We have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about ebooks and virtual learning. How can we preserve the essence of human to human contact, yet take advantage of the incredible advances in technology to spread learning?
Check out www.realebooks.com. This type of digital publishing seems to promise the best of both: emailable books for easy distribution, on-line libraries, and the ability to easily print out an actual copy of your book.
Richard Allington describes research-based teaching practices that improve the ability of children to read well. Notice the materials that are required for each area of practice.
Here are some of the practices: 1) writing, sound stretching, and phonemic awareness. This is as easy to do as demonstrating sound stretching as the teacher writes the morning message. Requires chart paper and a marker; 2) word walls. Using card stock, tape and a marker, a teacher can construct and present high-frequency words that students encounter often as they read and write; 3) just plain writing. The more you write, the better you read. Tools are a notebook or piece of paper and a pencil or pen; 4) extended independent reading. You must read in order to become a better reader. You need a book or other text that is at your ability level as a reader; 5) discussion after reading. Good conversation promotes understanding. Allington notes how odd it is that we frequently interrogate our children about what they have read, and how strange such behavior would be in the world outside school. People don’t quiz each other about the factual details of what they have read; they talk together about themes, characters, etc. Again, the only material needed is a text to read and discuss; 6) reading aloud to children. Not a substitute for, but a supplement to, children reading themselves. Helps especially with vocabulary growth and modeling the thinking readers do while they read. Once again, only material needed is a text; 7) appropriate texts. Providing kids with text they can actually read is the most important thing we can do to help kids become better readers. This concept is astoundingly obvious — if text is beyond a child’s ability to read, he or she will not be able to read it. Unfortunately, this concept is astoundingly disregarded — repeatedly and continually, in classrooms all across the United States. The only material required is an appropriate text.
What do we notice about the materials required for these activities? Other than the texts to be read, the materials are extraordinarily low cost. Meaning that there is no real money to be made in promoting these highly effective teaching practices. Allington wonders who will promote effective research-based practices that are not profit centers. Instead of programs that engage children in independent reading, Allington notes the push to put kids in one-size-fits-all curricular packages (which are highly profitable, it should be noted) that provide “lots of consumable, low-level seatwork activities.”
As school budgets come up for votes across the country, we wonder why people allow their money to be spend on programs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, when the keys to unlock our children’s potential as readers are available for a fraction of the cost.
A front page story in the New York Times puts the stress on stress: “In Web World Of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop”.
The bloggers are frantically trying to maintain their output and make some money from their writing. Some of them are actually dying, apparently, from health issues related to the pressure they are under. The treadmill is going faster and faster and they can’t get off.
We have spent a lot of time lately thinking about how to use the internet to not only spread our ideas and be an information resource, but to help create communities and connectedness. So far we have only been able to determine that people need to be with people to connect. You need real, physical, people to be around. Your community needs to be a physical, real one, there to share the joy, the sorrow, the everyday ordinariness of life.
The internet can only be a supplement to community, not a replacement. Facebook is so successful because it it a communication forum for real school communities. Virtual communities in addition to the real ones in our lives which entertain or provide information are an incredible addition to our lives. But virtual communities which hope to replace real communities seem likely to lead to alienation and disconnectedness.
Another story in the paper discusses how many college students are deciding to major in philosophy, in an attempt to make sense of the world. That seems good to us — people talking face-to-face, debating and discussing issues of ethical and moral importance, with the web available for research and fact-gathering.