Learning Methods

Innovative ideas - projects, processes, curricula, and more - that are transforming how we teach and learn.

Why Reading Aloud to Older Children Is Valuable

May 14, 2013 | 7:00 AM | By Holly Korbey

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Educator and author Jessica Lahey reads Shakespeare and Dickens aloud to her seventh- and eighth-graders, complete with all the voices. Her students love being read to, and sometimes get so carried away with the story, she allows them to lie on the floor and close their eyes just to listen and enjoy it. Lahey reads short stories aloud, too: “My favorite story to read out loud has to be Poe’s ‘Tell-tale Heart.’ I heighten the tension and get a little nuts-o as the narrator starts to really go off the rails. So much fun.”

While reading Dickens aloud helps students get used to his Victorian literary style, Lahey said that it’s also an opportunity for her to stop and explain rhetorical and literary devices they wouldn’t get on their own. And they read the Bard’s plays together, divvying up the parts, because “that’s how they are meant to be experienced.”

“Shared words have power, an energy that you can’t get from TV, radio, or online.”

Reading aloud to older children — even up to age 14, who can comfortably read to themselves — has benefits both academic and emotional, says Jim Trelease, who could easily be called King of the Read-Aloud. Trelease, a Boston-based journalist, turned his passion for reading aloud to his children into The Read-Aloud Handbook in 1979; it has since been an unequivocal bestseller with sales in the mult-millions, and Trelease is releasing the seventh, and final, edition in June.

Obviously, Trelease firmly believes in the value of reading to kids of all ages.

“The first reason to read aloud to older kids is to consider the fact that a child’s reading level doesn’t catch up to his listening level until about the eighth grade,” said Trelease, referring to a 1984 study performed by Dr. Thomas G. Sticht showing that kids can understand books that are Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Reading aloud

Paint or Paint App? Value of Creating Digital Vs. Traditional Art

May 10, 2013 | 7:00 AM | By Holly Korbey

Flickr: Naomi Chung

While it may be easy to imagine how iPads can support classroom studies with reading, history, or science, some of the most groundbreaking — and creative — work with digital tools may be happening in arts classes. Schools using iPads are incorporating them in art and music classes, too — and not only as tools for measuring and remembering, but for creating as well. Whether or not students grow up to become the next David Hockney – who has created several New Yorker covers using the iPad’s drawing tool – teachers say there is value to learning to create using digital tools, especially when blended with more hands-on means of expression.

Susan Sonnemaker, a middle school chorus and band teacher at San Francisco Day School, uses school-provided tablets in limited amounts throughout the year. She finds them most useful for managing technical aspects of music class with record speed — like recording practice sessions, using a tuner app to help kids tune their own instruments, and collecting digital practice sheets. For practical matters, Sonnemaker says, the iPad has been invaluable, because streamlining and managing tuning and practice leaves more time for actually playing or singing music.

“You can create something digitally that would be impossible to create by hand. Conversely, you can create something by hand that you cannot replicate digitally.”

But what about using tablets for inspiration and creating new music? When it comes to creating something new, Sonnemaker says that technology helps her students be more creative, not less: “In regards to composition, students are not only more engaged in their own projects (with iPads), but they’re using real life technology,” she said. “We still do a good deal of composition exercises using old-fashioned pencil and paper. But using Garageband on the iPad is what many professional musicians use, so students are also acquiring skills to compose in the real world if Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, art, iPad

FUTURE OF TABLETS

The Future of Tablets in Education: Potential Vs. Reality of Consuming Media

May 8, 2013 | 7:00 AM | By MindShift

Flickr: Flickingerbrad

By Justin Reich

The Someday/Monday dichotomy captures one of the core challenges in teacher professional development around education technology. On the one hand, deep integration of new learning technologies into classrooms requires substantially rethinking pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and teacher practice (someday). For technology to make a real difference in student learning, it can’t just be an add-on. On the other hand, teachers need to start somewhere (Monday), and one of the easiest ways for teachers to get experience with emerging tools is to play and experiment in lightweight ways: to use technology as an add-on. Teachers need to imagine a new future—to build towards Someday—and teachers also need new activities and strategies to try out on Monday. Both pathways are important to teacher growth and meaningful, sustained changes in teaching and learning.

In this four-part series, we’ll use the Someday/Monday template to explore four dimensions of using tablets, such as the iPad, in educational settings, examining how teachers can take students on a journey from consumption of media to curation, creation, and connection. Here, we’ll start with consumption.

Part I: Consumption

In the apocryphal photo of the iPad, the tablet rests in the lap of Steve Jobs, sitting on the stage at the iPad release demonstration, reclined in a leather chair. This was a device made for reading and watching, for sitting back, for passively consuming media. One of the signature challenges of the surge of interest in iPads is helping educators imagine the device as more than a library of books Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, iPad, Mobile Learning, tablet

Parents Want Kids to Use Mobile Devices in Schools

May 7, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By Ian Quillen

Flickr: jhaymesisvip

Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices have gained popularity as educational tools in part because of the belief those devices could cut across the digital divide created by socioeconomic boundaries.

Now a new study reinforces that perspective, finding that students’ access to mobile devices, in this country anyway, is more often a question of parents’ attitudes toward mobile learning than a family’s income or the mobile device provisions of that family’s local school district.

The report published by Grunwald Associates and the Learning First Alliance with support from AT&T, found that, according to data from a representative nationwide sample of nearly 2,400 parents, more than four in five K-12 students at least occasionally use some sort of computing device, including mobile devices like tablets or smartphones, or laptop computers.

“The ubiquity of mobile technology in everyday life I think comes through loud and clear in this study. Families own multiple devices, even families that are not well off.”

Further, although there was some association between parent income and the 18 percent of students who don’t use devices at home, more than half of those non-using students were found to live in houses where parents own at least one such device, often a smartphone.

The cause of non-use in those cases is “some other reason that probably revolves around the attitudes of parents and, by extension, the students toward the smartphone,” said Peter Grunwald, the president and founder of Grunwald Associates, a research firm based in Bethesda, Md., known for its work on ed-tech related projects. “The ubiquity of mobile technology in everyday life I think comes through loud and clear in this study. Families own multiple devices, even families that are not well off.”

Income did affect the number of computing devices per household, however. Overall, the study found families with an income of under $25,000 were found to own an average of 3.3 devices per household, a figure that includes desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones and Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Teaching With Tech, cell phones, Mobile Learning

CHILDREN AND MEDIA

How Does Multitasking Change the Way Kids Learn?

May 3, 2013 | 5:00 AM | By Annie Murphy Paul

Flickr: Ben Seidelman

Using tech tools that students are familiar with and already enjoy using is attractive to educators, but getting students focused on the project at hand might be more difficult because of it.

Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers.

For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University-Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing ear-buds.

Although the students had been told at the outset that they should “study something important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading a book for a course,” it wasn’t long before their attention drifted: Students’ “on-task behavior” started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes were up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually doing their schoolwork.

“We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone was watching,” Rosen says. “It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes without engaging their devices,” adding, “It was kind of scary, actually.”

“I don’t care if a kid wants to tweet while she’s watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a video game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have to have focus.”

Concern about young people’s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rosen’s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, Teaching With Tech, Larry Rosen, multitasking

A New Role for Avatars: Learning Languages

May 2, 2013 | 10:02 AM | By Holly Korbey

Flickr: Phillie Casablanca

Most experts agree that the best way to learn a language is by immersing yourself in it. Now, with more sophisticated technology, another theory around language learning is being tested: the use of avatars to practice speaking.

Alongside traditional methods, like listening, repeating, and digital flashcards, created by companies like Rosetta Stone, Livemocha, and AccelaStudy, a few tech companies have leveraged the idea that becoming someone else helps to learn a foreign language, especially when speaking it.

Companies like Second Life and Middlebury Interactive Languages both offer digital avatar programs to give language learners a chance to practice their skills in virtual environments. Britain’s Language Lab has created “English City” using Second Life, where learners are promised realistic conversations with native English-speaking teachers, also using avatars, in virtual but plausible digital environments, like checking in at the airport, going to an art museum, or giving a presentation.

“Speaking practice was only possible in the classroom, and that meant very little practice for students who have no contact with English outside their school.”

Few studies exist on the effectiveness of avatars for language learning, and just as recently as 2009, a study conducted by Griffith University on digital technology and second language learning found that “although significant advances have been made recently with chatbots [avatars] for Continue reading →