Congress of Qualitative Inquiry: Link

Wanna Read Along

Literacy Narrative as Currere: Presentation Draft for Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

Google Tools and The Writing Process

Shanna Peeples posted recently about using draftback, a googledocs addon. I had downloaded it and played with is myself, but hadn't looked at what it would tell me about student writing. Today, my friend Cody Ames shared some student docs with me and I was able to play around with the tools with authentic student products.

Here's what I learned:

• This image shows me a graph of the student's writing.
• She opened the doc on Thursday and worked in the top part of the document. Then she didn't so anything much until Wednesday late. 
• On Wednesday, it looks like she drafted most of her paper and finished it on Thursday. 
• I can see that she worked at home on Thursday night for 12 minutes and the next Thursday for 28 minutes. She worked again on Friday night for 15 minutes.
• I can also see which users were in her doc and how many revisions each person made to the doc. 
• The blue highlights show how long the document is over time. This also compares directly to the gray bars at the bottom - I can see that the document gets longer over time, but that the writer added a significant portion at the last of her writing session just before the conclusion - which is another piece of evidence that she used revision. 

• This image shows a static picture of the video draftback makes for the revisions. You can see the document being written! You can speed it up or slow it down to see what the writer is doing. 
• I learned that on the first day, the 16th, the writer just went in and deleted the prepopulated form the teacher had created to preserve MLA format. 
• I can see where she was drafting, and then switched to revision, and followed with editing. 
• I can see where she pauses to think or take a break. 

• Google Docs also has a feature that tracks changes like Word. You click on File. Then on the dropdown menu, you select revision history. A new tab will open and you can click on the green boxes to the right to see each revision. 
•   You can see in this example that she made revisions on Feb 16, Feb 23, and Feb 24.
•    It looks like the major revisions and editing changes were made on Feb 24, while the 16^th and 23 look more like she was still drafting.
• The earlier the revisions were noted in the stream for the 24th, the more she focused on elaboration.
•  The closer to the end of her session on the 24^th, she focused on edits like punctuation and spelling (shrift, : ).
• The 16^th is pretty fun to look at as it starts out with a pre-populated form that preserves the MLA formatting required for the course.
• Also, when you hover over the revisions, you can see WHO made the revisions. If someone else was sharing the document and making comments, you could see that too. 

• After clicking on the green square, you can scroll up and down on the essay and see images like the one below. Be sure to check out the second one. It's funny. 
• You can also upload a Word document with track changes selected. The track changes options will turn into google doc suggestions that can be accepted or rejected. Read more here. 

a.

b.

Notice that there is no concluding paragraph to this essay. What more is there to say? Just stop already. 

Holes or Wholes: Comprehending Difficult Text

Sometimes you get an email that makes your day. 


Good morning beautiful lady!

Austin (my husband) had this beautiful way of explaining a reading problem that my students in 7th period were having and it reminded me so much of something you would say/do! I wanted to share it.

We are reading The Odyssey right now and Jill and I came to a moment yesterday in my 7th period class of complete panic. They were not getting it. They couldn't recall even the simplest detail of what we were reading. Panic mode set in and "what do we do?!" was discussed. 

I was discussing this with Austin and Kara after school, and we brainstormed ideas together. Then, Austin grabbed a sticky note. In these steps:

1. He drew a smiley face on the note and asked me what it was. I said, "it's a smiley face...?" He responded with "So you understood it was a smiley face because you saw it as a whole."

2. He then ripped the picture into 4 different parts and mixed it up and said, "but when the whole picture is ripped apart, you have to figure out how to make sense of it and piece it back together as a whole."

3. Then he said, this is your students' problem. When they encounter pieces of writing, like The Odyssey where the words seem to have weird order and don't make sense, the students panic because they don't know what to do with the pieces and they aren't visualizing it as a whole.

4, Then we looked at some of the sentences from the reading, and I think he is right! It wasn't necessarily a comprehension of the plot issue, but rather the words are in weird order to our students!  

I know we have discussed this so many times, but when he explained it that way, it was like a lightbulb went off. (I then continued to jokingly ask him if he wanted to be an English teacher haha). I just had to share that with you! 

Candice Spain

A Relieubull Spelling Strategy

Anna and I were practicing her spelling words last night. Here's what she constructed: 

1. She is representing the sounds and syllables very well now. 

2. She knows the word lie, so she used what she knew. She knows the word bull, so she used that too. What I need her to learn now - which is FANTASTIC at her developmental stage, is to spell by derivational constancy - to spell by meaning! I asked her if she knew what the word meant. She didn't. 

3. "This word is made of a smaller word, a root word, RELY. If I can rely on you to do your chores, what does that mean?" She responded readily, "It means that you can trust me." 

4. She pulled out the letters like this: relie. "But lie means not true. How can you trust something that isn't true?" Smart girl. 

5. "You are right, Anna. Lie is a different root. It means something different. Rely sounds the same but has a different meaning, so we spell it differently. How else might we construct the word?"

6. "Relly." 

7. "That's a good start. The two l's together, though, make that e say the short sound /reh-ly/. 

8. I slid down the extra l to form the next picture.

9. So when you say that someone is reliable, you are really saying that you are ABLE to trust them. Can you form the word able? 

10 . Of course she could. The next step was to talk about changing the y to i when adding a suffix. 

And now, we have a word correctly spelled according to sounds and meaning. 

I'm a very proud Nona. 

When Kids Aren't Growing in Guided Reading; Analyzing the Running Record

What if we thought about analyzing the running record as if it were a Kernel Essay? The experience I had with Gretchen Bernabei and the kernel essay that resulted from the Pearl Harbor speech seems to fit in so many places?

Name the Behaviors: What happened in the Running Record? What kind of errors did the student make?

Name the Impact: What damage do these behaviors cause?

Analyze your Feedback: Why didn't you see it coming? What have you already tried?

Plan a Response: What are you going to teach for an intervention?