Forming Reading Communities! #CyberPD & NFPB Wednesday

 

            Reading In The Wild by Donalyn Miller this week added more ways to encourage reading, especially in communities. Michelle Nero at Literacy Learning Zone(@litlearningzone), Laura Komos at Ruminate and Invigorate (@LauraKomos) and Cathy Mere at  Reflect and Refine: Building A Learning Community(@CathyMere) are hosting #CyberPd this summer, where we read a certain professional book, this time Donalyn's, and share our response to it. 

         This time, Laura is hosting, so link up your posts there, read and take notes for the school year's beginning!

         It was a pleasure to read everyone's thinking last week, and I look forward to this share, too!                            Tweet at #CyberPD

Hurrah for Wild Readers - #CyberPD

            Reading In The Wild by Donalyn Miller is something to shout about, and luckily for us, Michelle Nero at Literacy Learning Zone(@litlearningzone), Laura Komos at Ruminate and Invigorate (@LauraKomos) and Cathy Mere at  Reflect and Refine: Building A Learning Community (@CathyMere) are hosting #CyberPd again this summer, where we'll read Donalyn's book, and reflect upon it, discuss it, perhaps even disagree about it.        
        That's the great thing about reading together, and Donalyn writes about it on page 9, "During daily reading time, our students practice more than their reading skills; they practice living like readers. Reading together, swapping books, sharing observations and recommendations, and developing reading relationships help students approximate wild reading behaviors. This why reading time at school really matters. Students need to connect with other readers and participate in a reading culture that values them." It's exactly what we'll be doing today, and for the next two weeks. While following the tweets from #nERDcampMI, I found this tweet from @BrianWyzlic, quoting Donalyn's presentation: 

"Literate conversations with peers (as little as ten minutes a day) improve students' reading motivation, comprehension, and test scores." (Cazden, 1988; Nystrand, 2006) 

#CyberPd-WOW!

    In the past two Wednesdays, Cathy Mere at Reflect and Refine hosted the first week of the #cyberPD title:  Alan November’s  Who Owns the Learning?:  Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age, and Jill Fisch hosted the second discussion of chapters three and four on her blog, My Primary Passion.  This discussion of chapters five and six is hosted by Laura Komos at Ruminate and Invigorate.  Stop by her blog to link your posts or visit to see what all the excitement is about! Thanks Laura!

                 I'm so excited, and much of my excitement comes from finally taking the time to sitdown to see what creating a search engine is all about, which comes from Chapter 4, page 58.  
                  I started one that may be helpful to teachers who write with their students, and who may want to search for specific lessons from sites I recommend.  I find it challenging to have thousands of sites come up when I'm searching for different kinds of writing lesson ideas, and often search the same sites, so those are what I chose to include in my search engine.  If you want to check it out, it's at the bottom of my blog site.  At the same time, I came across a blogger tip site here, that gave instructions in setting up a search engine for my own blog, and you can find that search to the right.  That enabled me to get rid of the cumbersome, taking-up-too-much-space cloud of tags in my layout.  

Exciting Chapters in Cyber PD!

                 Last Wednesday, Cathy Mere at Reflect and Refine hosted the first week of the #cyberPD title:  Alan November’s  Who Owns the Learning?:  Preparing Students for Success in the Digital Age.  Jill Fisch hosts today’s discussion of chapters three and four on her blog, My Primary Passion.  Stop by her blog to link your posts for today's reflection or just visit to see what all the excitement is about! Thanks Jill!

      Laura Komos at Ruminate and Invigorate will host next week.

Chapter three – The Student As Scribe

         Important words: The student scribe work represents low-hanging fruit for educators and students alike.  I like that the book helps educators who need easy-to-use ideas in order to implement these new ideas into classrooms.

Discussing Who Owns The Learning - #CyberPD

See this post at Cathy Mere's Reflect and Refine for what's going on with this summer's #cyberPD.  She's also hosting the first conversation of chapters one and two and linking up!  Today, join us here!  Cathy's friends, Laura Komos (Our Camp Read-a-Lot), Jill Fisch (My Primary Passion) are our two other hosts.  Join in, or at least visit to see what others think of this book, Who Owns The Learning, by Alan November.

A thread that appears to be running through the book is the idea that this proposal, the Digital Learning Farm, is based on the idea that in the past, kids who lived on farms had much more authentic work to do with their chores.  And they had to learn the why and how of those chores at least some of the time in order to be effective in their daily lives as contributing members of the family.  They couldn't decide to skip their 'homework' because lives surely depended upon it, the animals they fed, the plants cared for, etc.  He also sites the 'teacher's helper' role of students in one room schoolhouses, and states "The power of purpose and meaningful contribution has been missing from our classrooms and our youth culture for some time."

Summer Time - #Cyber PD Time!

      I'm excited to link up with Cathy Mere at Reflect and Refine: Building A Learning Community, Laura Komos at Our Camp Read-A-Lot, and Jill Fisch at My Primary Passion are hosting #CyberPD.  We'll share our plans for reading Professional Development books, and then Cathy, Laura and Jill will choose one for us to read together in July.