Nance Wilson and I talked with Mike Kranitz of EventSquid about #beyondtheapp #bta Beyond the App: Cause and Conference, which strives to support teachers’ professional development and coach literacy experts in one of the most creative ways possible in response to COVID, and their model may just change the game.
“We wanted them to know that they weren’t alone in the things that were causing them to struggle and we wanted them to know that people whose books they read… are also people they can talk and work together with.” – Dr. Thomas Wolsey
“It’s about leveraging the technology that’s out there to think about, ‘Well, what could this do for me that would be better and or different and would allow me to have similar quality practices that I had in the face to face?’” – Dr. Nance Wilson
Recently, the Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at The American University in Cairo sponsored a virtual symposium themed, Inspiration and Innovation: Conversations Around Emerging Pedagogy in Our Next Normal. The symposium featured faculty presentations called “Shift and Share.” Faculty presented the same presentation three times to ensure that participants were in small enough groups to interact. My presentation (March 10, 2021) was titled “Navigating the River: Teaching and Metacognition for Challenging Times” which you can view below.
A number of really good workshops, plenary sessions, and shift and share session recordings and resources are linked here. Check out the ideas!
It’s here: Beyond the App launches today for middle-grade educators. You can still join us and stretch your teaching muscles this weekend. We begin at noon Eastern Standard Time / 7 PM Cairo Time. Register here https://lnkd.in/gQjiYVP
Beyond the App is an interactive online conference for middle grades teachers, teacher educators, parents, and educational leaders. For just $10 you get to work with experts in the field to improve your online teaching of literacy.
Visit our website and register (Your registration helps us fund the conference in the future): https://bit.ly/beyondtheapp
If you are registering from Africa, please send a note for special instructions to BeyondTheApp@Cortland.edu
In addition, participants can choose to donate to our EgyptReads! Initiative to put books in school libraries.
Some of our speakers:
Jack C Berckemeyer Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey Maha Bali Vicky Mac Arthur Cardullo Zoi Philippakos Troy Hicks Emily Smothers Howell Ian O’Byrne Danny Brassell Keisha Rembert Jill Castek Timothy Rasinski Julie Coiro Richard Beach AND MORE!
Beyond the App invites teachers to interact with experts in online and traditional literacies. In contrast to many professional development activities, Beyond the App participants will co-construct approaches to teaching upper elementary and middle school students with colleagues around the globe. The event is a joint project with the Literacy Department at the State University of New York at Cortland and Graduate School of Education at The American University in Cairo.
Participants will have the opportunity to choose strands or themes such as building fluency, motivation for learning online, assessment practices, and more. You are likely familiar with the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model represented by the phrases, “I [the teacher] do, We do, and You do.” Our focus is on the difficult challenge of providing appropriate literacy practices within the we do [it together] phase when teachers are working online, and students are learning. But, how do you do that when you are teaching online?
Join us to go Beyond the App.
Sign up for details via email on our LeadPages site.
By Thomas DeVere Wolsey with Roya Q. Scales and Seth A. Parsons (Guest Bloggers)
We are really excited to announce the release of our book, Becoming a Metacognitive Teacher: A Guide for Early and Preservice Teachers. In our years as teachers and professors, we have found that the best teachers were the ones who knew how to reflect on their practice and to think of teaching as a journey. Every day as a teacher offers something new to learn, to discover, and to explore.
Cover
Here is what our colleagues have said about our book.
“This book emphasizes that teaching is a deadly serious, demanding, thoughtful, pragmatic art. It pulls no punches about how difficult it is to create a productive learning environment for the 20–30 divergent students under your care in the harried environment of classrooms, and that to succeed you need a proactive, focused mental stance, a reflective, thoughtful approach, and the energy to orchestrate multiple pedagogical variables in response to constantly varying conditions.” ―Gerald G. Duffy, professor emeritus, Michigan State University
“To foster metacognitive thinking among our students, teachers must have sophisticated metacognitive skills themselves. This unique and well-grounded text demonstrates the critical role of metacognition in developing the craft of effective teaching for preservice and novice teachers.” ―William Brozo, professor of literacy, School of Education, George Mason University
“Comprehensive and practical, this text provides an artful and thoughtful blend of strategies for prospective teachers’ personal and professional development. The goal of developing thinking teachers who keep their students at the forefront is supported with the author’s discussion of their and others’ personal and research histories, rich vignettes, and access to multiple digital resources (e.g., TED talks, blogs, instructional videos). A text for both teacher educators and prospective teachers.” ―Victoria J. Risko, professor emerita, Vanderbilt University
*I may earn a small commission for Amazon Affiliate links to any products or services from this website. Your purchase helps support our work in bringing you Literacy Beat.
My graduate students in the Human Development and Learning Theories course took on the challenge of showing how various learning theories look at home and at school. They created scenarios and explainers using a variety of video tools.
Theories are nice, but the real test of a theory for parents and teachers is how a theory can be useful. Parents are grappling with the challenges of working from home and helping their children through the current COVID-19 pandemic. These videos are designed to provide quick and useful ideas to ease the burden.
In this video by Rasha , Farah , and Farah, social learning theories are demonstrated for both children and adolescents. Learn more about social learning on their blog, Who Am I?
Do you face challenges with your kids staying at home? These two videos present a synopsis on how to work with kids during COVID-19 pandemic especially how to teach emotional discipline. Parenting tips that you will love! Nesma, Lamiaa, and Dina’s blog Emotional Development can be found here.
Hana, Sara, and Mona tackled experiential learning. Watch while Hana shows us how NOT to make brownies. View their blog on experiential learning: Do Think Conclude Adapt for more information.
Guess what today, April 23, 2020, is! It’s World Book Day, a UNESCO project. While Literacy Beat celebrates books and reading all year round, World Book Day offers an extra opportunity to honor the books (and other texts) we love. Here are some resources from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and others to help you party like the Dickens.
UNESCO’s World Book Day page with hashtags, toolkit, and links. #worldbookday
National Day‘s page with ideas to celebrate. Find other celebration days for all 365 days of the year, too.
The WorldBookDay.com website has a number of #StayAtHome suggestions.
*I may earn a small commission for Amazon Affiliate links to any products or services from this website. Your purchase helps support our work in bringing you Literacy Beat.
School buildings closed for the rest of the year and universities shuttered their doors, but education must and does go on. In my formerly face-to-face classes, presentations we scheduled for live audiences are now going to be online. Alternatives to live presentations are many, and I will share some of them in this post.
First things first, though: How do you choose an online presentation tool?
Determine what aspects of the presentation you will assess and how that will be done. What gets assessed depends on your tolerance for new technologies (or willingness to try them) and that of your students. Remember that many of them will be trying out tools they have never used before.
Are you able to support your students as they try out new digital tools? If not, are they able to find the support they need? Check out this post on the lazy classroom for a few ideas about how much to challenge your students to try new tech tools.
Onward to some curated resources that you may find helpful. Add your own in the comments, and you might enjoy this post by our colleague, Renee Hobbs where she shares examples of some digital tools she uses.
There are a variety of free digital, web-based resources available for instructors, educators, and learners to create useful and meaningful multimedia presentations. Keep reading.
MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION TOOLS
Tool Options
Glogster: Tool for creating interactive, innovative multimedia posters, glogs, and more. Read more here.
Prezi: Tool for creating visual presentations that allows you or the viewer to zoom in “to the details” or out to show the “big picture.”
VoiceThread: VoiceThread is an interactive tool that permits creators to add video, still images, audio, and text using a variety of tools. Creators can enable comment features that permit viewers to add their own thoughts to the presentation.
Flipgrid allows users to post short videos to which others can reply asynchronously.
Narrated PowerPoint® posted to SlideShare, AuthorStream, Vimeo, or YouTube. PowerPoint includes a narration/dictate option and can be uploaded or converted for online presentation using one of the tools linked above.
PowToon is a popular and powerful video tool that is user-friendly.
You can also read the following reviews of some of these tools and a discussion of other tools here:
Remember when designing your multimedia presentation:
Simplicity adds value.
Aim for a few words or phrases on a slide (the nugget of information).
Aim for one powerful image on a slide. That image could be accompanied by minimal text, a symbol, or no text at all.
Be creative in capturing and maintaining attention.
Eliminate distraction: use animations, flash, or sound effects sparingly and only when necessary to get the point across.
Avoid slide transitions.
Design artfully:
What does your audience already know?
What do you want your viewers to learn?
Check PresentationZen for more ideas on artful presentation design.
Learn more about Multimedia and Fair Use
Working with multimedia, almost invariably, means incorporating the works of others into a presentation (cf. Huffman, 2010). Teachers and students do have some latitude, called Fair Use. However, it is always an effective practice to make sure that the intellectual property of others are attributed or cited in any presentation. While there can be substantial penalties for infringing on the works created by others, the most important point, arguably, is that attributing the works of others is simply good citizenship. Creators want credit for their work, and any user is a potential creator, as well. In digital environments, creators, authors, and users, take care of one another by properly attributing the sources they use. Though teachers, professors, and students are very familiar with citation of text-based sources (e.g. APA, MLA, Chicago), these style guides often do not provide sufficient guidance when a student, for example, wants to incorporate images, audio, or video created by others in a multimedia presentation.
An excellent place to begin learning about digital citizenship and fair use is the MediaLab at the University of Rhode Island. Teacher and student resources can be found on the MediaLab website.
Though not exhaustive, these websites provide a place to begin looking for music and image sources that students and teachers might use in their own multimedia presentations while considering the rights of others who have contributed their works.
Bridget Dalton
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Blaine Smith
danagrisham
jillcastek
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