Educational Leadership Professional Development, & Digital Age. Thinking: A Vision for Change.
This wasn’t part of the presentation, but as a result of a question, Coiro listed five concepts that they have found to serve as an effective bridge between new literacy skills and other subject standards. They are, and I typed this fast:
1. Asking questions
2. Locating information
3. Evaluating
4. Synthesizing
5. Communicating
This is a great workshop about professional development. She showed a picture of a group of teachers in an auditorium and the speaker, standing behind a podium, on the stage. It was a picture of me. Well, not really me, but he looked just like me. I don’t stand behind the podium, but he still looked like me. Hmmmm! What am I going to make of this?
Online Handouts:
www.lite.iwarp.com/CoiroIRAPD2006.html
Here is an interesting list of dilemmas provided in one of Julie’s that face as school leaders.
Paralysis by assessment and the irony of NCLB
* Accountability vs. recognizing the power of classroom intellectual capital
* Meeting professional development needs vs. meeting hardware and equipment needs
* Lab model vs. individual classroom model
* Ensuring access vs. protecting children
She’s now going through some reports and instructional technology models from other countries. Hungary is actually talking about who should generate the learning content. Should it be teachers and students? Wow!
Ireland — manufactures more software than the US or any other nation
Finland — 5 weeks paid leave for PD for integrating new literacies
Japan — has broadband in nearly every home that’s 16 times faster than in the US at $22 per month (Foreign Affairs, 2005)
India — companies provide online tutoring for students in reading, math, and science (NY Times, Sept. 2005)
Mexico — investing more than $1 million to install an Internet computer in every primary classroom by 2005 (Education Week, 2004)
Australia, the UK, Finland, Ireland, & Japan have Internet portals for educators far superior to anything the US has produced.
Dave:
Have you seen this? – Watch the embedded video
http://edtechvalley.blogspot.com/2007/02/web-20-machine-is-using-us.html
Kyle
Wow!! The video that Karl mentioned above is AMAZING and worth watching! And that is NOT what my comment is about…
My comment is about Julie Coiro. I was at that session also and I am SO glad that there are articulate people like her doing research and communicating about the changes that are happening in literacy! She was saying the same things that I am observing in life and in schools, but she is able to put it into the frame of research that is so important.
One thing that she said that really struck me is that the research group that she works with (Donald Leu at the University of Connecticut and many others) were really angry when the National Reading Panel came out and said that there is no scientific evidence that technology improves learning of reading. They went back and RE looked at all of the research studies reviewed by the panel and found out that “for scientific purposes” they eliminated any studies with ESL students or low performing students (or something like that) and so she said that the results came out totally differently than they would have if they included the group that benefits the most from technology use. She is going to send me the paper that they did questioning these results and I will write something in my blog (http://malahinitx.blogspot.com) about it when it comes. She said for various reasons-mostly time limitations and other things they were doing- their article was never published. To me it seems SO important since scientific research is what we are supposedly basing everything on these days. I don’t know how often I have heard the comment that research has NOT shown that technology makes a difference. We have to change that perception because we KNOW it is wrong.
Janice
Wanted to pass along a quick “thank you” for pointing me in this direction. Julie’s steps for instilling confidence in teachers pursuing integration were valuable to me. I plan on using them in the next few months as I work with my staff to move toward the use of read/write technologies.
Cheers.