Beyond Integration

I recently worked with our middle school math teachers to increase opportunities for students to use technology to collaborate and communicate their learning. I pre-planned with our middle school content specialist to really determine what students should be doing in a math class when it came to collaboration and communication and how technology would enhance these opportunities. We decided to focus on the following: Effective mathematical teaching practices: facilitate meaningful discourse and elicit and use evidence of student thinking. Mathematical process standards: Use critical thinking skills to justify mathematical reasoning & critique the reasoning of others. Use a variety of mathematical tools effectively and strategically. Communicate mathematically & approach mathematical situations with precision. With these skills in mind, I felt VoiceThread was a perfect tool that would give our students opportunities to build and use these skills as well as become ...

In our connected world, people find themselves gathering information from online sources much more frequently than print sources.  Interestingly, the way our brains work to scan digital texts has changed based on the typical layout of websites that present information.  For example, our eyes are more likely to remain focused on the left side of a webpage, where menus and additional links are typically placed rather than scan the entire page fully.  Readers, young and old, typically scan pages in an “F” pattern, tracing their eyes along the text in heavy left-to-right patterns at the beginning of paragraphs but not throughout the entirety of the passage.  Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/ This isn’t altogether horrible if students are simply scanning to gather rudimentary information but when we are asking students to complete sustained and detailed reading online, these habits suggest that a support for students may h...