My latest Diigo links (weekly)

• Digital Natives, Yet Strangers to the Web [from The Atlantic]

  "Kids not only need to be proficient in how to use digital technology, becoming savvy coders and prolific ebook readers, he explains—they also need to deeply, holistically, and realistically understand how the digital world works behind the scenes."

  tags: instructionalTechnology technology

• The Road Not Taken: The Poem Everyone Loves and Everyone Gets Wrong [from Academy of American Poets]

  "Because the poem isn’t 'The Road less Traveled.' It’s 'The Road Not Taken.' And the road not taken, of course, is the road one didn’t take—which means that the title passes over the 'less traveled' road the speaker claims to have followed in order to foreground the road he never tried. The title isn’t about what he did; it’s about what he didn’t do. Or is it? The more one thinks about it, the more difficult it becomes to be sure who is doing what and why."

  tags: poem poetry ELA 4500

• Multi-Level Text Sets: Leveling the Playing Field or Sidelining Struggling Readers? [blog post by Freddy Hiebert]

  Results from a study by Hiebert in which she compared three different tiered text sets from three different publishers to determine if the necessary text features to support developing readers (particularly the 2 Vs: vocabulary and volume, i.e. sentence length) are present. Her conclusion: "Rather than getting texts with more accessible vocabulary, they get texts where the ideas have been sacrificed or simplified to comply with the aim of achieving a target text complexity." My take-away: teacher's must use discretion to compile texts on common topics/themes, rather than rely exclusively on canned text packages.Crucial finding: "For struggling readers, two features of text matter a great deal—the vocabulary and the volume of reading. The perspective underlying the texts for struggling readers in these programs of leveled texts goes in the opposite direction of what struggling readers need. Rather than getting texts with more accessible vocabulary, they get texts where the ideas have been sacrificed or simplified to comply with the aim of achieving a target text complexity." My take-away: eschew ready-made, multi-leveled text sets from publishers. Teachers need to be empowered to locate, evaluate, and curate their own text collections to suit the particular needs and interests of their own learners.

  tags: textSets textComplexity textFeatures

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

My latest Diigo links (weekly)