These days anything worth doing is worth doing younger and first graders are sometimes asked to write paragraphs. Perhaps you have seen the hamburger model of writing (picture on left)? Let me be clear, I love this model and have used it sometimes to assist in revising writing that is entirely unfocused. However, this is …
Author: Mathew Needleman
Mathew Needleman, Apple Distinguished Educator and Google Certified Innovator has been pioneering the use of instructional technology for over two decades. He has been a classroom teacher, literacy coach, conference keynoter, and he currently serves as an elementary school principal in Los Angeles, California. He is the founder of the independent education studio, Needleworks Pictures.
Teaching Writing Part #1: Don’t Fence Me In
All elementary school teachers are teachers of writing and yet many of them are not writers themselves. I started my career as a writer and so this week I’ll be posting a few tips on how to teach writing in a way that resembles the real world. Tip #1 Not everything that you start writing …
How to Explicitly Teach a Strategy
As I’ve posted before, decoding isn’t everything. Students also need strategies to know how to comprehend and make sense of text. This is sometimes hard for teachers to believe because as adults, we’ve already internalized reading comprehension strategies like clarifying and predicting. I vaguely remember being taught about inferencing in school, I think most of …
Two Comprehension Resources
According to research, it’s important that teachers explicitly teach students how to use comprehension strategies even before students are reading fluently. • Here’s a one page comprehension strategies “cheat sheet” that lists the strategies, definitions, and has a sentence frame for each to assist teachers and students in using the strategy. Teaching students how to …
Awesome Photo Booth Effects
Here are some free additional photo effects for Apple’s Photo Booth program. Some of these only work in Leopard. Cat’s Eye and More iChat Effects These are great fun and come by way of Smashing Magazine.
How I Plan
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on How to Plan a Technology Lesson, today I break down how I planned my students’ movies, We See Animals Hiding. Unit Theme: Look Again State Standards: While this unit is about animal camouflage, the standard for California is more general, having to with animals and plants ability to …
How to Plan a Technology Lesson
The Blue Skunk blog presents 7 Stupid Mistakes Teachers Make With Technology. I’d like to address poor technology planning that I’ve written about in the past. I think poor planning pervades education and isn’t a problem specific to technology use but one that many classrooms suffer from. There’s nothing new or different about my method …
A Bailout for LAUSD?
Happy New Year! Over the three week holiday vacation, I moved and was without internet access for a couple of weeks. The first e-mail that came through once I was back online was from our new superintendent. I try to avoid being political in my blog but turmoil is happening throughout my district. I think …
A New Blog
Frank Guttler, who used to lead great screen education workshops for the American Film Institute (AFI), now leads the same workshops on his own (since AFI downsized its K-12 education department). Frank has his own blog and I look forward to reading. I’ve added it to my blogroll in place of the American Film Institute …
Greatest Hits of 2008
2008 has turned out to be one of the most significant in my life. It was a year of great loss as as well as great joy. Although I didn’t write so much about the latter, I became engaged to my long-time girlfriend, also a teacher, in September. And we will be beginning 2009 in …