unholy trinity of homophones, their, there and they’re. I wish I could direct readers to some clever song or acronym or acrostic to assist in remembering the abundant cases of homophones, but, alas, you simply need a good resource and the ability to memorize in order to master homophones. And, in that vein, I will list a few homophone groups that I see misused exceedingly often, along with their definitions. Their, they’re, there: The words with apostrophes are the easiest. Its, it’s: Of course, readers, you will apply the aforementioned rule to this pair as well, no? Affect, effect: This is a universally tough one and requires its own post. Altar, alter: You get married at the altar, which alters (changes) your single state. Buy, bye, by: Buy: to purchase. Died, dyed.
Nutty non-rules of grammar | Grammar Monkeys Recently I got a voice mail message from a reader saying that the verb “rise” could be used only with animate subjects, and thus our headline “Speed limit may rise to 75 mph” was incorrect, and it should have said “Speed limit may be raised to 75 mph.” Turning aside the issue of changing a perfectly good active-voice sentence to a wordier passive, I was intrigued, because I’d never run across this “rule” before. After all, bread rises. The sun rises. No one seems to complain about those. None of our dictionaries said anything about “rise” being restricted to animate subjects. Our usage manuals cite “rise” in distinction to “raise,” the former intransitive and the latter transitive. The “raise” entry in one book reminded me of another “rule” I’d run across: “Raise” is for crops or livestock, “rear” is for children. After I posted the rise/animate issue on Twitter, grammar-book author June Casagrande replied, “That’s one of the nuttiest non-rules I’ve heard, and I’ve heard a lot.”
Rubrics for Assessment Learn more about our Online Courses, Online Certificate Programs, and Graduate Degree A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, group work/cooperative learning, concept map, research process/ report, PowerPoint, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other social media projects. Quick Links to Rubrics Social Media Project Rubrics Wiki RubricCriteria for assessing individual and group Wiki contributions. Blog RubricAssess individual blog entries, including comments on peers' blogs. Twitter RubricAssess learning during social networking instructional assignments. Discussion, Teamwork, and Group Work Rubrics Online Discussion Board RubricAssessing ability to share perspectives, refine thoughts through the writing process, and participate in meaningful discussionPrimary Grade Self-Evaluation Teamwork Rubric (PDF)Features of a sandwich to graphically show the criteria PowerPoint and Podcast Rubrics A+ PowerPoint Rubric Joan Vandervelde's rubric provides 10 performance categories
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