21st Century Book Talks & Trailers Welcome to ThingLink! This quick tutorial will show you how to create wonderfully engaging experiences with ThingLink. Create Simply click the Create button and select the type of project you want to create. Upload Select a file from your device to be your base image or video. Edit Watch this short video to learn about tag types, basic customization options and the simple publishing process - a perfect intro to editing your thinglinks! Share When you’re ready to share your thinglink, click the blue Share button in the top right corner of the page. Track Statistics help you understand how many people have seen your content, and what part was most engaging. 21st Century Book Talks & Trailers hneltner 8 years ago 19531 views Do you want to create similar content? Start now Learn more Inspiration from ThingLink users Explore more The Journey to Mt. Rita Niblack Atoms Carrie The Who's Who of Sing Virgin Media Step by step at Marcoule Advent im Weinviertel Niederösterreich-Werbung GmbH Sub Sahara Africa Maureen Nolan
Using Images as Scaffolds for Reading Complex Text – School Library Connection Blog April at School Library Connection has been all about inquiry—but we’ve got inquiry on the brain all year long! In case you missed it, check out this great article from our November 2015 issue by Nicole Waskie-Laura and Susan LeBlanc on using images to scaffold learning as we move students toward the goal of reading complex texts. Picture this: a class of students with a wide range of reading levels and abilities engaging deeply with the same introductory text. The topic and text are unfamiliar, yet the students that typically struggle to read are leading the text-based conversations. As the lesson progresses, the room buzzes with conversation as students grapple with the information in the text, ask inquisitive questions of their peers, and provide evidence-based answers. How is it possible that all students across reading levels are independently accessing the same text? Defining Text The Goal: Reading Complex Text Images as Scaffolds Images for Inquiry From Theoretical to Practical
10 Tips to Create Great Readers | Scholastic Great readers are made; they are not born (to paraphrase Vince Lombardi). After all, children don’t enter the world knowing how to decode words, make inferences, or cite evidence. They grow into great readers by learning great habits—accumulating a rich database of skills that add up to the ability to read fluently. Some children pick up those habits when adults read to them. Others will not reach those heights without targeted instruction in the classroom. In a habit-focused classroom, all students get abundant opportunities to practice new skills correctly, so when they sit down to read without our guidance, they can access those tools automatically. 1 | Build habits at the moment of error, not at the moment of success. 2 | Change how students talk about reading, and you’ll change how they think about it. 3 | Put great reading and great writing where they belong: hand in hand. 5 | Make prompting normal. 6 | There is magic to effective prompting, but the magic is replicable.
25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area 25 Reading Strategies That Work In Every Content Area by TeachThought Staff Reading is simply a sequence of symbol interpretation. By understanding that letters make sounds, we can blend those sounds together to make whole sounds that symbolize meaning we can all exchange with one another. By mastering the symbols and their most common contexts, reading becomes a practice in thought–less about decoding and more about understanding. Without getting too Platonic about it all, reading doesn’t change simply because you’re reading a text from another content area. Science content can often by full of jargon, research citations, and odd text features. Social Studies content can be an interesting mix of itemized information, and traditional paragraphs/imagery. Literature? This all makes reading strategies somewhat content area specific. But if you’d like to start with a basic set of strategies, you could do worse than the elegant graphic above from wiki-teacher.com. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article I come back from lunch to join my second block of students, whom I always greet with “Did everyone have a good lunch?" There are the usual grumblings about the cafeteria food, brief interjections about someone who got in trouble for throwing food, or who left a mess that caused their whole table to have to stay behind to clean up. But inevitably, there is my ever-so-eloquent Violet, with her daily blotter on who is dating whom, or who just broke up. It’s still mind blowing to me that kids are dating at the ripe age of 12, which I have deduced (in general) to mean that they text each other in the evenings and occasionally hang out in groups on the weekends. Harmless, yes, but for many, this is the center of their social universe, and truly, kids want to feel a connection. I arranged my classroom tables in several rows with chairs on both sides facing one another. Me: As you all know, we take time each week to share as a class the books that we are reading. Whispers . . . Giggles.
24 important Google Docs Tips and Add-ons for Teachers May 3, 2017 Google Docs has tons of interesting features that can immensely enhance your productivity level as a teacher and educator. However, most of these features are hidden and you need to dig deeper beyond the simple compose, comment and share trio most users are used to. We have already covered several of these features in previous posts in the past which you can access here. Today, we are sharing with you this wonderful infographic created by the folks in GetVoip featuring a quasi-comprehensive list of hacks and tips to help you tap into the full potential of Google Docs. There is also a section at the bottom of the visual with a number of useful add-ons to tryout on Google Docs.
What I am thinking about – Part 1 – Leveling the Library | Library Goddess Hello readers! The school year is winding down (or actually, it feels like it is busier than ever…so really we are winding up, but that’s school life for you) and I’ve started thinking a lot about next school year. Thinking about next school year means learning more about a reading “program” my teachers will be using and thinking about how to implement a Reading Plan that our state has mandated all schools develop. All of this learning and thinking has me feeling some anxiety and I feel like I need to get a few things off my chest! So, here we go! Part 1 – Leveling the Library…my teachers are going to start using Lucy Calkins Reading in their classroom for their ELA instruction. I feel that the purpose of the school library is to be a place where students learn how to make good choices based on what they WANT to read. And, you don’t have to take my word for it Here are a couple of other places to go to find more information on why choice is so important for growing readers: Like this:
Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article My department was trying to fill a position in science education and we were interviewing a candidate who had worked extensively with inner-city youth to support their interest in and confidence about science. The job candidate presented a fascinating Powerpoint presentation showing photographs of the summer workshops she facilitated in which girls and boys from economically disadvantaged homes gathered for six weeks in the summer to explore science. To measure the impact of the summer program on children's perceptions of what it meant to be a scientist, the facilitators asked students to take the Draw a Scientist Test (DAST) at the beginning and the end of their summer experience. The DAST was designed "as an open-ended projective test to detect children's perceptions of scientists" (Nuno, 1998) by asking them to draw a picture of a scientist doing science. Data and Expectations Before diving into an analysis of the DART, my study group talked about what we expected to find. Next Steps