Module 6 Summary: Presentations

Tips on making powerpoints: You should outline your presentation at the beginning and follow that outline throughout. You shouldn't use complete sentences and more than 4-5 points per slide not to overwhelm the reader. Two slides per minute or so should take place during the presentation. You should use bullet points rather than complete paragraphs on a slide. Animation should be limited. Fonts should be standard fonts that are large and easy to read. Font should be contrasting to your background and change of color on a page should be used sparingly to emphasize. The background on the slide should be used throughout and should be simple and uncomplicated. Graphs should have titles and should be easy to read rather than the use of raw data. You should use a concluding slide to end your presentation on a good note then have a question at the end to lead discussion.

Research Tutorial: EBSCOHost is a search engine where you can find articles, presentations, and papers to save when doing research.

Creating good powerpoints: Visual presentations are ways to help enhance a spoken presentations and not to replace the speaker. The slides should be there to compliment the spoken word.

Kid Pix and Powerpoint: Both of these programs include ways to bring creativity into a presentation. The other resources on these programs are there to enhance the text of a presentation. You can make classroom books, responding to literature, and extend student learning, There are many templates to choose from for each of these types of presentations.

Module 5 Learning Summary

Video on maximizing literacy centers:
Centers are a great way for students to do quick word work during a literacy block but the teacher must decide how much work is just enough to make the centers work effective and so that students are able to complete the activity on their own or with a partner.

What is Literacy? video:
Literacy is a way to build a future. Literacy is not just being able to read and write but the ability to open up many doors for the future to get a good job, participate in society, contribute to our country's economy, and prosper as a human being. I loved the quote "reading is to the mind, as exercise is to the body". As so many historians have said before us, we need to be able to read to better our lives. Literacy is the most valuable asset a person can have.

Using literacy centers video:
Literacy centers are meant for students to practice what they have learned. Teachers are able to teach small groups while other students are practicing what they have been taught and are engaged. Students are building their literacy skills. Centers are good for practical, time-efficient ideas for the classroom flow.

Balanced literacy video:
This teacher sets her room up to be successful at independent work, group work, small group instruction and an area for collaboration. She says that the best thing to do when planning is to set reasonable but high expectations for your students with modeling from you to lead them to be successful.

Effective literacy classroom video:
This video is about a book called "Spaces and Places" that writes about how to plan your classroom. There are before and after pictures so that teachers can see how classrooms were transformed, how areas are used, what wall space should be used for, and how to get your room packed up at the end of the year. It is a bound book that can easily be accessed and written in to help use your space to it's full potential.

This weeks videos were very helpful in understanding why literacy is important, how you should configure your classroom, and why centers work is beneficial for literacy instruction and growth.

Module 4 learning summary

Module 4 summary

RTI stands for response to intervention. The RTI process is in place for students who don’t learn along with the other 80% of general education students. There are many reasons why a child might need interventions but the RTI process is to help get students with learning or behavior disabilities the right help to make them successful in school. Teachers are responsible for the interventions in tier 1 but as a student moves up the ladder towards tier 2 or 3 other personnel come in to help the student be successful. The RTI process is meant to identify a problem, discuss why it is happening, figure out a way to fix it and see, then see if the intervention worked. The teachers take data to show how the interventions are working and whether new interventions need to be implemented. Through the RTI process we are able to identify when a student has a learning disability. Identification of students with learning disabilities should take time through the RTI process to monitor how a student works when different strategies are implemented.

When we set up a reading program you need to keep in mind which kids fall into the core, supplemental, and intervention groups to best fit their needs when it comes to reading. There is a difference between phonics and phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize word lengths, rhyming, and syllabication, segmenting onset and rime, and working with different sounds. Phonics is when you have letter to sound associations, decoding, and encoding. Readers progress through four stages which are sounding out, saying whole word, sight words, and automatic word reading. The end goal is to read for comprehension and meaning. Assessment is important but we must implement the correct ways to comprehend before we can assess. Web-quests are a great way to incorporate technology into reading through the tasks at hand: retelling, compilation, mystery, journalistic, design, creative product, consensus building, persuasion, self-knowledge, analytical, judgments, and scientific. As a teacher it is important to get readers to the highest level you can in first grade or else they will struggle for the years beyond that grade. Explicit instruction at this young age for phonemic and phonological awareness will help a student become more successful. We must expose our students to new words every day in order for them to achieve at high levels in vocabulary development by the time they are in fifth or eighth grade. While reading students should question, visualize, predict, connect, and respond to what they are reading. Teachers are the biggest influence on student reading abilities and levels. We must model good reading if we want our students to be good at reading. Overall through this module I have learned that we are the biggest advocates for our student’s success and we must be intentional on how we teach them to read. 

Module 3 Summary

Video on encouraging enthusiasm for reading: It's important that parents read with and to their children to help them build a love for reading. As teachers do in school by modeling the reading process, parents are encouraged to do the same at home to help their children get enthusiastic about reading.

Smart Table: Is a great way for students to interact during an activity. Whether it be a math activity or a reading activity where they can work together to achieve the end goal. It's for primary grades and is an easy way for four students to work together as well as using technology. There are endless amounts of ways to incorporate this technology but for social studies I think it would be beneficial when you are talking about locations to use the technology with maps or create a map with pictures of different events and placing them on the map where they occurred. I just think about my class and I teach US history from the Civil War to today and there are loads of locations my students need to know and how if they could move things around to get a better feel as to where these events take place. With literacy in my classroom I could see students writing a paper then recreating the paper or story on the board to tell the story with friends.

Science and literacy integrated: I think great ways to incorporate literacy development into science could be by making up songs to go along with the important key vocabulary of a unit to get them exposed to the language in a fun and exciting way. Science journal are a great way to incorporate writing into science. Literacy is reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Science content is difficult for students with language barriers because the background knowledge of the vocabulary might not be there. Having students speak about what experiment they just did could help build their speaking skills with key vocabulary in relation to the science content.

Literacy Development: I would say the development of literacy starts with being able to recognize words, read words, speak about reading, then being able to synthesize or analyze what you are reading.

Expository Text: We live in the information age and it's vital for students to be able to retell and engage in conversation about reading expository text. We see through the new common core standards how much emphasis has been put on being able to read and write informational text. Teachers should use expository trade books to teach students how to retell and summarize what is being read.

Research study: The research done showed that when explicit instruction of informational text was incorporated, students were more likely to read informational text on their own. Students are highly influenced by what the teacher is incorporating into the classroom. I found it interesting that the explicit instruction of fiction didn't have nearly the impact that explicit instruction of non-fiction did.

Module 2 Summary

Videos: The goal for differentiated instruction is to get to know your students and assess their biggest needs to reach them at their instructional level. It's important to find the best way to approach your students to make learning fun and engaging for them. 

Differentiation came about from Tomlinson being a young teacher and using different activities with different students. It evolved in her middle school classroom. She had students who were four years under grade level and students on grade level so she had to use different approaches for these groups of students. You have to look at your class as a whole to see the big picture and the different variables to best teach your students and make sense of your classroom. 

Presentations: The challenges we face in learning literacy is not following the simple rules laid out for years before us but being innovative in finding ways to create problem-solving skills in our students. It's using new and exciting ways to engage students to help progress as learners. Strategic reading sessions are teacher-guided with purposeful, planned out purposes. It's a way to guide students through the reading process on how to build background knowledge, engage in the pre-reading, and reflects on what they have learned and to reread when they are done. It's important to get students engaged and excited about what they are reading so they can find purpose in reading. The teacher must plan ahead to figure out what is needed before reading for students to be able to dive into the text. 

Content area reading is much more difficult for students and must be scaffolded to get the most out of the text. The teacher must analyze the text beforehand for readability level to get students prepared for the task that could at times seem impossible. Teachers should modify if the text is too high and allow for focusing in on only a few vocabulary words. It's important for teachers to point out the different patterns you see in the different content area texts so that students can associate organization to each of these. Also using different strategies of teaching before, during, and after reading. 

Reading has a scaffolding process that goes from "I do you watch" to "You do I watch" through the steps of "I do you help" and "You do I help" to get students from the read aloud stage to the independently reading their choice of books stage. 

Bloom's Taxonomy was developed with many people to show the different stages of questioning development with students. There are different verbs that apply to the six stages. When you are questioning your students in small guided reading groups you should use Bloom's as a guideline for the results you are trying to achieve. 

Module 1 EDRD 7718

Throughout module 1, I learned more about expository text and why it's important to our classrooms and different reading strategies for struggling readers. Readers who are struggling need to work on decoding and sight words to work towards being fluent. Once you are a fluent reader that means that you can read with accuracy and expression. Vocabulary is important and should grow with age to increase understanding of unknown words. Comprehension is the most important goal. All readers should read to gain meaning. We also learned through the powerpoints about the different text structures and why it's necessary to figure out the signal words that indicate how the text is structured. When reading expository text we must realize whether it's a problem/solution, cause/effect, compare/contrast, or a sequence structure. This allows for you to organize your thoughts from the text to gain meaning. It's not only important to use graphic organizers when writing an expository text but it's just as important when reading one. In the Vacca, text I read about why content area textbooks are so difficult. Textbooks, especially for ELLs, become intimidating if the text is not readable, the pictures aren't enticing, and the words are beyond their scope. It is good to expose students to new words but when the new words overrun the known words it becomes too much. I have found in my classroom how difficult it is to use many of our textbooks because they no longer align to our standards. The only textbooks I still use occasionally are science and social studies because we are still using GPS standards. Textbooks need to be readable too. There are many methods to test readability but Fry has made a method that is used most often. As mentioned in the Vacca text, many teachers have steered away from using conventional textbooks and found more interesting ways to engage their learners to get the content taught.

For the Fry Test my classroom’s science textbook had an average of 10 sentences and an average of 139 syllables, therefore, it fell into the readability of 5^th grade which is the grade that I teach. When I did the Irwin checklist, this textbook stayed for the most part in the adequate section with a few poor areas and a few excellent areas. The weaknesses of this text are that it is very average level and doesn't apply to a variety of ability levels. The assets of the text are that it is appealing to look at and has excellent resources like the index, glossary, and table of contents to help narrow down research for students. The best way to utilize this tool is to use it as a secondary resource for instruction and not the primary resource. The limitations of using these types of readability tests are that we don’t really get an idea of how well the students can comprehend or understand the material.

Textbook text patterns can help students when reading paragraphs or informational narratives because they have seen it before with you.  

Module 8: PowerPoint Review

Factors Involved in Reading and Writing Difficulties

There are many factors that can affect students in positive and negative ways when it comes to reading and writing but during this powerpoint the focus was on the negative. The factors mentioned were: cognitive, visual, language, orthographic processing, social and emotional, physical, physical health, educational, and family. I have noticed within my own classroom how difficult it is for students to overcome emotional factors like parental pressures especially when the parents aren't reading with them at home. I can see a huge difference between my students who have parents that read at home and students that don't. The students who excel in reading in my classroom have parents who speak English at home. It's amazing that this difference can show such a divide between students. It is important to figure out the factors that might be holding back students so that as the teacher you can find ways to overcome these factors. Students sometimes have a hard time admitting when something is causing them problems. There are times where no matter what we do their difficulties are out of our control, like physical health issues such as cancer or other illnesses that keep them out of school on a regular basis. This is unfortunate because many times the students wants to get better but are losing the opportunity to get better. I thought this powerpoint was very informative while also being straight to the point.