AVID Summer Insititue - Day 3

Day 3 had us in our strands for one last time, then for my site team, we had a "mobile" site team meeting as we drove home from Dallas. :) Here are my notes from today:

We started out talking about how to use the critical reading strategies in a 1:1 classroom. Of course, with tablets, you can pretty much annotate right on them, but with Chromebooks, that would be more challenging.

Yesterday we worked on summarizing, today we looked at Macro and Micro structure of text. I understand the general point of Macro/Micro, but I'm not sure how to apply it to math effectively. With the Micro, the saying/doing activity was interesting but difficult as my idea of what the author is doing was definitely different than an ELA teacher perspective.

One idea I am totally stealing is "Sticker Props". A page of stickers showed up on our table, but it wasn't until later that the presenter shared what they were for. Apparently, when her kids work in groups, she puts a small sheet of stickers in the middle of the table. If a group member has a profound statement or an "a-ha" moment, they get to choose a sticker. I love this idea!

One activity I used as an elective teacher was the "One-Pager". The presenter suggested having students create a One-Pager via Google Draw if you are in a 1:1 environment. Draw is one of the tools of G-Drive that I haven't used, so that may need to be explored soon!

One of my favorite strategies we used today was a pre-reading strategy called Vocabulary Connections. The presenters had chosen 8 vocabulary words from the text and displayed them on the screen. We were asked to create a sentence using as many of the words as we could. I found it fascinating to hear the different sentences and combinations of words from my table-mates. I'm not sure how it would work in most math classes though...

Our final activity of the day was a Socratic Seminar. I've done SS's before, but one new twist that the presenter shared today was charting the conversation. Basically, she drew a circle on her iPad to create a "seating chart" of the circle. Then she drew lines from person to person through the circle to illustrate the conversation. The major benefit was that it allowed her to monitor the conversation and see who dominated the convo, who was quiet, and when two or more people were engaged in a debate.

Now I'm home and the hard work starts... working on our site goals and preparing for the new year!