As many of you know, Read Alouds have always been a crucial part of our curriculum and literacy work. Reading aloud breathes life into a text, and when a text comes to life it doesn’t just connect students to the act of reading, it connects them to one another. The words come alive; we share a…
Team TLAC and I had the pleasure of watching several online lessons from schools across the country (and in England) this week and having watched them I want to share a reflection. One of the constant challenges when you are talking to a screen is knowing what your students are doing as they watch it in…
As you probably know I’ve been trying to share useful video and analysis of successful approaches to online learning on this blog. One of the big challenges is that synchronous lessons are challenging–challenging to run; limited in terms of how much students can do in a day–while asynchronous lessons are hard to make interactive. As I…
This is a strange post to write at the present moment–but also hopefully relevant. It’s about the last video of the old world–classroom teaching with a teacher and 30 kids and a book–my team and I watched before classrooms went dark and we all went to online. After writing all last week about things we can…
Previously I blogged about how important it is in online learning to include lots of short consolidation activities–moments when students interact with the content you’re sharing and consolidate it into memory–and become engaged and active participants. This is true whether you are using ‘synchronous’–live with students in real time–or ‘asynchronous’–you prepare something for students to view…