TIE 2012 In-Depth Session

Death to Textbooks: Building your own Textbook with Narratives
Dr. Mark Geary, DSU
 http://www.homepages.dsu.edu/mgeary/


Imaginative Education Research Group  - http://ierg.net/
This website introduces new theories, principles, and practical techniques for making education more effective. Because engaging students' imaginations in learning, and teachers' imaginations in teaching, is crucial to making knowledge in the curriculum vivid and meaningful, we call this new approach Imaginative Education (IE). We show that the imagination is one of the great workhorses of learning, and how it can be used for all ages and skill levels.

Interactive Elements of the Reading Process

• Reading
• Text
• Learning Environment

Proficient Readers

• figure out what is confusing them
• set goals for getting through the reading
• have strategies
• do a lot of these invisibly

Strategies of Proficient Readers

• Visualize - to make mental pictures or sensory images
• Connect - to link to own experiences, to events in the world, to other readings
• Question - to actively, wonder, to surface uncertainties, to interrogate the text
• Infer - to predict hypothesize, interpret, draw conclusions
• Evaluate - to determine importance, make judgements
• Analyze -
• Recall -
• Vocabulary -

Comic Life - http://plasq.com/products/comiclife/mac 
Be the Hero You Are! Comic Life lets you create astounding comics, beautiful picture albums, how-tos... and more!

Struggling readers have issues with

• Comprehension
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
• Work recognition
• Motivation

How to teach kids to read text books
Look at the text book backwards - Do the summary and questions first. Then go through chapter backwards looking at the text features.

Book - Understanding Comics
http://scottmccloud.com/2-print/1-uc/index.html

The Tar Heel Reader - http://tarheelreader.org/
Welcome to the Tar Heel Reader, a collection of free, easy-to-read, and accessible books on a wide range of topics. The books may be downloaded as slide shows in PowerPoint, Impress, or Flash format. Each book can be speech enabled and accessed using multiple interfaces, including touch screens, the IntelliKeys with custom overlays, and 1 to 3 switches.

DSU Delicious site - http://delicious.com/dsu_coe
List lots of online textbook resources


Webquest - http://webquest.org/
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented lesson format in which most or all the information that learners work with comes from the web. The model was developed by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University in February, 1995 with early input from SDSU/Pacific Bell Fellow Tom March, the Educational Technology staff at San Diego Unified School District, and waves of participants each summer at the Teach the Teachers Consortium. 

Module Maker2 - http://questioning.org/module/module.html

Online Learning represents an exciting new way to structure and guide student research efforts so they will focus upon higher level thinking and rich electronic resources along with good print resources like books and live data from sources such as interviews. Research modules can be an effective way of addressing the most challenging new state standards.

This Module Maker will show you how to build your own
Online Research Modules that will challenge your students to make up their own minds while supplying them with rich information to support such thinking.

Questioning.org -

An educational journal devoted to questions,
questioning, sound intelligence, strategic reading
and quality teaching.


The Story Form Model

• Identifying Importance
• What is the most important about this topic?
• Why should it matter to children?
• What is affectively engaging about it? 
• What polar opposites fit best with topic?
• For more information on Binary Opposites and their importance in teaching and learning visit the Imaginative Education Research Group at www.ierg.net  

Some Binary Opposites
respect / disrespect
oppression / liberty
dominance / subordination
balanced / unsteady
survival / death
starvation / gluttony
life / death
drought / flooding
identity / nameless
belong / not belong
healthy / unhealthy
confront / compromise
health / sickness
risk taking / safety
wealth / destitution
success / defeat
take / release
give / take
victory / defeat
force / work with it
beautiful/ ugly
pride / shame
clean / filthy
gigantic / miniscule
never / forever
alone / together
difficult / easy
friends/ enemies
perfect/ flawed
right / wrong
powerful / weak
translucent / opaque 
fair / unfair
equal/ unequal
clear / foggy
sane / crazy
remembered / forgotten
treasure / garbage
pain / pleasure
create / destroy
end / renew
linear / cyclic
friend / foe
peace / war
help / hinder
love / hate
joy / sorrow
parent / child
forgive / blame
endure/ give up
hot / cold 
connected / disconnected
improve / worsen
sturdy / fragile
hide / show
news / secret
appear / disappear
visible / invisible
conceal / reveal
truth / false
lead / follow
advantage / disadvantage
remember / forget
smart / stupid
ingenious / unimaginative
industrious / lazy
lethargic / energetic
hero / villain
stench / perfume
stagnant / active
warmth / cold
colourful / drab
bright / dark
cheerful / sombre
careful / careless
trusting / suspicious
believe / doubt
win / loose
forget / remember
timid / bold
modest / arrogant
impartial / biased
rational / illogical
separate / together
kind / cruel
whisper / scream

• Finding Binary Opposites
• What powerful binary opposites best catch the importance of the topics?
  
• Organizing Contents into story form
• What content most dramatically embodies the binary opposites, in order to provide access to the topic?
  
• Conclusion
• What is the best way of resolving the dramatic conflict inherent in the binary opposites?
• What degree of mediation of those opposites is it appropriate to see?
  
• Evaluation
• How can one know the topic has been understood its importance grasped, and the content learned?

"An image tells a thousand words, but you don't know which thousand."

Three Basic Frameworks

• Mythic - Content at: http://ierg.net/teaching/plan-frameworks/index.html
• Locating importance - What is emotionally engaging about this topic? How can it evoke wonder? Why should it matter to us?
• Everything that we teach can evoke some kind of wonder and produce some emotional response in us.  
• In order to help students connect emotionally to the material, teachers need to
  first identify their own emotional attachment to it.  A sense of wonder about
  something is usually connected to this attachment.  Everything that we teach can
  evoke some kind of wonder and produce some emotional response in us.  A sense
  of wonder and an emotional response to material are important in engaging
  students’ imaginations. So this first question asks the teacher to feel for what is
  wonderful about the topic. This can be difficult if the topic is something like the
  use of the comma! The trick, though, is to try to re-see the topic through the eyes
  of the child, to catch at what can stimulate the sense of wonder about even the
  most routine topics. Especially when teachers have been taught to become expert
  at organizing classroom activities and structuring topics into instructional units,
  this can be hard. It is asking the teacher to do something that is, for most of us,
  quite unfamiliar—to begin by feeling about the topic. Try to indicate for any topic
  you plan to teach what is wonderful about it, and what can provide an emotional
  engagement to it by the child.
   
• Who, what, when, where, why, how, how much? (from Back of the Napkin) http://www.danroam.com/the-back-of-the-napkin/
•  
• Romantic
• 1. Identifying “heroic” qualities
  What heroic human qualities are central to the topic? What emotional images do they evoke? What within the topic can best evoke wonder? 
• In order to help students connect emotionally to the material, teachers need to
  first identify their own emotional attachment to it.  What heroic human quality or
  emotion––courage, compassion, tenacity, fear, hope, loathing, delight, etc.––can
  we identify in the topic?  These human qualities help us––and our students––see
  the world in human terms and give human meaning to events and ideas in all
  disciplines. We “humanize” each topic not to falsify it but to infuse the world with
  human meaning. Again, this first task is the most difficult part of planning the
  lesson or unit. We are asked to feel about the topic as well as to think about it;
  indeed, we are asked to “perfink” (David Kresch’s term for perceiving, feeling,
  and thinking together) about it. Remember, the heroic quality you identify will be
  a shaping force to the narrative or story you create for this unit or lesson so
  identify heroic qualities that most effectively convey the content of the topic. 
• Philosophic