NCTE Day #4

As many of you all know, I am very interested in multiliteracies, specifically involving the “visual” element. Thus, it was only appropriate that I make my way to a session about using visuals!

Some of the important things I walked away with include the following:

• struggling readers can still “read” books through images –> then the words fall into place
• teachers need to help their students take time to read images (think: picture book, graphic novel, advertisements, signs)

Furthermore, if you don’t think that the visual can be beneficial in your classroom, think about these ideas:

• image arrangement and what that tells the reader
• materials that make up the images and how they can help tell the story
• movement across the page
• art and typeface

We need to use and develop a language of pictures to help students

NCTE Day #3

The morning started off with a session on engaging struggling high school readers with Gay Ivey (from JMU). Here are a few of the novels she suggested:

• Homeboyz
• I Heart You, You Haunt Me
• Stuck In Neutral
• Quad
• Paranoid Park
• Bootcamp
• Out from Bonneville
• Twilight

I really liked her suggestion of including

NCTE Day #2

The day opened with a talk devoted to the shift in education to a more digital, technological realm. Some of the points were interesting, but I don’t agree that students will learn to read from cds. Nor do I think this should be the “shift” of the education world. Technology is an imperative factor in today’s world, yes, but if one doesn’t have the basic skills required to utilize that technology, what’s the point? Reading, in whatever form it may be, will always be a critical element in ALL areas (and not just English)…at least in my opinion. Thus, I don’t see reading from a disc as the ONLY source of developing reading skills…and I’m a technology person, too.

But now, onto one of my favorite sessions: Adolescent Literacy:  What Works Best [with powerhouses P. David Pearson, Barbara Flores, Donna Alvermann, Ernest Morrell]. If you haven’t heard of these powerhouses, I suggest you look them up. Their work is amazing and they are incredibly knowledgable in their areas. I think it will be easiest to list the questions and the respective answers, so here it goes…

Question 1: What are the most pressing issues for educators building literacy plans for “problem” adolescents?

NCTE Day #1

Ah, yes, here we go! Some of my reflections on the recent NCTE convention in San Antonio…

I attended a very neat session on “Teaching Tone” (by Carol Jago and John Golden) on the first day. Here are a few quick notes that I found interesting:

• teachers are doing all of the work –> need to push students past the silence
• group collaboration can be the KEY to success –>gives students the chance to build off of each other
• visuals can be used to help walk students through developing tone

What I found particularly useful would be the fact that 1) visuals were used to help set-up a successful learning environment versus a text only learning environment and 2) technology was used (as simple as ppt) to help students express their tone pieces. The exercises that were discussed not only helped students grasp the understanding of tone, but also had them looking at rhetorical strategies to effecitively set up their works (i.e. RAFT elements)

However, most importantly, I want to point out that one of the first major sessions of the convention focused on two ways to engage and challenges students with some of the stronger literacy skills they are brining into the classroom — all the while still incorporating a “traditional” piece of knowledge (tone). I think this helps set-up the idea of how we need to go about setting up or classrooms to be successful learning environments…