ELOs

Extended Learning Opportunities?

Not quite sure what that stands for, but that's what its come to mean for me!

For my first ELO, I decided to explore Prezi a bit more and create a Prezi presentation on Dr. Richard Keller's interview from this blog post.

Here is the link to it and I hope you enjoy it, as I spent quite some time on it. Tip: use a mouse, not your trackpad.

An Interview with Dr. Richard Keller


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The medium itself may provide us with new ways of teaching and encouraging young readers to be purposeful, critical, and analytical about the information they encounter. The development of tools—such as online reading tutors and programs that embed strategy prompts, models, think-alouds, and feedback into the text or browser— may enhance the kind of strategic thinking that is vital for online reading comprehension.

- Wolf and Barzillai, 2009 

And now an extension of the previous post's thoughts on learning and technology... Here are some articles for background information:

• The Importance of Deep Reading, by Maryanne Wolf and Mirit Barzillai

• Crazy Busy, by Dr. Hallowell

From the Wolf and Barzillai article and the video summary from Dr. Hallowell, my initial reactions as an individual is to start putting down my iPhone. A bit of an overstatement, but generally, I would like to start leaving my phone in my bag when I am having a meal with friends/family, having coffee, or just chatting in the hallways. Especially this time of the year - finals, job searches, paperwork for employment - I feel like I have a thousand things to do and I am constantly on my phone trying to figure it all out at once. When I operate like this, I tend to lose track of dates and times, my prioritizing skills diminish because everything is on my brain all at once. What I have begun to do is to write in a planner, in order to better execute metacognitive functioning so I can feel like I have control in my life again. Again, it sounds like an exaggeration, but I promise, I am only slightly exaggerating.

It's really interesting how the Wolf and Barzillai article talks about brain plasticity, and how human brains were never meant to read and this is a new cognitive function from evolutionary processes.  That was 5, 500 years ago. Imagine what our brains would look like 5,500 years from now. That's too much of an abstraction for me, so let's take it back to 100 years from now. How will technology and new modes of thinking have shaped our brains and our lives that starkly transforms our brains? Will we really be doing this in our classroom 50, 100, years from now? [From my first post.]

As teachers I feel that we must embrace and engage in new technologies, but maintain control of our use of it. We've still got to work on executive functioning and critical thinking skills. We need those to help us understand text when reading out of a hard-cover book, and we still need those skills to help us understand text when reading off the screen. The new problem for me is that I'll hit CTRL+T and open up a new slate of endless possibilities of the web. 

For our students, technology should be used to encourage readers to be proactive, thoughtful, and critical readers. Teachers can use technology to support these cognitive functions during online reading and searching through use of UDL, as mentioned by Wolf and Barzillai. In the end, this may very well end up as a new way of teaching literacy, modeling good use and strategies when reading or searching online across all academic disciplines.

As an additional reading, if you can find access to this article, I highly recommend giving it a read. This was one of the earlier research studies done with high school and college students about online searching and epistemological development.

Hofer, B. K. (2004). Epistemological understanding as a metacognitive process: Thinking aloud during online searching. Educational Psychologist,39(1), 43-55.