Tiffany's Blog for RDNG 654

Before this assignment I had never used a software app for creating a graphic organizer.  My experiences with trying different ones out were quite different. The first one I tried was Google Draw.  For me, this was the was the least user friendly and the most frustrating of the apps I experimented with.  I had trouble simply making the lines I was drawing straight. Even adding the text was tricky; I had difficulty making the text the same size.  I am not too impressed with the graphic organizer I used here.  While the digital format and the pencil/paper version I previously used looked similar, for me, it would have been so much quicker using pen and paper.   Another app I tried was bubbl.us.  I thought this app was very friendly - even for a novice like me!  I liked that they had ready to use templates that I could easily edit.  Registering was extremely easy and I did not find myself having to sign up for a trial period that I have to ...

  September 26, 2022 As a reading interventionist, I have not had much experience using technology with my small groups so I did find this overwhelming.  The thirty minutes I have with my students seem to go by too fast as it; I find myself not getting to everything I was supposed to cover in my daily lesson.  Incorporating technology has truly been a challenge for me.  That being said, as I navigate through the technology, I feel like I can relate to how my students might feel when it comes to the challenge they have when learning to read. I will persevere!  Currently, I have many students on my caseload that are working on learning their letters and sounds.  I start my lesson with each of these groups by singing the alphabet song everyday.  I thought adding an alphabet song would be a good way to change the beginning of the lesson so it keeps the students engaged. I chose the alphabet song below as it was a change and I liked how they also incorporat...

 September 18, 2022 Is it a duck?  Do you see a rabbit??  I always liked sharing this picture with students and asking what they see. I love to see their reactions when they can finally see both animals.  To me, this is a good picture to use as an example to show how different people can view the same image in different ways. I think images are used to influence a group's feelings and thoughts in different ways.  One way that comes to mind for me is playing to people's emotions.  Some people are easily influenced - kids especially so.  Also, young students are more impressionable.  Therefore, if they see an image that grab's their attention, they might not care as much about the factual content.  Because of this, as educators we need to teach our students to read digital images in ways that will help them determine the deeper meaning of the digital image.  One way we could do this is by showing students examples of age appropriate hoax i...

I will start this blog by saying before this assignment I did not have much knowledge about e-books, or how to use them exactly, so this experience was both new and challenging for me.  I first went onto the link for e-books for children.  I went to Amazon and looked at the children's books, but as I did not have a Kindle I did not know what to do.  I decided to try the International Children's Digital Library next.  I downloaded the book The Little Red Hen and Other Stories Retold by Florence White Williams.  Personally, I did not find this e-book particularly exciting.  It was not interactive and it wasn't very colorful which I found less appealing.  As my frustration continued to grow, I decided to call a friend.  She informed me I could download the Kindle app to my phone. (No, I really did not know I could do that as embarrassing as that is to admit).  After I downloaded the Kindle to my phone, I went back to Amazon and downloaded four b...

My current thinking about teaching the "new literacies" as part of my ELA instruction is that they are absolutely essential.  That being said, it also makes me anxious as I am definitely a digital immigrant. As I teach digital natives, I must make a shift in my own mind set and embrace the changes and obstacles I will be faced with while I learn to navigate through this digital shift in my own teaching. The obstacles I see for myself is that this is a very different style of teaching than what I am used to.  For example, in a college class I once took, I was taught there was no such thing as multi-tasking so to see it as a new literacy skill is contradicting for me.  Another example would be judgment; I myself did not have the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of an information source until I did the assignment for this class.  Honestly, almost all of the new literacy skills are new to me so teaching them will be a challenge.  I find myself que...