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Share What You Are Reading Level: Primary --- Content: Language Arts |
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Ms. Lee is a primary
grades teacher. Recently, the school where she teaches adopted a new
technology plan. As Ms. Lee reviewed the new technology plan she realized
that for her grade level the technology plan expected students to interact
with eCommunication tools. Ms. Lee designed a
unit that she believes will attend to the technology plan and one of the
Language Arts standards for her grade level: Students will read and respond to literary text and
share their responses with peers. As she designed the unit she
structured activities around one unit question: How can peer interpretations of literary text inform
our reading choices? As Ms. Lee continued
her thinking, she wondered if this unit might be an opportunity to
collaborate with her long-time colleague who works at a school across town,
Ms. Gilbert. After talking to Ms. Gilbert the two teachers decided the unit
would be an opportunity for their students to collaborate, while attending to
multiple learning goals. Here is an overview of
one of the activities they incorporated. Ms. Lee worked with
the local librarian to create a blog, using the web-based version of Word
Press. The blog, titled Students
Reading, would be used as a vehicle for students to demonstrate
and document their work over time in addressing the essential question. Then Ms.Lee worked with her technology team to ensure that the
student laptops, as well as the laptops at Ms. Gilbert’s school, would
effectively operate WeToku. As Ms. Lee described WeToku to her team: It
is a web-based application that allows you to conduct interviews over the
web, record those interviews, and share those interviews via a blog.
To begin the unit, Ms.
Lee and Ms. Gilbert worked with their classes to identify interview questions
for interviewing other students their age about what they like to read. Then
the teachers paired students across classes for interviewing. The students
used their laptops to interview a student in another class. This served as an
opportunity to practice using the software and allowed the students to get to
know one another. Students selected
texts based on book reviews written by other students online at the
Scholastic Share What You’re Reading site. Students used their e-journals to
document how they made their decisions about which text to read. When
students had completed their text they used a formatted book review guide,
written by Ms. Lee and Ms. Gilbert, to begin composing their reviews. Students worked with
other students in their classrooms to peer edit and
make changes to their book reviews. When their final draft was complete Ms.
Lee and Ms. Gilbert once again had students use WeToku
to conduct peer interviews. The purpose of the interviews was to gain a brief
overview of the text the students read, gain a better understanding of
students overall opinion of the text, and document the interview process
using WeToku. When student interviews were
completed they posted their interviews to the blog Ms. Lee had created. In
addition, students posted the book reviews they had written. Students used
“tagging” in the blog to make it possible for other students to search for
topics of interests. When the interviews were complete and the blog had over
fifty interviews posted, students began the next stage of the unit. Students worked across
classrooms to design a dissemination and research plan to understand how
their interviews and reviews could be incorporated into other classrooms and
inform the reading selections of other students. Student teams worked to
present the blog to other classrooms, teach other classrooms how to use and
contribute to the blog, and survey the users to find out if the blog
interviews and reviews were impacting their text selections. At the end of the
unit, students conducted presentations at both schools,
discussing their findings and demonstrating the system to students, teachers,
and families. By the end of the semester four other classrooms were using the
blog and the students in Ms. Lee and Ms. Gilbert’s classes demonstrated
through their own research that peer interpretations of text can inform peer
choices. Resources used in this
scenario: Tools used in this
scenario: |