LiterateLife

I found a really interesting article in the Journal of Educational Technology and Society that really explained constructivist learning theory.

 What I read here follows what I have been reading about acquisition of literacy from Calkins, Atwell, Fountas and Pinnell, and other prominent literacy teachers/authors.

 Intuitively, I am drawn to constructivism. I certainly find I learn best through hands-on exploration into a topic that interests me and with support from an expert who can help me along (much like my current self-immersion into edtech!)

But, I am NOT providing my middle school kids with much of this kind of learning, and I feel that it’s still not well-accepted in my school with a mostly low-SES ethnic population.

My main problem: Finding topics that inspire my students to practice the language arts in meaningful ways. Everything seems to bore them beyond social interactions and the people of popular media culture.

I would love to have a mentor on whose expertise I could rely to help me create the constructivist classroom I envision.

I believe those mentors are what I’m searching for in this foray into web 2.0.

I followed a link today explaining web 2.0 technology being used in Australia. It looks great. I need training on how to take a unit of study and create web 2.0 activities to move the students through the unit. My 7th graders are reading Where the Red Fern Grows. What do I want them to bet from this book? Mostly I want them to engage in the story of Billy and his love for his dogs. I want them to relate to Billy.

We are reading this book together because it is above the independent reading abilities of my students; it is also part of my district’s 7th grade curriculum. There are maybe 2-3 of my students who could handle this text alone.

I could set up a page on my blog that outlines activities for the students to do. The primary one would be responding to the text in a forum, to engage in discussion that requires writing. Possibly personal response posts in their own blogs would work, with a requirement to respond to a specified number of blogs.

I would love to see examples of classroom applications of web 2.0 technologies on the web.