Whip Me, Beat Me, Make Me Use a Computer to Improve My Reading

With federal reading improvement dollars flowing into some of our Title One schools, there’s been an increase in the use of computerized reading programs. Our district uses Read Naturally. Its website claims: Read Naturally continues to provide teachers with all of the tools they need to address the fluency needs of their students.

I sincerely hope not.

Granted, I am not a struggling reader or an ESL student. But I practiced with this computer-based reading tutorial last week. It had been a while since I had used such a creature and was expecting some dramatic improvements in machine-based reading instruction from what I had experienced four or five years ago. I was set up as a 5th grade, high-achieving student, and worked on a lesson about Daniel Boone – one of my favorite historical characters. The program made me review vocabulary, read the very dull story about three times, have the very dull story read to me three times (couldn’t skip), and gave me a low level quiz on my comprehension. I did a small amount of writing to summarize the content. I spent about an hour on a single passage of about 500 words. Boring, boring, boring.

You want to kill a kid’s love of reading quicker than Dan’l could kill a b’ar, this is the product to use. I ruefully reflected on how much better giving a kid James Daugherty’s fine book Daniel Boone would be and sit with him and read along.

I suppose in their place - in schools with sub par teachers, and with a very select number of students - programs like Read Naturally may do some good. But for the vast majority of kids, using these expensive basal-readers-on-a-disk run the real chance of creating negative associations with both reading and computer use.

All media specialists should be promoting another means of building student reading skills – Personal Voluntary Reading. It’s effective and builds not just reading skills, but the desire to read. Please purchase, read and share Stephen Krashen’s book The Power of Reading with your teachers and reading specialists. My review.

To me it seems the logical sequence in working with kids and reading is to instill the desire to read long before trying to teach reading skills. Good stories, good storytellers, and lots of exposure to books will do this; computers don’t.

Your experiences with online reading systems?

A Whole New Mind

The “Lazy Person’s Guide to Reading” (see my August 16th blog entry) seems to have paid off once again. I spent an not inordinate amount of time on the porch this weekend finishing Daniel Pink’s wonderful book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. I’d heard Pink on NPR a few weeks back and just had to find out more about what he had to say

For those of us who were terrified by Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat and its report on the rise of outsourcing of white collar jobs to Asia, Pink’s book brings some relief – if not a little optimism for our kids in tomorrow’s workplace – if we as educators take some lessons from it.

Like Friedman, Pink acknowledges the outsourcing trend (Asia), as well as two other trends he labels Abundance and Automation. He suggests that readers ask themselves three questions about their jobs:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Am I offering something that satisfies the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age? (Are you not just making toilet brushes, but toilet brushes that satisfy the user’s aesthetic sensibilities as well?)

As a result of these trends, he believes we are shifting from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Successful players in this new economy will increasing be required to develop and use the right-brain abilities of high concept (seeing the larger picture, synthesizing information) and high touch (being empathetic, creating meaning). Happy news, perhaps, for those of us who never were all that good at the left-brain stuff in the first place.

More specifically, he suggests we work toward developing in ourselves (and I hope by implication, our students), six right brain “senses,” to complement our left-brain, analytic skills. He suggests we will need realize the value of:
1. Not just function, but also DESIGN
2. Not just argument, but also STORY.
3. Not just focus, but also SYMPHONY.
4. Not just logic, but also EMPATHY.
5. Not just seriousness, but also PLAY.
6. Not just accumulation, but also MEANING.

In the age of educational accountability, we seem to be gearing all our instructional efforts to helping students master left-brain skills, since that is what the tests measure, of course. But to what extent do we and should we also be developing design sense, storytelling abilities, the ability to synthesis information, empathy, the use of humor and the ability to detect the importance of the information they learn?

How have you addressed left-brain skills into your lesson plans?

 Follow-up posting.

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1 Comment »
IF you closely study lessons plans and the trend in education, you will find that 80-90% of school is languge and left-brained based, yet, 80-89% of our students are right-brain learners. There is another book all educatiors should read entitled Is the Left Brain Always Right? An old book, but provides food for thought. Perhaps, as educators we should focus on whole brain and whoe person development?

Comment by Ruth — August 23, 2005 @ 9:48 am

God bless conference planners

Most places I go to speak, I get a warm reception, but Florence, SC, was an exception. It was the chilliest group of librarians I’d ever met. Oh, the people themselves displayed the Southern graciousness, hospitality and charm for which they are rightly famous, but, damn, the ice arena where the general sessions were held froze almost everyone out. (I personally lost three toes to frostbite, but it was interesting to watch the zamboni clear the ice before the keynote.) Lauren Hammond, who chaired the conference, I am sure, is still getting comments.

Every member of a professional organization should be a conference chair at least once in his or her career – preferably early on. It’s a wonderful lesson in just how illusionary control over much of anything actually is.

Our MEMO (Minnesota Educational Media Organization) Fall Conference will be here in Mankato this fall and I am once again the chair. (Fourth time as either conference chair or program chair for MEMO.) It is a labor of love – labor being the operative word. My wonderful, dedicated committee and I start planning the event a year in advance – selecting a theme, special speakers, food, tours, workshops, etc. The venue itself was chosen years in advance. As the conference gets closer, we’ll worry about ribbons, signs, equipment, transportation, nametags, exhibit locations, speakers gifts, etc. But despite our best planning and attention to details, I am sure there will be a few surprises.

Like most conference organizers, we want and need feedback for future conferences, so we ask attendees to fill out evaluation forms for both sessions and the conference as a whole. Most folks are honest, yet generous, in their appraisals of the event. Conference planners, exhibitors, and presenters do take suggestions for improvement to heart and use them. However, there are a few comments I would love to see banned on evaluation forms.

1. The room was too hot/cold. (The person who invents perfect climate control in large buildings should earn a place in paradise.)
2. The dessert was too small/too big/not sweet enough/too sweet/made of ____ which I am allergic to. (Hey, at least you got dessert.)
3. I didn’t agree with the keynote speaker. (You mean s/he made you think?)
4. The workshop wasn’t what I thought it would be. (Did you read the program description or just the title?)
5. I didn’t like the color of the bags/program/t-shirts, etc. (Well, the hospitality chair is a fall and you’re a spring – live with it.)
6. From vendors – There was too little time for attendees to do nothing but attend the vendor area. (Is there ever enough time from an exhibitor’s perspective?)
7. There was a snow storm/rain/heat wave during the conference. (No comment.)
8. I had pay for parking. (Next time we’ll try to have the conference at a shopping mall instead of a convention center.)
9. I misread the program and missed the session I really wanted to go to. (And you have a college degree?)
10. There weren’t enough handouts. (You’re saying you came late to the session?)

Here’s all I’m saying – if you’ve ever written a comment like the one above, please volunteer for next year’s conference planning committee. So much planning work is done online now, geographic distance is not really a limiting factor. You’ll learn very quickly that you can’t guard against the arbitrary.

If you attended the SC conference in Florence last spring, take a minute and send Lawren and e-mail telling her how much you appreciated all the hard work that went into the event.

Conference planners, any other comments you’d like banned from evaluations?
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My comment is based on 8 years of attending a conference at Mohonk. We have a 2-hour downtime scheduled after lunch the second day and each year someone complains because 1. they don’t need the downtime and think we should still be in sessions or 2. nothing was scheduled for the downtime.

Comment from Laura Pearle:

Last year in TN, we had a conference chair for the first time run the conference instead of the state president. YIPPEE! Still, I didn’t get to attend a session until the very last one. There are so many details for the conference chair and for the president to oversee. Unfortunately one of our beloved keynote speakers had her laptop stolen while we were at lunch. I spent hours viewing surveillance film in the security booth. Then it was well-deserved time consoling our speaker and being there for her. Earlier in the conference, we discovered the group working with the bookstore didn’t order the author’s books to be autographed and it was off to discover how to overnight books from Oregon to Chattanooga. I am greatly looking forward to attending AASL because I am not in charge of anything. What a heavenly concept. Go to a conference and enjoy being with the professionals, chatting with the vendors, and contemplating “stuff” in sessions. Hooray for the planners!

Comment by Diane Chen — September 13, 2005 @ 11:10 pm