Eyes past print

Modeling fluent reading. Introduction of outside text every period of every day in every class. The opportunity to bring relevance to adolescents. With whole-school immersion in text and reading, ideas and concepts naturally follow. The teacher reads, the student follow along a copy of the text. Content-area literacy expert, Janet Allen calls it “eyes past print with voice support.” At my school, we call it a requirement… one element of a building-wide literacy plan.

Two years ago, after our sit-down session with Janet Allen in Orlando, Florida, our leadership team decided on a school-wide implementation of this strategy as an element of our focus on literacy skills. Co-Principal in charge of instruction, Dr. Jeanette Westfall, was a former elementary teacher, high school communication arts teacher and instructional coach. There is no doubt that her background helped her decide that a non-negotiable approach to reading improvement across content areas was a valuable thing given our situation.

Why we went there

Data analysis in our school improvement planning sessions clearly indicated the need for a systemic effort to improve reading. However, witnessing and characterizing the problem is only the beginning. The ability to design concrete, strategic approaches to solving such a problem is a crucial next step. Bringing the teeth of accountability into the picture is the final piece of the puzzle in comprehensively addressing a systemic educational issue.

The accountability piece tied to EPP is a direct requirement from our building administration to employ this “read aloud” strategy for an absolute minimum of five minutes per class per day. For students this translates to a daily minimum of twenty minutes of engagement with rigorous text with a fluent reader. The next logical step of a strategic teacher is to quickly adjust planning to take advantage of this requirement to bring rigorous and relevant content-specific text into the beginning (or end) of each period.

For a teacher with traditional style, this also forces at least one transition within the daily lesson. In the hands of an effective teacher, these transitions help to keep kids actively engaged and using their brains in varied ways.  Data showed that not only was there a need, but that our kids simply weren’t reading enough.  You can make strong suggestions about what goes on outside of the classroom.  Inside the four walls of a classroom is a different story.  You can guarantee immersion within the walls of a school building.

Lit2Go

In other posts this year, I have suggested online services that might add to our implementation of EPP.  In this post, I would like to introduce another interesting online resource from Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse. Lit2Go is a website I remember running across a year or so ago on Apple’s iTunes. On the USF site within iTunes you will find audio files for K-12 education organized by grade level.

However, in my opinion, the organizational website for Lit2Go is what makes it useful for the strategy described above as well as others. The main page allows many typical content searches for literature. Author, Title, Keyword, and Reading Level are all available search functions as well as a direct link to the files on the iTunes service for slipping smoothly into your iPod.

My first try was an author search- I pretty randomly chose Lewis Carroll.  I ran down the list of ten offerings for the author and clicked to select The Two Clocks.  The contents page for any selection has a nice set of overview information such as an abstract, word count, reading level, origin, genre, lexile level, theme, suggested educational strategy, Sunshine State Standards (of more use if you are actually IN Florida), and more.  On this page, it is the collection of not only the .mp3 audio file of the work, but also the text in both .html and .pdf format that makes this a valuable resource.  It also looks as if some pieces contain other “support material,” though the attached document for this particular story seems pretty useless.

Overall, the fact that this site provides both audio and clearly-printed text of a good number of classic pieces makes it valuable for efficiently selecting and managing EPP within a literature or communication arts class.

An easy win

The “clock that doesn’t go” in Lewis Carroll’s story is right two times per day.  The other clock which loses a minute a day is only right twice per year.  Surely, implementing EPP in a setting where reading immersion strategies are warranted is a way to be “right” at least four times per day.  If this form of “being right” seems worthwhile to you in your own educational setting, then give Lit2Go a try and come back and tell us what you thought.  Did it work quickly and easily for the described strategy?  Even better…  do you have another innovative use of Lit2Go to share?  Bring it here, and help us all to be right more than two times per day.

What I have found particularly true in the past year is that even the fanciest website on the Internet doesn’t produce a solid educational event outside of the carefully-created framework of a skilled instructor.  Compared to many of the applications/websites I have talked about on this blog in the past year, this one could be seen as one of the less “sophisticated.”  However, any good teacher knows that what happens when you plug a device into the wall…  pales in comparison to what happens inside the mind of a child.

Artwork thanks:

On a day when the only thing bigger than the snowflakes is the deep gray loneliness of the sky, I bring you a minuscule chunk of one of my favorite Christmas gifts.

My wife, Erin, has a thing for finding the perfect book to send me off on my April exploration of the Bahamian backwoods.  Normally, when I unpack the mystery book from my jumbled bag on board a sailboat anchored on Andros Island, I delight in the pen-sloppy scribblings just inside the front cover.  Last year it was Pablo Neruda.  What will this Spring bring?  Someday perhaps I’ll do a post on those messages.  Though parts, to be sure, will stay private forever for me.

Today’s words for winter:  by Galway Kinnell.  You (and I) can thank some nifty old guy on the east coast for this book.  He knows who he is too.  I’m glad Erin reads his blog as well, for she is an excellent gift-giver.

This verse is from A New Selected Poems from Galway Kinnell.  I feel OK about posting the words to this poem here in hopes that it will gain a larger readership.  I will, of course, retract if ever asked.

We humans do create fires here on Earth.  We create warmth in a universe where, aside from stars, cold is the norm.

Amazing words here.  Poetry compared to language is the inverse of DNA compared to a tree frog.  While poetry can be seen as shiny distillation of our daily talk, biochemicals tell little of the quickness of life.

Artwork thanks:  Cemetery Angel from Adam Selwood on Flickr.

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“Play game, ‘puter game… play ‘puter game… gaaaame… yayyy!”

My almost-two year old has a thing for letters and numbers.  That, of course makes me delighted because from there, everything is exciting.  I spend my professional life trying either to help teenagers find excitement in the natural world or colleagues find excitement in refining their practice.  Those two groups of people in my professional life have little in common with preschoolers.  Yet, the content carrots I have to work with there are far more thrilling than the bare bones geometric shapes and associated sounds of letters and numbers.

Now, it is here that I must tell you (as if you didn’t know) that I am no kind of authority on early childhood education.  I have spent nearly 18 years as a teacher or an instructional coach.  However, those years have been spent working in secondary education.  I have developed a really healthy love of the process of learning itself, but I walked to the plate in 1991 swinging a love for science.  Now that I think about it, I suppose there would be a bit of overlap in a Venn diagram of those two entities.  I have now spent less than two years on a case study of early childhood education.  How could I not?  Instructional coach + new father = easy fit.  That said, I welcome the comments here of anyone and everyone who might carry a bit fatter portfolio of educating children.  Please allow me to extend the educational technology discussion down a grade level or ten.

So let’s get back to the leadoff quote.  Yes, that is exactly what our little beast now exclaims when either of us sits down by her with laptop in hand.  In reality, all it takes is the slightest hint.  What on Earth is she speaking of while in the throes of such excitement?  Starfall.  She is fired up about the online reading site at Starfall.com.  This is not a new site.  It was founded well prior to the “Web 2.0″ boom around 2004.  If you are an early childhood educator -and computers don’t frighten you- you likely already know about Starfall.  Since this is not my largest reader demographic, allow me to point most of you in this direction.  Even if you don’t have your own larvae at home, you can certainly share this link with friends who do.  They might just thank you.

At Starfall, you will not be blown away by slick graphics nor amazing audio.  What you will find is a rather engaging little site for curious tykes that seems to be very sound at what it does.  What does it do?  It provides a version of online reading instruction starting with ABC’s and moving on to various levels of early reading.  The ABC’s introduce students to the sounds of letters (phonemes).  Learn to Read teaches students how letters are combined to create words.  The simple animations associated here are quite good as the letters (always pronounced by a child’s voice) move closer together as they become a word.  The It’s Fun to Read section uses learning activities to begin simple sentence construction.  Finally, I’m Reading uses plays, myths and folk stories to increase fluency.

How well does it work?  I honestly have nothing to compare to.  My little girlie could identify all letters by sight when she was 18 months old.  She has delighted in the phonemes for each of the letters, and is starting to identify simple words.  Is this website the only thing she has explored in that time?  Certainly not.  Erin & I read and read and read.  That’s pretty much what happens in the family room.  Whether we are reading to ourselves, or to the babe, we read tons…  and much of it is online.  Our little bookworm even finds little corners in the house to hide away and “read.”

Will Starfall raise a child through the screen of a laptop?  Not so much.  Will it help out in the early stages of learning to read?  I certainly think so.  It is a very cool part of the puzzle.  In fact, my wife just remarked about how she also first began to actually nail down colors and numbers as a side effect of several of the mini-lessons on the site.  I guess watching mom & dad work & play on laptops influences the way a child likes to learn.  She gets so fired up when we let her take center stage in front of the ol’ Mac and click her own way through the site.  No gift we have yet given her has been met with the enthusiasm this website has, and continues to deliver.  Ok, maybe Discovery Channel dinosaur flicks.

Check out Starfall.  Copy the link to anyone in your world with small children.  Or really-  perhaps even older kids who struggle with reading.  I would be curious about that.  Are the animations & examples too young for somewhat older kids to gain from the program?  Or is this something that might be utilized in a school setting?  As I said above, my “expertise” with early-childhood education amounts to one case study with a 23-month old princess.  If you need a “testimonial,” link back to this page. Check it out.  Check back.  Let us know what you think here.

And oh…  Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and many others.  May you all glow in the warmth of any celebration of light in the middle of Winter’s darkness.

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If the act of web surfing might keep dementia at bay, then blogging might just allow your brain to outlive your body.

The Context

I found this brief, but intriguing article from MSNBC interesting enough to engage a read-aloud with my Dual-Credit Biology class this past week.  This classroom of curious minds is full of nascent bloggers.  We have begun our journey into the blogosphere within the relatively safe confines (if the global web can be seen as “confined” in any way) of a classroom network on the Ning platform.  Here we have recently dabbled with  online discussion forums, mini-project publishing and blogging as it relates to the dynamic nature of science in general.

One must also be aware that these forms of learning are quite novel at my school of around 900 students in Saint Joseph, Missouri.  I, along with a small cohort of teachers at Benton High, have taken a step into the world of online interactivity and publishing within the standard curriculum of our courses.  After just a month and a half, we have realized the fact that the doors of our classrooms no longer lock tight at 3:00pm.  During even late nights throughout the week, many of our classrooms are still abuzz with content discourse while the mice come out to frolic in the hallways of our aging school.

I have to say, my students have bought in.  I have tried to deeply embed the daily work we do in class with the digital tendrils that run throughout the global web.  It is fun to think of these conversations happening invisibly about our heads as radio signals.  For years I have peppered my classroom mission with this ideal, but this year I have taken a full windward tack toward digital conversation.  The experimental nature of it all tends to dovetail well into the two science classes I teach (Dual-Credit Biology and Marine Biology).  Students seem to come to these classes fully prepared to confront ideas and phenomena they have yet encountered.  I have never taken that mindset lightly in what I do on a day-to-day basis.

The Article

So it is within this framework that a little article like this can get some serious play.  The suggestion that web surfing itself could prolong the cranial excitement that leads to long brain life is powerful.  The main detail that stuck out to me is the fact that fMRI scans of subjects surfing the web were more diverse than a control group who were merely reading books.  In this study, the book-reading participants showed significant brain activity in the temporal, parietal and occipital lobes of the brain.  As the article states, these regions are involved in controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities.  This surely comes as no surprise to any reading expert as many of our current comprehension strategies are designed to take advantage of this.

However, the brains of those participants who were web surfing showed the same activity.  What is more is the fact that they also excited the frontal, temporal and cingulate areas of their noggins.  These areas of the brain control decision-making and complex reasoning.  More still is the fact that this effect was only noted in those subjects who had prior Internet experience.

“Our most striking finding was that Internet searching appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading.”

If ever there was a solid suggestion that a non-webbite should get on the Internet…  and now…  this could be it.  The fact that a discussion of these ideas can take place for fifteen minutes in the lives of open-minded teenagers is pretty stimulating.  To know that what you do now can effect the neural wiring of your future brain is pretty compelling.

Going Beyond

If mere web surfing can be such rich exercise for gray matter, then the act of blogging just might build the kind of active brains we strive for in education-  for blogging, is not your garden variety writing exercise.  My first experiences with blogging last March were personally empowering for many reasons.  Not the least of which was the fact that I soon felt like I was engaging in a type of writing that went way beyond anything I had done to date.

After authoring a few trial pieces to see what the phenomenon was all about, it occurred to me that I was engaged in far more than I had ever been while solely journaling.  I remember talking this out with several of my closest educator friends.  I remember making a comment that what I was doing felt like some type of “connective” writing-  perhaps even a different genre.  Of course, what felt like a shiny new endeavor to me was already a published entity.  In fact, in Will Richardson’s 2006 book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, “connective writing” is mentioned as somewhat of a new genre starting on page 30.  Finding this little gem made me feel a little less of an explorer, but was certainly validating.

Richardson describes this type of writing as being, “a form that forces those who do it to read carefully and critically, that demands clarity and cogency in its construction, that is done for a wide audience, and that links to the sources of the ideas expressed.” He goes on to drive home the point that good blogging requires far more critical reading than might be immediately noticed by the casual reader of a blog.  There is far more rich goodness in this chapter than can be related in this post, and I highly recommend the book to anyone looking to engage students in the pedagogy of blogging.

Bottom Line

Academic blogging is rigorous synthesis.  It is an activity than can certainly enhance your classroom, and potentially extend the life of your brain.  As I finish up this post, my wife @erinNLY just chimed onto the Twitterverse with a somewhat-related line from a Flobots song:  “There is a war going on for your mind.  If you are thinking, you are winning.”

Perhaps this is a better mission statement for our school than the one we last authored.

Artwork thanks:

Mao, Isaac. “Brain.” Flickr. 13 June 2005. 18 Oct 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/isaacmao/19245594/>.

“tmcnamee”, “Old World Brain.” Flickr. 03 APR 2007. 18 Oct 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/mcnamee/445793409/>.

How do you get your daily dose of literature? Life is hectic in 2008. Is it during your installations of “eyes past print w/voice support?” If you answered “yes” to that, what if I could show you a new and very cool way to deliver that little instructional gem?

DAILYLIT.com is really… well, I just don’t know about this one as of yet, but I am interested.

Don’t you honestly find yourself busier and busier all the time? Does it seem that you rarely have more than 5 to 20 minutes to read something you want to… and much of this is even taken up by e-mail, etc?

I have found this to be a problem personally. One solution I have found is to simply buy the Audiobook. Yes, I even try to find books that I must purchase for a grad class online if possible. This way, I can be reading one while the other sits in the memory of my iPod (which is directly connected to my car’s stereo). Now, when I am driving to one appointment or from another errand, I get 5 to 20 minutes of the book I am exploring.

While this is different enough to be frustrating at times -and I wouldn’t recommend it for just any genre- I am becoming a huge fan. Why? It is simple, really. I find that quite often that the ten-minute dose of wisdom I get from the book (right now: a re-read of “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell) is more than enough to inspire pretty deep thought and reflection throughout the day. It usually seems to hold me over until the next on-the-fly listening session.

Now don’t rush to label my multitasking, “continuous partial attention.” Don’t imagine a world where I am unable to sit and engage text and think deeply for long periods of time. Please do not think that these behaviors have rendered me unfit for a long Sunday afternoon read. Right now, I just do not have the luxury of much uninterrupted time. The only time I am allowed that kind of focus on one text… is usually when I am team-reading titles such as this one with my darling little girl.

So how does “Dailylit.com” fit in here? As a very new user, I am betting this is a similar affair. The way it works is that you get a daily dose (referred to as an installment) of any book you are signed up for, but by e-mail! (public domain books are free, btw) Apparently, if you find yourself with more time to read than the one installment provides at that time, you can click on a continue button to deliver the very next text in sequence.

When you sign up for the book, you see how many installments the book contains, and then you get to choose how often you want those e-mails delivered to your inbox. You can choose the exact time the installments are to be delivered as well as whether you would like them daily, on weekdays only, weekends only, etc. My personal test of the service was to sign up for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This sizable volume will come direct to my inbox in a total of 423 installments. A shot of my first installment is here:

Upon receiving my first daily dose, I returned to the settings area of my account to adjust the “advanced” level of my subscription. I asked for “longer” installments and hit “resend” for a new version of my first dose. That instantly cut the total number of e-mails I will receive for Leaves of Grass to just over 210.

Apparently, (for the tech savvy) you can also choose to receive your updates via RSS to read within your aggregator instead of e-mail. Think about other possibilities… now that your book has been converted to text, it would be a just a few clicks to drop it into a few PowerPoint slides for use during EPP at the beginning of each class period. In fact, I thought I would try just that today.

This would likely save some serious paper volume here at Benton. Of course that strategy wouldn’t allow text markup like a paper copy would, but it is an option. Teachers create varying worlds within their classrooms and this is a tool that seems powerful enough to work with nearly all of them in some way.

Check it out, it is free to register. Find me there. Download a book. Give it a try. Get your daily dose of literature- and then come back here and tell us all about how it went.