VSRA Session #1
Integration ideas Tagged conferences, podcast 1 Comment »The first conference session that I went to was The Teacher Research Grant Award session. If you know me, you know I love research – so this should be no surprise…the session was by a reading specialist in Montgomery County. She had won the grant with her proposal on using podcasting to increase student reading fluency. Her work was very interesting. She chose some 5th grade students who had issues with fluency and assigned them poems to read and practice. She sow them twice a week after that once to listen to monitor their practice and once to record their podcasts. Podcasts were made available to others in the school using iTunes. At the end of 9 weeks she took some reading assessments to compare to the students’ reading prior to this intervention strategy. She found that students had gained 20 wpm in fluency. In addition the students had begun self correction which meant that the increased fluency had begun to effect their comprehension. We had a very interesting discussion (there were only 7 of us in the session) about how this intervention might effect students if it were carried out for an entire year.
The session led me to think about how we might adapt the process to work in my schools – or for that matter replicate it across several schools. If one of the reading specialists would work with me, I think we could devise an intervention for both upper grade students as well as lower grade students. If we chose maybe 5 students in the intermediate grades who needed fluency intervention, the reading specialist could assign them a poem (the following authors were recommended in the session: Paul Fleischman; Hoberman; Jack Prelutsky; and Bruce Lansky) and work with them once a week to check that they were practicing. Then I could work with the reading specialist and the students once a week to record the podcasts. We can upload the podcaststo a blog (iTunes wouldn’t work for us) and then teachers in the lower grades could use the podcasts for a center ime activity along with the text that the students used for the podcast. We already have the microphone and software and probably some of the books…we just need some willing participants. I guess I first thought of Blount and Carey, but now that I am writing about this, I could see this working for some special ed teachers – namely Armstrong, Goolsby and Morris and even some speech applications , so I guess I’ll tag Moses as well…










