The first seven “things” have been amazing so far! I’ve been able to grasp how to do each of them (which is surprising enough in itself), but I have also been pleasantly surprised at how useful I have found everything to be. Since I am not in a regular classroom, some of the things adapt themselves better than others to my particular situation, but even those that do not can be helpful to me in my coaching of other teachers where I am often called upon to share strategies or resources, so all the Things will prove useful to me in one way or another.
In Thing 0, I enjoyed setting up my blog, Chatterbumps. It gives me a good example of online journaling which could definitely be used in our classrooms next year when my school adds all the technology we gained from our latest bond. Every student will have access to a computer all day and I could easily see blogging one’s assignments completely replacing the spiral notebooks and workbooks our teachers lug home on a daily basis. Depending on the assignments involved, the use of student assignment portfolios could address all nine of Marzano’s strategies, but especially similarities and differences. Students might be asked to compare and contrast two different characters within a story, or two different themes, or genres in their journals. Students might be asked to summarize an article they read, take notes during a presentation, reflect on their learning, etc. Students could use their blogs to ask questions, organize their thoughts and focus their thinking. I see tremendous potential in the classroom use of this Thing.
Thing #1 brought very useful information in the form of keyboard shortcuts I can share with students and colleagues as well to improve our productivity and Delicious, the online resource to store important sites and areas of research. Again, this addresses questions, cues and advanced organizers.
In Thing #2 we learned how to use Google Docs to work on tasks collaboratively/ Again, depending on the assignment, I can see this addressing many of the Marzano strategies: similarities and differences, summarizing and note taking, questions, cues and advanced organizers, but also the homework & practice strategy along with the one for cooperative learning. The opportunity to work on things as a group also offers immediate opportunities for Marzano’s objectives and feedback. Activities that incorporated historical investigation like making a “You Be The Historian” page, you even allow the student an opportunity to use the hypothesis strategy.
Thing #3 was about communication tools. Asynchronous and synchronous communication can bring experts into the classroom through tools such as Skype. Back Channel Chat allows students to take collaborative notes during presentations and receive immediate feedback. Marzano’s summarizing and note taking , objectives and feedback, cooperative learning would be well served with back channel chat, and the use of Skype conferencing with another classroom or individual from a different culture would lend itself very well to Marzano’s similarities and differences strategy.
Thing #4 is about content area tools such as Thinkfinity, ReadWriteThink, etc. This gave me a wealth of resources to plan my own lessons, but also to share with my colleagues. In addition, there are many resources for students and parents: interactive websites, suggestions for ways to help your child be successful in school, and also gives opportunities for advanced or continued studies for those children that could benefit from more advanced practice. I see this fitting in with Marazano’s homework and practice, hypotheses, and questions, cues and advanced organizers.
Thing #5 brings to light the very focus of my position as an interventionist--diverse learning and differentiated instruction. UDL strategies and the resources in this Thing were extremely beneficial to me. I gained a much better understanding of the tools that were available to me to remove the barriers for student learning before they occur. Tools like text to speech, text to MP3, and the many other tools I never knew existed help to address Marzano’s non-linguistic representations, help to address diverse learning styles and differentiate instruction. This thing was very exciting to me!
Thing #6 was about digital citizenship. I found the piece on Netiquette very interesting and have posted a shortened rendition of it on my face of the classroom blog for Thing #7. I plan to post a link to the video on cyber-bullying there as well. But, the part of this Thing that I found the most interesting and thought provoking was the evaluation tools for deciding whether a website is a bogus one or if it is a valuable research resource. I could really see that being a great intro to any unit on research and that very nicely addresses Marzano’s similarities and differences and especially the opportunity for the students’ hypotheses.
Thing#7 deals with the Face of My Classroom. This one has been really difficult for me as I no longer really have a classroom with regular assignments to post, etc. So, after thinking about it long and hard, I have decided to use my classroom blog to feature helpful hints for parents, good things to know, book reviews/recommendations from students or faculty, fluency passages for students to practice on at home, links to interactive language building sites and games, and things like that. I would also like to feature writing pieces from students. This would allow me to use Marzano’s homework and practice, objectives and feedback and effort and recognition strategies. Although my blog is in its infancy, you can find it at: Literacy Lane
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