Day #2

Accessing Text to Struggling Readers

I attended a great conference today run by Dave Edyburn from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His focus was on how to make text from any resource available to all students in all areas.

He used some great websites that I plan to put into practice right away! He showed us how to take text from the Internet, copy and paste it into the following website and it will read it. This is great for my Special Education students that are reading below grade level. I can find text online for them and they will be able to hear it read to them.
Check out the site!

He also showed us a great way to take a word document and summarize whatever it is about. You can copy an article from the internet that is VERY LONG and paste it into word and then use word to summarize the article. You can summarize it to 10%, 20%, etc. He brought up the point that some students can start with 10% and then move up to continue to learn more at their own pace while using the same article as any other student. The link below will take you to an article he wrote about what he has developed and how he uses different resources to make text accessible to students.
Check out the site!

Where’s the Beef? Assessing Digital Products for Rigor, Relevance and Craftsmanship

This was another conference I attended where they discussed ways to tell if student technology products involved rigor and if they were relevant to the task.

When you score technology tasks:
½ should be content and ½ should be craftsmanship
How are the students designing their work? What are they doing? Where are they on Blooms?

Use Student Work
1) External Evaluators
2) Internal Evaluators
3) Staff Training
4) Peer Collaboration
5) Individual Student Scoring

New Term I Learned:
Machinimas- Virtual world recording with sets and scenes. You put them into the recording software. (Go Animate Website would be an example of a Machinima)