EduBlog Insights

First, I want to note the checklist of online reading comprehension skills that Donald Leu mentioned during the keynote. It could be used in any classroom to see who has these skills.  I referred you to this link for the keynote handouts. You will find the checklist in the document entitled “Leu et al Final chapterssinglespaced.pdf.”

Now, back to the new literacies of online reading comprehension.

1. Identifying important questions or problems - Students need to know how to remember their question and not get distracted.
2. Locating information - Students need to know simple search engines. They need to know how to put quotes around phrases.
3. Critical Evaluation - They found six different areas - understanding, relevancy, accuracy, reliability, bias, and stance. These are essential. A Leu quote here “If you don’t think critically on the internet you are sunk.” He also went into detail about how kids evaluate reliability by the amount of information they find. They tend to believe that if there is a lot it is reliable, if there is just a little it is not reliable.
4. Synthesizing Information - Communicating information using blogs, wikis - all these new tools require new skills and strategies.
5. Communicating

Now I just hit the highlights here. Refer to the document above for much more detailed information. Also read Chapter 3 “What is New about the New Literacies of Online Reading Comprehension?” in this document handout, “NCTE chapter published.pdf.

Jill Castek and Lisa Zawilinski shared their experiences doing research with the kids in schools. It was really interesting. There are video examples of this in the session handout entitled “Leu, Castek, ZawilinskiKeynoteFinalHandout.pdf.”

In closing Leu emphasized that this is not an easy task to fundamentally reshape the nature of classroom reading instruction. It is a layered issue. We have to change all the levels in order to get anything to happen - instruction, curriculum, professional development, state reading standards, state reading assessment, school leadership, state funding, research - a daunting task indeed! Even the reading community itself is in some cases the last one to understand this movement from page to screen.

Jill Castek and Lisa Zawilinksi had a session after this keynote that I will report on next.

The work this team is doing is truly amazing…..

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Conferences, TRLD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.