Chapter 10: What About Literacy 3.0? Continuing Professional Development

This chapter is called, "What About Literacy 3.0? Continuing Professional Development" and since it has come to an end this chapter discusses a lot of more information. This talks about the important of blogs and portfolios. This chapter talked about blogging and digital portfolios and to be honest it brought me back to this class and how we are writing blogs about the chapter. I found this (blogging) to be super helpful because it was a great way to express my thoughts about what I believe in and what I learned in this course and this chapter. “Blogging forces you to analyze your thoughts and actions in a much more methodical way than to simply reflect on your day. It enables you to learn more about your teaching, your students, and the value of your own ideas” (159). I completely agree with this quote from the book because as I mentioned before it was a great way to reflect on what I learned in the course and what I've read in the book itself. I would love to bring blogging into my classroom so that my students have a way to express themselves freely about what they learned and how they learned it in the classroom. It was exciting to read about the future of technology and how our teachers are now constantly up to date with the latest and how to incorporate it in their classroom. This shows how teachers are using different techniques and are flexible and open-minded in the classroom.

Another interesting thing that the book talks about is the digital portfolios. They are used to document teaching practice, professional growth, and student learning throughout systematic documentation and reflection.This chapter lists different tips and considerations when creating a digital portfolio such as information overload, structure and layout, ease of navigation and permission releases. Portfolios are something I would love to consider while conducting a classroom. This book has thought me a lot of new things to bring into my classroom and I can't wait to see it and see how it works out with my students! 

Chapter 9: Assessment in a Literacy 2.0 Environment

In this chapter called, "Assessment in a Literacy 2.0 Environment"  focuses on assessment in a Literacy 2.0 environment providing very meaningful knowledge construction. The transition between this chapter and chapter 8 was very smooth because having just learned about the different learning styles of each student may use, now it is time to assess those learning skills. There are two different types of assessments that the book talks about, formative and summative. Formative assessment is assessment for learning. This assessment focuses on the process of learning and is ongoing providing information needed to adjust teaching and support learning. Summative assessment is the assessment of learning that focuses on learning at a particular point, such as a cumulative project or an activity at the end of a unit. Both of these assessments are very valuable and important to consider in our classrooms. This chapter also focuses a lot on how to give feedback to the students using different tools such as inventories and surveys, checklists, rubrics and portfolios.

What was super interesting in this chapter was reading about the new generation of assessments for the Common Core State Standards and how it will be conducted completely online and how it will require students to respond to multiple-choice items, open-ended responses and performance assessments. This shift is a reminder of how important the use our technology is now in our society. Our teachers now have to be very open-minded and flexible to the change in standards as technology progresses. As a future educator, I plan to be very careful and cautious with using the different types of assessment because I do not want to discourage my students and I want to try to make it less difficult than what it really looks like. 

Chapter 8: Technology Across the Curriculum

"To scaffold students' capacity to ask questions within the context of academic content, teachers must first engage and motivate students with content, sparking curiosity to pose questions that prompt deeper thinking" (pg. 121).

Chapter 8 talks about the important of critical thinking and developing informative and essential questions that relate to the text that the child may be reading. In the classroom, the teacher's influence on the student's learning is very important. As teachers, it is important when we organize the student's thoughts and guide them through their reading. The book mentions the importance of making textual connections based on the student's personal and past experiences. In another course I took last semester, we went over the importance of the student's connection with the text. Just like this chapter, it talked about the important of the text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. It is important for students to make these connections because then they can create their own meaning of text based on their own emotions, concerns, life experiences and what they are reading.

While reading more into this chapter, it presented other information such as the use of the media and the Internet to find good sources to analyze while researching a text. This chapter gives a lot of critical thinking questions that our students should ask themselves while looking into a particular topic that they are researching. The book gave some questions such as: What am I trying t find out about my topic? What do I want to know or solve? What key words should I use in my search query? What kind of information am I looking for? (pg. 124).  As we all know Google is the first search engine that we go to when researching something that we want to know more information about. The book talks about a site called Gooru (www.goolearning.org) which is a great search engine to use for this particular search. One of the citation services that was mentioned in the chapter was Easybib. As a English major, Easybib was my best friend because all I had to do was plug everything in and they would do the citation for me. It's easy to use and very helpful when trying to make citations for a paper.

Children's Book Review:

"Stellaluna" by Janell Cannon is about how a mother fruit bat loves her baby, Stellaluna, very much and would not let anything happen to her. Until one night, an owl attacks the bats, knocking Stellaluna out of her mother's safe embrace, and she falls into the forest. One morning she wakes up and is in a sparrow's nest filled with three baby birds named Pip, Flitter, and Flap. The mother sparrow will only let Stellaluna stay with them if she only ate bugs, doesn't hang by her feet and sleeps at night. She did her best but she couldn't help wanting to fly at night or hang upside down to sleep. Then one day, Stellaluna was separated from her bird family and was discovered sleeping with her head up by a very surprised bat. The other bats came to see this bat sleeping with her head up and she is happily reunited with her mother. When her bird family comes to visit, they discovered the being bat-like is just as hard for baby birds as being bird-like was for her.

I chose this book because I think that it exemplifies how even though we are different in our own ways we as humans or animals are so much alike. This book values the importance of finding our own identity, why people make and break promises, and what makes up a family. This is one of my many favorite books that I have read to my children at my internship last spring semester and they would always ask me to read it everyday.

Chapter 7: Writing Online

In this book, Chapter 7 is called, "Writing Online." This chapter focuses on the main idea of "digital writing," which is defined as "compositions created with, and oftentimes for reading or viewing on a computer or other devices that is connected to the Internet." While reading further into this chapter, it also discusses the different types of online blogs that may be used that is occurring in technology now. From my experiences with writing blogs and reading different blogs they are usually intended to comment, review or critique different works of literature as well as other things such as movies, music, social issues and etc. The book then states a great insight on the strategies on writing blogs such as, "showing an awareness of audience, especially a worldwide audience, synthesizing information across multiple sources, evaluating the relevance of connections, and evaluating the relevance of additional images and media." This definitely was an eye opener when writing blogs.

During my college career, I have taken online courses where we had to use Blackboard, for example. Blackboard is an online source where college students and the teachers can communicate with eachother and students can submit in their work. There has been times where the professor has taken a day off, for personal reasons, and because she didn't want us to get behind in our school work, she would make us go online and post something about what we were talking about. She would post some ideas and each one of us would go after that idea and elaborate our own interpretation of the idea and from there we can comment on each others ideas. Online blogging and commenting is such a resourceful took because students can then share their own information and interpretations, which is basically what this chapter is touching base on. 

One of the techniques that the chapter talks about is using the anchor charts. When reading this section, I found it to be very resourceful as the anchor chart is an effective scaffold for students' to learn during modeled lessons. Anchor charts are created by both teachers and students who are meant to highlight specific guidelines or behaviors for performing a particular strategy. I personally have never seen an anchor chart before but by reading the section for it I believe that it will be effective to use in the classroom. I would love to use something like this in the future! 

Chapter 6: Using E-Tools to Scaffold Comprehension of E-Literature

The next chapter that was assigned was chapter 6, "Using E-Tools to Scaffold Comprehension of E-Literature." This chapter was very informative because it introduced the different tools and comprehension strategies for when using digital texts. In this text, there were different step by step information listed for bother the younger and older children the comprehension strategies for when they are reading digital texts and this seemed to be useful for when teachers want to use it in their classroom.

One of the strategies that they talked about was the online annotations. As a student in college, I tend to use a lot of sticky notes. Every time I have something to read for class, I grab my pack of sticky notes and a pen and when I come notice something important I would write it down and stick it to the page. I use this method so I wouldn't forget what the important fact is for the page. One semester, I was reading a story and I have at least two sticky note on each page because the story had a lot of facts and details that I didn't want to forget about when having a class discussion the next day. When reading this selection of "Online Annotations," I learned that there is an online way to use sticky notes. The book states, "Sticky notes have become a popular tool to assist students with monitoring comprehension, as students use them to write thoughts, questions, or unknown words while reading independently" (89). One of the websites that the book provides and gets in depth with is WebNotes, which is a downloaded to the computer, and a toolbar appears below the address bar of the browser. The sticky notes that are now on your computer can also be highlighted and you can put them in folders on your computer. I believe this strategy can help students especially when they are reading something online and they don't understand what a word means. Also, whether they want to be someone like me and write down the facts and little details that may be important later on in the reading. This chapter talked about so much more digital texts. For example, the author visits, Google Lit trips, book talks and book trailers. These activities would be so much fun for kids to do in the classroom and I know just like them I will be very excited to use it in my classroom. Reading this chapters and learning about the different digital texts that we as teachers may use in our classrooms makes me so excited and has opened my eyes to all the different strategies. 

Chapter 5: Sites and Selection Criteria for Ebooks

This weeks module is chapter 5 which discusses about the different types of digital books. For example, it mentions e-Books and websites where it offers students to enhance their reading skills. When students are being exposed to e-Books it can be beneficial because children can be engaged with the text in a fun and informative way.

In the chapter, there are two main specific categories that the book talks about. The first one is the online read-aloud and the second one is the interactive story books. In the book, the book shows an example of a online read-aloud website called Storyline Online. Once you go on the website, there are many different types of books for children. What is very interesting when using this website is that famous actors/actresses are reading to you and when looking at the video the illustrations of the book come to life in a way. I did an internship at a school 2 semesters ago and the teacher had used this website when the children were going "book shopping." Every Mondays, the children would come back from recess and the teacher would put a story on the projector and they would watch the video while getting read to while getting their new books. When I read this piece of the chapter, I knew about this website and it surprised me that I would see it again. The other piece that the book talks about is the interactive storybooks which allows the students to add graphics, sounds, videos, and other forms of animation to a reading instead of just holding the page and reading a standard printed text. I feel like both reading the story through a website and reading it in standard print has both pros and cons. For having the animation, children will have a better gist of the story since it is coming to life on the website then trying to imagine it in your head what is going on in the story.

When reading these chapters, I imagine myself using these techniques in my classroom. As I mentioned before with the Storyline Online, I planned to use this in my classroom and to use the standard print technique. I want students to understand both ways because I don't want students to loose interest in reading printed books.