Gains or EduGains

Gains is a relatively new web page with strong ties to the Ministry.  It states that it is “built on the success of … [the Ministry documents]… Think Literacy Success, Think Literacy Cross-Curricular Approaches, Me Read?No Way, Leading Math Success, Targeted Implementation and Planning Supports, and Critical Learning Instructional Supports”.  It is very web 2.0 and encourages contributions from many sources.

It is a bit of “rag tag” fleet of stuff mainly to support Ontario secondary teachers of math, literacy and differentiated instruction with stated plans to continue to grow to support other subject areas. 

Literacy Gains includes among other things,  concise guides to listening, media literacy (I liked this one), critical literacy and metacognition.  Math Gains includes documents from a variety of sources and Boards, videos, Ministry documents, posters, software lessons (eg Geometers Sketchpad).  As my son would say “it is a bit random” BUT it does contain useful resources and is worth checking out.

A final comment: both the literacy and math gain pages include the following introduction “Reaching every teacher and student; gathering and sharing local evidence of promising practises; precisely personalizing instructional trajectories; harnessing collaborative technologies; establishing communities of practice at every level in the system”.   HUH? I am not sure what this means.  My recommendation would be to de-jargon and simplify this.

Rowan

Nursery rhymes

Judy A submitted this October 9, 2009

This week an interesting article in the National Post caught my eye. Its headline read “Nursery rhymes too old fashioned for kids”. It was referring to the results of a survey carried out in Britain for National Bookstart Day, which takes place today. The Bookstart program gives free books to every child in the UK and encourages the sharing of books and rhymes with children. This year’s theme was “my favourite rhyme”. To my surprise, the survey results indicated that many parents think that nursery rhymes are too outdated to interest their children. Only a little over a third of parents who responded to the poll said they regularly recite nursery rhymes to their children and almost a quarter said they never have.

Research has shown that the ability to recite nursery rhymes is one of the best predictors of future reading success. Through nursery rhymes, children become familiar with the rhythm and sounds of oral language which leads to the next step of literacy development—the written word. The literature states that the more developed a child’s phonological and phonemic skills are by the time they begin learning to read; the better that child will be able to recognize the relationship between sounds and letters. So, old fashioned or not, keep reciting those rhymes!

Here are a few links that might be of interest:

• http://www.booktrade.info/index.php/showarticle/23595
• http://www.isd300.k12.mn.us/ES/kinder/KINDERGARTEN%20INFORMATION/nursery%20rhymes%20handout.pdf
• http://www.linguist.org.cn/doc/uc200701/uc20070107.pdf
•  http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/assets/content/bcc/docs/schools/eps/pat/rhymes_sample.pdf

 Judy A, Reference Librarian

Copyright in K-12 schools

The old Pan Canadian Licence is no longer in effect having been replaced with the Access Copyright Tariff, 2005-2009.  Access Copyright has created a new document The ABCs of the Access Copyright Tariff available on their web page. It includes one page that summarizes the dos and donts of the tariff in easy to read language and several pages of FAQs that provide more detailed information.  If you have any questions about photocopying in K-12 schools, this is great place to begin.

Rowan

2009 Ont Education Research Symposium

The Ministry of Education sponsors an annual research symposium and the 2009  theme was the achievement gap.

The papers have been posted online <here>. Read the papers get a synopsis of the current research on the link between the achievement gap and the following subjects: Aboriginal, gender (boys and reading), poverty, English /French language classes, special education.

Rowan

Leithwood and Strauss on Turnaround Schools

This report on turnaround leadership is dated 2008, so I am behind the times, however better late than never, and the information remains relevant in today’s data and measurement based education world.

The Canadian Education Association commissioned Kenneth Leithwood and Tiiu Strauss to examine the impact of leadership on school’s that demonstrate siginificant improvment in the acadmic achievement of their students.

The Exective Summary of the report titled Learning about Leadership from School Turnaround Efforts in Ontario <here> lists 8 key findings about successful turnaround leadership.  I am not going to list them all: read the  8 page summary! 

Note that the Library does not have the full report at this time, but we will purchase it.

Rowan

EQAO results minus SES factors

Judy C sent me this link. The C.D. Howe Institute has released an e-brief by David Johnson, titled Ontario’s Best Public Schools, 2005/06 – 2007/08: An Update to Signposts of Success (2005), <here>. 

The author has developed a methodology that filters out the influence of the socio-economic background on student performance, thereby allowing a comparison of the schools, the quality and effectiveness of a schools’ staff and teaching practices. 

The table in the report lists the 11 schools in the province that reflect an exceptionally high academic achievement.  Of the 11, one is a TDSB school (Cornell JPS); the rest are all Catholic schools. In the brief, Johnson, states “it is apparent from this result and other studies that Catholic Boards are stronger than public boards” .

Rowan

French resources for elem literacy and numercy

Judy A wants me to remind teachers about the Min of Ed and TFO eWorkshop web page of online resources (including video resources) that  support literacy and numeracy. French page <here> and English page <here>.

And I am attaching a recent bibliography of books in French for French language teachers. Teachers may contact the library to borrow them.

FrenchTeacherResources

Rowan

Wordle Library Image

Using Wordle, I have created an image representing Professional Library services. Fun!  Rowan

Fun with word clouds

Create word clouds at wordle.net. They are fun for personal use, or great as a team building project, or have your school students do this to support  a language art project – heck any topic. Great for vocabulary building before starting a new project.

Rowan

OTF Professional Development Videos

The OTF has a Professional Development videos web page, that contains videos that you can watch via the Internet, on a whole range of different topics. From what I can tell from my brief review of the page, you don’t have to be a member of the OTF to review them, but you do have to register. Be patient, it takes a time for the videos to load.

The videos:

•  are definitely American,
•  are current and the viewing quality is good,
• providea good introductory overview on a variety of subjects (not just education generally but curriculum subjects),
• are about a half hour in length 
• the 2 videos that I reviewed included interviews with experts (eg Michael Gurian on educating boys).

Check them out,

Rowan