Looking at a Lexile Score

Hello everyone and welcome back to school!  As you are probably aware you are going to be moving your students through some testing right in the beginning of the school year through a program called NWEA MAP.  This undertaking will be something that will take some time to adjust to but it will give some timely insight to the ability level of each and everyone of your students.

As you work through the information that is available to you one of the pieces of information that you will get will be each of your student’s lexile score.  This is essentially a reading ability level for each of your students.

With this information you can visit the lexile website and find many resources, activities, and even appropriate book titles all aligned to a lexile score level.  Here is the site for you to explore and happy headstart in individually instructing each of your students in your classroom.

Lexile Website

Links to Explore this Summer

As I have been working hard to catch up on my reading I have found many links to many resources.  Here are two links however that really stood out to me on topics that I get questions from teachers on all the time.

1. http://www.ed.gov/admins/comm/parents/parentinvolve/index.html - This link is to a DOE website that provides an opportunity for leadership, technical assistance and support in the implementation of effective and successful parent involvement programs.  We know that parents are key in helping students be successful in school so here is a website with resources and activities that have been successful for other districts across the United States.

2. http://www.youinnovate21.net/ - This website is aimed at getting middle school students excited about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with the goal of preparing them to become 21st Century innovators.

Enjoy!

Using the Power of the Web and On-line Learning

The following link will take you to an article in Edutopia Magazine from 2007.  Note that it is about 2 years old and the content in this article describes a small % of the learning that is occuring in our classrooms today in GRPS.  However, even though this is currently a small % of our classrooms I am getting more and more questions on having students use Moodle, submit work via email, using You Tube or Teacher Tube in instruction.  We are moving in a wonderful direction with unlimited resources at our fingertips in the form of technology.  Use this resource to help get you to take that next step in your teaching.

Here is a link to the article:  http://www.edutopia.org/whats-next-2007  Please take a minute to look over the entire article and the suggested ten topics to improve education if you wish but specifically focus on the component of Online Learning: Virtual Valedictory (Sidebar: Virtually Real: Distance-Learning Educators Go the Distance When They Go Offline) as well as Social Networking: TheirSpace (Sidebars: Digital Discussion: Take Your Class to the Internet and Edublogs We Love: Ten Top Stops for Internet Interaction)

These two articles give information on how these resources can be used and most importantly give you access to resources you can use to be successful at getting technology embedded in your instruction.  Let me know if you need more support in getting this off the ground and happy reading!

Web 2.0 Resources Organized

Web 2.0 sites are everywhere.  Which sites are the best, which sites should I use, where do I start?  These are questions that fill our educational technology minds on a regular basis.  The answers to these questions are actually going to have to be answered individually as you see the value in the web 2.0 resources and how they apply to your teaching and/or learning style.

The most important thing to keep in mind with this is develop a plan and use tools that work for you to best deliver knowledge to your students in your subject area.

Here is a website that has a culmination of Web 2.0 tools that teachers can use.  It includes explanations of what each resource can do for you.

Please visit:

 

http://www.protopage.com/continuousimprovement#Untitled/Home

 

It has 3 sections:

 

Collaborative Professional Learning

 

Collaborative Student Learning

 

Communication

Hope you find something to help you help your students in increasing their academic abilities!

On-line Learning

So you have probably heard the buzz about on-line learning.  Many schools are implementing this type of instruction.  With this phrase you hear the following words: easy, seat-time, credit recovery, AP, scheduling, replacement, unknown, difficult, alternative, and many many more.  This I find to be very confusing as these are words that you should also hear when you talk about on-line learning: accountable, ownership, rigorous, flexible, effort-based, facilitator, partnership, personalized, aligned, 21st century, again and many many more.

I post these two websites with a challenge and that challenge is to read, process, and take into consideration all of the words you see listed up above and then visit the websites.  As you are there however look at how those words apply in what you read about what on-line learning can be and make your list of vocabulary words to give meaning to the phrase, “on-line learning” for yourself.

http://www.inghamisd.org/gettingonline/start.html

 

https://www.waol.org/prospective_students/isonlineforme.aspx