The following is a post by Dr. Scott Petri who will be our guest host tonight as I am traveling home from ISTE2016 today. I can't say how much I appreciate my PLN for not only participating but also contributing to the conversations we have. I enjoy seeing others ideas and passions for education and continue to invite you to let me know the topics you are interested in and we can create questions together if you desire and allow for you to host a session of #sstlap. This chat is not mine but ours. If it wasn't for all of you it would be me asking questions to myself which I do enough of. Please consider taking the opportunity to host a chat. Thanks and enjoy the chat. I will try to jump in if I am able.
Thanks again to Scott and all of you! Writing Assignments That Teach Students to Listen #TeachWriting June 11, 2016 Hosted by @scottmpetri Are we losing our listening abilities? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSohjlYQI2A How can teachers use Julian Treasure’s 5 ways to listen better? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIho2S0ZahI Q1 What prevents our students from being good listeners? Listening barriers for students are: listening mainly for details, becoming distracted and lack of interest in the subject (Golen, 1990). http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/ineffective-listening.html Q2 What are common misconceptions our students have about listening? http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/listening-misconceptions.html Q3 How can you incorporate audio into your classroom so that it increases literacy? Q4 What listening objectives are most frequently used in your class/discipline? Photo-Card w/ Mead (1978) 1. to recall significant details; 2. to comprehend main ideas; 3. to draw inferences about information; 4. to make judgments concerning the speaker (e.g.,attitude, intent, bias, credibility); 5. to make judgments about the information (e.g., type, evidence, logic, arguments) Q5 What types of listening activities help students improve their writing skills? Believers & Doubters Game (Fletcher) Q6 What strategies/games can teachers use so that students actively listen to their classmates’ presentations? Q7 How do you teach students to improve their writing by listening to songs & speeches? http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/148 http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html Promo Tweets Research shows that students can listen 2-3 grade levels above what they can read. Listening while reading helps people have successful reading events, where they read with enjoyment and accuracy. #TeachWriting Listening while reading has been shown to help with decoding, a fundamental part of reading. #TeachWriting The average person talks at a rate of about 125 – 175 words per minute, while we listen at up to 450 words per minute (Carver, Johnson, & Friedman, 1970). On average, viewers who just watched and listened to the evening news can only recall 17.2% of the content Listening has been identified as one of the top skills employers seek in entry-level employees as well as those being promoted. Even though most of us spend the majority of our day listening, it is the communication activity that receives the least instruction in school (Coakley & Wolvin, 1997). Listening is critical to academic success. An entire freshman class of over 400 students was given a listening test at the beginning of their first semester. After their first year of studies, 49% of students scoring low on the listening test were on academic probation, while only 4.42% of those scoring high on the listening test were on academic probation. Conversely, 68.5% of those scoring high on the listening test were considered Honors Students after the first year, while only 4.17% of those scoring low attained the same success (Conaway, 1982). Students do not have a clear concept of listening as an active process that they can control. Students find it easier to criticize the speaker as opposed to the speaker’s message (Imhof, 1998). Students report greater listening comprehension when they use the metacognitive strategies of asking pre-questions, interest management, and elaboration strategies (Imhof, 2001). Listening and nonverbal communication training significantly influences multicultural sensitivity (Timm & Schroeder, 2000). When students engage in purposeful listening how do they know what to attend to? How do you teach them what to respond to? How to respond? Or When to respond? Resources http://www.listen.org/WhitePaper http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/listening-skills.html http://d1025403.site.myhosting.com/files.listen.org/Facts.htm http://www.csun.edu/~hcpas003/effective.html http://www.americanrhetoric.com/ http://www2c.cdc.gov/podcasts/AudioScriptWritingGuide.pdf http://bsideradio.org/learn/writing-a-radio-script/ https://15minutehistory.org/podcast-index/ Listening Assignment Ideas Student Created Podcasts Informative/Persuasive Speeches Interviews: 9/11, StoryCorps, Vietnam Vets http://historyrewriter.com/2015/05/18/vietnam-veteran-interview-project/ http://www.newseum.org/2015/09/04/911-front-page-history-books/ https://storycorps.org/blog/tag/the-great-thanksgiving-listen/ @listencurrent has curated some research on the importance of listening skills. https://listencurrent.com/research 1st Person Story Voice Over Theater Measures of Effective Listening Research shows that students can listen 2-3 grade levels above what they can read. Listening while reading helps people have successful reading events, where they read with enjoyment and accuracy. Listening while reading has been shown to help with decoding, a fundamental part of reading. The average person talks at a rate of about 125 to 175 words per minute, while we listen and comprehend up to 450 words per minute (Carver, Johnson, & Friedman, 1970). Listening has been identified as one of the top skills employers seek in entry-level employees as well as those being promoted. Even though most of us spend the majority of our day listening, it is the communication activity that receives the least instruction in school (Coakley & Wolvin, 1997). On average, viewers who just watched and listened to the evening news can only recall 17.2% of the content. Listening is critical to academic success. Conaway (1982) examined an entire freshman class of over 400 students. They were given a listening test at the beginning of their first semester. After their first year of college, 49% of students scoring low on the listening test were on academic probation, while only 4.42% of those scoring high on the listening test were on academic probation. On the other hand, 68.5% of those scoring high on the listening test were considered Honors Students after the first year, while only 4.17% of those scoring low attained the same success. Students do not have a clear concept of listening as an active process that they can control. Students find it easier to criticize the speaker as opposed to the speaker’s message (Imhof, 1998). Students report greater listening comprehension when they use the metacognitive strategies of asking pre-questions, interest management, and elaboration strategies (Imhof, 2001). Listening and nonverbal communication training significantly influences multicultural sensitivity (Timm & Schroeder, 2000). Understanding is the goal of listening. Our friend Erik Palmer suggests before students engage in purposeful listening, their teachers should tell them what to attend to. We need to teach students what to respond to, how to respond, and when to respond. For example, today we are going to listen to five speeches. For each speech, we are only listening for LIFE. After each speaker finishes, clap, then take a minute to evaluate the level of passion they put into their speech. After that write down three suggestions on how they could increase the amount of LIFE in their speech. Instead of emphasizing: you stole my red hat, try stressing, you stole my red hat. A classroom teacher who reads Powers (1984) College Board study will understand that speaking, listening, reading and writing are all tightly correlated. Empirically measuring oral communication skills requires many hours of assessment on small populations. It is the opposite of what we experience in public schools where it is not practical for us to separately measure each skill. The important takeaway here is for teachers to prepare their students to actively listen, avoid distractions, and take advantage of the reciprocal relationship between speaking and listening by training student listeners to evaluate how well various speaking functions are accomplished by their classmates. While there are reliability issues with classroom peer review models, the benefits of “learning by evaluation” far outweigh the negatives.
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The other day I was watching some travel show or something that sparked memories of my trip with my wife to Mexico. We went to Chichen Itza and toured the ruins. I remember climbing to the top and how much my wife Andrea did not like the descent. It is pretty steep and you only have a small rope to hold onto. I also remember that they told us they would be restricting access to the temple we climbed up because of the wear on the steps. We were one of the last groups to be able to climb the stairs. This made me think how unique an experience we had, that others who venture there wouldn't have the same experience. Those thoughts led to me thinking about how many other unique experiences the people in my PLN have that could be used as educational experiences for our students. I started to think about the potential for turning those vacation photos into amateur tour guide videos.
What I have been thinking about for awhile is a way to have teachers and then students create "travel guide" videos. I see teachers like Matt Barry post pictures of his travels to the National Parks. My brother has traveled extensively and has tons of pictures he has shared. I am heading to Denver and have been offered by the person I am staying with to take a tour and travel into the mountains. Full disclosure I was also initially inspired by a project my daughter did with "Flat Stanley." They were asked to send a paper cut out of themselves to a friend or relative and that person was supposed to take that cut out of the child to different places around the city and take pictures with the cut out. My youngest brother took my daughters cut out all around his home in Arizona and then on the plane back to Wisconsin when he came back for Christmas. But what about those who can't take trips across the country or around the world to create their own videos of students? How can we tap into our PLN to create these tours. I have been thinking about this for awhile and I really want to make this happen for our students. I am wondering if there are individuals interested in creating tours of their hometowns, or current cities and sharing those with the rest of the world. I know there are so many teachers looking for ways to connect their classrooms to the world and this is a great start. We could create a shared folder that could be housed on this site for ease of access. Teachers could connect with each other and discuss what they would be interested in learning. We could start with pictures and some sort of an overview or caption of the images, or people could take short videos where they explain the visuals. I think videos of Niagara falls are much more powerful than a still image. People could focus on taking the pictures and images without any audio and add that later in WeVideo, iMovie, etc. I am going to put an example together in the next few weeks after ISTE and share it with everyone. My ultimate goals for this: Connect students with the world beyond their schools and local communities. Connect teachers to create amazing learning opportunities that they will share with others to create more and better experiences Turn the learning over to students - after students see some examples done by teachers, we let students create their own tours. They might work individually or in small groups to showcase their local attractions and culture, or as a class. If you do multiple examples of your area, maybe allow students to vote on who did the best job and this could be best job of each attraction and then edit the videos to one final best of video to share with others. Let your and your students' imaginations drive this activity. I am hoping we can start creating examples for our classes and each other this summer and create our first round examples. Don't worry about being perfect, these will hopefully be the worst examples our students see because they will create much more amazing products than we ever could. Thanks for your consideration and let's connect if you are interested. Here is a link to the shared folder Q1 what makes travel so exciting or enjoyable Q2 what is the best field trip you have ever experienced as a student Q3 what is the best field trip you have ever experienced as an adult Q4 Where would you like to go that you haven't yet Q5 Where have you traveled that you would be willing to share pics and stories Q6 Where would you like to take students that you aren't able to for whatever reason. Q7 Would you be willing to share your adventures with students at other schools I have been thinking about the way we teach history for awhile. There have been conversations about doing things thematically, or from present to the past or... History teachers have the complex job of teaching an every growing curriculum. History continues to grow and become more complex. I work with teachers who at times get bogged down in the curriculum feeling like they have to teach this or that because it says so in the curriculum. I feel very fortunate in my experience that I had lots of freedom to create curriculum as I saw fit. On the other hand I created much of the curriculum early on in my career based on the Chapter 1 section 1 methodology. I was exposed to Understanding by Design or Backward design years ago and it opened my eyes to a new way of looking at teaching history and any content. The premise is you start with the end goal in mind. What you want students to learn and then how will they demonstrate they have learned this. To this end how do you come up with what is truly important enough to teach in 180 days of school? Then subtract out days for testing and special events and the days leading up to and just after breaks that impact learning and you have lost a significant number of days of instruction. So how do you fit in all the content with fewer days? Focus on what is most important. This is where Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions come in. Think about the ways you can incorporate multiple topics in one learning unit. Concepts like justice or inequality, or examining cause and effects connect multiple events. What does it mean to be civilized? Tonight we are looking at creating Essential Questions for your class. I will drop one word, a question starter and you complete the rest. Summer is upon us! Some it has begun, some it is just on the horizon. This edition of #sstlap is all about Summer Learning opportunities. As the year wraps up I am reminded of the hustle and bustle of the final days as we try to fit in the final learning opportunities as we feel the pressure of the last day of school looming overhead. I remember thinking about the missed opportunities, the content that wasn't covered, the things I could have done better, and the things I wanted to try. I began thinking about all the things I wanted to do over the summer to make the next year better. I still do much of that reflection and goal setting, although my role in technology I don't have the same end of year pressures with 130 students needing my guidance, attention and compassion. As with every end there is a new beginning. With that in mind, let's focus on our journey for the next school year. What do we want next year to look like? What do we want to do differently than we did this year? What do we need to make our goals a reality? You will all answer those and the following questions in your own unique way, but I am hoping that we see similar ideas coming through. I hope we see ideas about engaging students, creating hands on learning. I also hope I don't see how can we make better worksheets or how can you make sure student desks remained fixed and forward facing all year long. To achieve our goals we need each other. To that end, I am hopeful that we can come together to provide some new learning opportunities for our group and others. So I have a list that I hope grows and people work to make a reality as the summer and next school year moves forward. A list of potential activities to help you achieve your goals. Please review and share those you would like to embrace in your learning journey. I will: Read educational books like Teach Like a Pirate, Play Like a Pirate, Learn Like a Pirate, Ditch that Textbook or the numerous other books in the Dave Burgess Pirate Collection. Or other incredible books from other educational authors who choose to share ideas to make education great! Attend Conferences or Edcamps to gather with other educators to learn and grow together. Take coursework/classes to learn specific content that will assist you in your learning journey. Embark on an educational journey to add a new degree, license or certification. (yes becoming a Google Certified Educator, or becoming an Ambassador for Nearpod, Seesaw, BrainPop, etc. counts) Blogging or Podcasting- creating or getting back into recording your reflections or ideas about education. Host a Twitter chat- I hear #sstlap is looking for summer moderators especially since summer means 4 nights of Soccer including Thursday nights for the current host. Anyone Anyone Bueller Bueller - let me know if you have a burning topic you want to discuss like using QR codes, Making Geography Awesome and Engaging - moving beyond coloring maps, How to create a ticket lesson, how to use games in your content area, or anything you have up your sleeve. The topics are often chosen because they are things that I have wanted to learn about or share with my PLN. I always want the topics to be relevant to you, so what better way to make them relevant to what you want to learn about than creating the topic and questions for a #sstlap chat. Organize an informal learning session like PatioPD or Personalized PD or PubPD where educators come together in person and share ideas. Use Blab, Voxer, Google Hangouts to connect with other educators. Attend EdcampHome or start your own virtual PD session with members of your PLN. Discuss best practices or start collaborating on a unit or lesson. Examine your learning environment - how can you change your room to make it more student and learning friendly? Examine your teaching practices- do you use Backward Design or Universal Design for Learning? If you don't know what these are or how to implement them, let me know I can share some resources. Do you know what students should know/learn by the end of the unit and how they will demonstrate this learning before you begin teaching? Do you use a variety of methods to present information and provide students choice in how they demonstrate learning? This list is getting pretty big, and if you engage in all of them plus the many other individual goals you have, you will miss out on being able to enjoy summer. Yes I know most of you will work hard during the weeks without students, because that is who we are, but remember to stop and smell the roses, feel the sand or grass between your toes and enjoy an ice cold beverage from time to time as you recline in the lawn chair. 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