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It is 2016 and technology is booming. Children are able to navigate iPads perhaps even before they can even speak. This is why it is of utmost importance to integrate technology into the classroom. Technology not only makes learning fun and engaging, it is also a medium that students are familiar with and can understand. Reading or listening to books online, performing web quests, playing educational games, and doing research for writing are all ways technology can help students in the classroom. This is an article that gives some great tips on how to integrate technology into your daily routine, even if you're not very familiar with how to use some of the more modern gadgets.

I love the website Kahoot. I first saw it used in a middle school science classroom during my first field observation in the MAT program. It is a resource for teachers to create quizzes that students then take during class time. They can use their phones, laptops, tablets, or desktop computers to create a username and sign in to your specific quiz. You can make it a group activity by splitting the students up into teams. They can follow along on the classroom's projector as well as on their personal device. The students must read the question, are given a few seconds to think about it, then must answer it using the choices provided. The quicker you respond correctly, the higher your score becomes. It's super fun and gets the students engaged in learning. They actually become quite competitive.

This YouTube channel has all sorts of audio books that teachers can play to their students for free. It includes books for younger children as well as high school-aged students.

Not every school district provides SMART Boards, but those that do sometimes don't offer teachers the proper training necessary to effectively use them. The relatively crudely recorded video below is actually full of tips on how to use a SMART Board in the classroom.

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This is a clip of my demonstrating how to use a SMARTboard for my Ed Tech undergraduate class. While it isn't a full demonstration nor is it at a conference, I hope it can demonstrate some of my presentation strengths as well as my clarity with technological training and getting people involved.

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Writing workshop is a process of writing for students that includes an introduction and mini lesson at the beginning, followed by independent writing and conferring, publishing, and sharing with peers. An influential theorist who dealt with writing is Donald Graves. He wrote the book A Fresh Look at Writing, which broke down the writing process into the five stages that are commonly used in writing workshops. They include pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Another theorist who devoted her time to student writing is Lucy Calkins. She founded the writer's workshop itself, and said that every student, not just those who were born with the ability, are able to write if they learn how.

Here is a resource that includes 30 ideas for teachers about how to teach students to write.

This website has tons of free graphic organizers to help students to begin to write and organize their ideas.

Below is an example of how to conduct a mini lesson within a writer's workshop.

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Reader's workshop is a process in which students fine-tune their reading skills. It begins with a mini lesson conducted by the teacher, followed by independent reading, note-taking in journals, and sharing their thoughts and opinions about the text with their peers. The creator of the whole workshop approach is Lucy Calkins, who founded the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Their link can be found here, and they offer services to schools around the nation. Their mission is to equip teachers via training to teach their students how to read and write. They hold mock lessons, provide feedback on current teaching methods, and give support for differentiation.

This is a fabulous blog post from a teacher named Beth Newingham. She discusses how she conducts reader's workshops, including types of mini lessons she uses, individualized reading strategies, guided reading groups, and how to properly close the lesson.

This article discusses the importance of having differentiated centers set up around your classroom to better meet the needs of each individual learner. It gives examples and tips on how to achieve maximum learning.

Below is a photo of a first grade teacher engaging a small group of students in a guided reading session. (Photo Source)

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Early childhood literacy development, otherwise known as emergent literacy, is the knowledge children acquire regarding literacy and language before they know how to read and write. Marie Clay, a theorist who created the idea of emergent literacy, discusses in her work that it is vital to read aloud to children who cannot yet read on their own. She explains that children should be encouraged to think out loud and interact with the stories they're listening to.

Print awareness is one aspect of emergent literacy in which children learn what print is, how to hold a book, and that words are read from left to right. Here are some ways to encourage print awareness.

Another facet of early childhood literacy development is retelling stories. Children who have already listened to their teachers or parents read a particular story should be able to retell it, more or less. This activity involves the retelling of stories using fun props to help convey their thoughts.

During this period of time before children begin to read, they learn the alphabet. This is a cute song depicting each letter of the alphabet in upper- and lower-case form, as well as several small pictures of items that begin with their corresponding letters.

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Comprehension strategies allow students to better understand the text they are reading. There are many techniques that can be used, ranging from filling in semantic maps to summarizing the story. Here is a great resource for comprehension strategies.

An theorist who has done plenty of research in the realm of reading comprehension is David Rumelhart. He was the first to develop the interactive reading model of comprehension, which explains how students use their preexisting knowledge and information from word and text structure to understand what they're reading. This combination creates connections in the brain, or a schemata, and organizes them. Another reading comprehension theorist is M. Pressley, who stresses the importance of actually teaching comprehension strategies to students, rather than merely giving them the opportunity to employ them.

This website depicts 21 different "anchor charts" that a teacher could hang around his or her room for quick access for students. They give tips for visualization, decoding words using context clues, how to retell a story, and much more.

Below is a poster that can be purchased here. Its a cohesive yet concise way of remind students how to strengthen their comprehension abilities.

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The concept of children's literature is self explanatory as it is literally literature appropriate for child readers. An organization by the same name was founded in 1993 by Marilyn Courtot, and it employs literary critics who read thousands of children's books per year and offer reviews on them. The website was designed as an easy resource for teachers and librarians to use when choosing books for their students to read. It can be found here.

The Association for Library Service for Children website has an extensive selection of children's books for younger and older children. Under the "Awards, Grants, & Scholarships" tab on the left side of the page, you can find a list of literature awards specifically for children's literature. We explored two of them, Caldecott and Newbery, in class earlier this semester. They date back to 1938 and 1922, respectively, and only honor the most outstanding books in their field.

Below are several award-winning pieces of children's literature, many of which I own from my childhood. (Image from Google)

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Phonics is a term used to describe the relationship between the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they represent. For example, in school, students learn that the letter "c" is associated with the sound in "cat," "car," and "can." Rudolf Flesch, and later Marilyn Jager Adams, were strong proponents of the use of phonics in teaching children how to read in that it teaches them how to read at an individual word and alphabetic level.

Attached here is a website on which word family posters can be ordered. These would be ideal to hang in a classroom for teaching phonics and can double as a sight-word wall.

CVC words, or consonant-vowel-consonants, make great phonics activities for students to actively engage in. Here are a bunch of examples of different games and tasks to give to students during a lesson on phonics.

Below is a graphic organizer I created for a literacy unit plan based on the book Madeline's Rescue (Padlet skewed the formatting on the preview photo). It uses word families that are featured in the book and requires students to generate their own words for each family. This graphic organizer would be distributed after a lesson on the topic and a bit of modeling on how to fill it in.

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Vocabulary development is acquiring knowledge of words and their definitions through reading, speaking, listening, etc. It begins very early in life, usually during the first year, and continues indefinitely. Theorist Elfrieda H. Hiebert advocates vocabulary development and explains it as a skill that deepens and becomes more complex over time. Another facet of vocabulary development is connecting words to real-life experiencing and viewing them through various cultural and societal perspectives.

This is a pretty good article about how to teach vocabulary in a classroom setting, complete with different strategies and ideas for teaching ELL students. It also makes mention of idioms, which are an important part of vocabulary development in that the words in idioms usually do not carry their literal meanings.

Vocabulary lessons can sometimes be a bit dry and boring, so having students play games to learn their vocabulary words can be an exciting alternative. Here are ideas for 10 games that can be played using any vocabulary words that help in familiarizing students with the words and their meanings while also keeping their attention and focus on learning.

Graphic organizers and semantic maps are a great way to incorporate vocabulary into lessons. They appeal to visual learners and take the pressure of writing cohesive and coherent sentences off of the students who might not be great writers. Below is an example of a graphic organizer that includes definitions, synonyms (can add antonyms), using it in a sentence, and drawing a depiction of the word.

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Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately and fluidly with few, if any, errors. It takes time to develop a fluent reader, but various strategies have proven successful in helping the process along. This article explains some of them.

The idea of fluency is supported by the theory of automaticity, which describes how people can read automatically without making a real conscious effort in decoding the words. It was developed by theorists David LaBerge and S. Jay Samuels, who stress that this skill should be fostered early in life to help with academic achievement down the road.

An exciting and innovative way to improve fluency and reading automaticity is having the students engage in a reader's theater activity. These activities involve children's books that have been converted into scripts, which students can read in a play format. They can act out what they're reading as they're reciting their lines and really have fun with it. Here is a list reader's theater ideas with scripts attached.

To improve fluency, it's very important to model fluent reading via read alouds. A teacher could read out loud to students in front of the classroom; however, to integrate technology into a reading lesson, there are plenty of read alouds on YouTube with the pictures in the books to go along. Here's an example of a Dr. Seuss read aloud:

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The Annenberg Learner website gives quality, concise summaries of the different types of classroom reading here. The effectiveness of read alouds is studied more in-depth in this peer-reviewed journal article titled Teaching First Graders to Comprehend Complex Texts Through Read-Alouds by Witte, P. G.

The website Just Read Books Aloud is a fantastic resource for read alouds. The site is very user friendly, and categorizes the different read alouds by length, author, topic, reading level, and more. The engaging videos model fluency while also integrating technology into the classroom. They can even be given as homework assignments as they're easily accessible from any internet-enabled computer. What's more, the website is perfect for ELL students as it offers books read in various languages, including Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.

Guiding Readers and Writers (can't underline), written by the two theorists Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, is a great resource for teachers who wish to incorporate guided reading, independent reading, and other similar literacy techniques into their classrooms. It includes a whole section on guided reading, which discusses how to group students for the most efficient and enriched learning experience and introduces the reader to leveled texts. The section on independent reading explains how to foster an intrinsic interest in reading and shares various methods on how to integrate reflections and response journals into independent reading time. The book is available for purchase here.

It's extremely important that the teacher who is employing the read aloud technique shows the pictures to the students to develop visual literacy. The teacher might want to ask what the students think will happen next based solely on the picture shown, for example.
(Photo Source)

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Phonemic awareness is a concept that deals with the recognition and ability to manipulate phonemes. Phonemes are the shortest sounds in words. For example, the word "hat" can be broken down into three distinctive phonemes: "h," "ah," and "t." This article explains phonemic awareness in more depth and gives some examples of how to develop it as a skill. The journal article Using a Multimodal Approach to Facilitate Articulation, Phonemic Awareness, and Literacy in Young Children by Pieretti, R. A., et al, discusses how tactile, auditory, and kinesthetic techniques can help improve phonemic awareness in children who have difficulty learning in a more traditional sense.

The work of H. K. Yopp supports the concept of phonemic awareness as she created the Phonemic Awareness Assessment and published several works on the importance of phonemic awareness in a child's reading development.

Click Here for a website which includes several phonemic awareness activities that a teacher could engage in with students.

For a lesson plan on phonemic awareness, good for grades K-2, click here.

Below is a video of a model phonemic awareness lesson.