The focuses which I elected for my Master's degree were Technology and Special Education, but as with so many other things in life, those choices took me down an unanticipated path.
I found that I learned more about how to incorporate methods from each of these areas into the idea and teaching of Literacy; and so this is what I wish to showcase for the outcome(s) of my Master's of Education degree here at Michigan State University...how Literacy became an unexpected goal of my higher education.
Creating Metacognitive Readers and Writers
Reading Comprehension and its role in my Master's of Education Degree.
The first piece I wish to showcase is a short Jing-produced screen-cast explaining how to go about completing an assignment which incorporates a class website into the literacy training involved in a Cognitively Impaired classroom. Click on the above paragraph to see the screen cast.
image credit- http://www.jing.com
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image credit- http://www.jing.com
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After I began to see the implications of literacy learning in relation to special education methods and the use of technology, I discovered a very simple way to impress upon students the importance of reading comprehension. I found the PICTURE method of teaching reading comprehension and implemented it into many aspects of my daily routine. One of the most obvious ways I used this concept was to make it prominent in my classroom. Visually and aesthetically, the PICTURE method of reading became a large part of my teaching vocabulary.
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After incorporating the PICTURE method into my instruction, I wanted to have another strategy to use with the reading instruction I was giving. Since I teach ELA to high school sophomores and seniors, I felt it necessary to have some sort of justification and method I could implement which seemed to give the method a real purpose. To help incorporate this sense of purpose, one of the most successful things I did was to create Reader's Logs in which my students kept a "diary" of sorts, tracking their reading and thoughts as they read. This was only one piece of my effort to make my students Metacognitive readers. Asking a reader to think of what they are thinking of as they read proved helped the students get more out of the reading, and led to impressive and enriching discussions of all the reading we did.
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Writing and its role in literacy and my Master's of Education degree.
Who doesn't like LAMBORGHINIS? Because there are very few people not affected by a supercar, and there are many more people who need to sharpen their literacy skills in respect to writing, I challenged my students to a contest of sorts. I had them research a 1930 Packard V-12 limousine, and a 2001 Lamborghini Diablo VT and write a Compare and Contrast paper based on what they found out. This was a resounding success due to the prize offered to a handful of writers who produced the "best" papers. Each of my 7 "winners" got to take a ride in the Diablo and the Packard courtesy of a friend of mine whom owns both cars. Motivation to write comes in many forms; I used the motivation to sit in a very expensive car to get the students to try their best to write a properly cited, mechanically/grammatically sound piece of writing.
Literacy can take on many faces. Reading, writing and simply communicating with others are all parts of this process of becoming a literate individual. This project/unit showcases how I feel that being creative and inventive can lead to massive gains in students' learning.
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Literacy can take on many faces. Reading, writing and simply communicating with others are all parts of this process of becoming a literate individual. This project/unit showcases how I feel that being creative and inventive can lead to massive gains in students' learning.
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Sharing your writing with an authentic audience is a necessity in creating good writing. We did this by writing Fairy Tales for 1st and 2nd graders, then we went to the Early Elementary and shared our stories with them. As you can see from the picture below, the kids loved the stories.
To incorporate the new Common Core standards into the curriculum, I had the students write fairy tales and then present them to Early Elementary students. Doing this assignment created unique uses of the technology available to us by allowing students to use not only simple word processing programs, but also by encouraging them to create artwork to go along with the story they created, and then when we arrived at the elementary school, students answered questions about why they wrote what they did, how they got their ideas, and other aspects of the writing process.
When we left we had affected the attitudes of many of the younger students, and I feel like we made an impact on their attitude towards what schooling can look like. It can be fun and beneficial at the same time. As addressed in CEP 802- Developing Positive Attitudes Towards Learning, and other classes, investing in the motivation to learn can pay dividends. Both the younger and older kids got something out of this assignment.