This year I am undertaking the project again but on a class level, with students producing reviews for their class to place on our blog. Last year the classroom booktalk was also a great motivator for getting students to read and this year I also have several students who need a hook for reading, which is another factor is taking part in 2009. Also 2 key areas of development for my students this year are reading comprehension and oral language skills, which have been factored in to the planning of the project for this year.
Developing this further than the 2008 process came through involvement with the Beyond IT conference that took place earlier in the year. Beyond IT involved a group of 14 facilitators, teachers, e-Learning specialists etc in a 3 day conference that looked at a range of ICT issues, ideas and thinking. As part of this I had the pleasure of working with Dorothy Burt and Glen Storey. Our big area of thinking was around getting teachers to move past the 'flash stuff, the cool tools and gimmicks' onto using ICT to develop and strengthen the learning - a real tool that benefits the learning.
We looked at the Literacy Cycle model that was developed at Pt England School. Glen and I then looked at developing the Literacy Cycle to take back into our own classes. This model shows where each area of Literacy (Listening, Reading, Writing, Viewing and Speaking along with the key competency of Thinking) is being developed during the Classroom booktalk project. A few weeks ago I started my first group on the cycle. Over the next few posts I am going to share the process that we are going through to begin and work through this cycle.
3 comments:
Hey, Thanks very much for posting what you have done with the literacy cycle in your class. I have been enjoying visiting the kids' blog too and seeing the outworking from it in their postings. Has it been a useful metacognitive tool/process for the students as they do their booktalk project?
Dorothy
Thanks, I was very lucky to have had a chance to work with you on this! The kids really only got into it in the last few weeks of term but already I was starting to hear them talk to each other about where on the cycle they were and what they were developing. When Stuart and his group came as part of the Apple bus tour one of my students pointed out where he was at in the cycle and what he was doing out of the blue. He did so quite clearly, which was nice to see with it still being so new. The final work is not on the kids blog yet (the work that is being posted already is part of Reading Response Journals - different reading groups) the first Booktalk review will be on the blog in the first week!
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