Can your iPad read to you?! Well, yes....with a little work

How to access accessibility features....as of Oct. 2016!

Today I took yet another stab at having my iPad read to me.

I'm a sucker for learning while listening...especially since I spend a lot of time in the kitchen: cooking, prepping, cleaning, putting away dishes, etc.

This turns out to be a perfect time for me to listen to recordings, videos or podcasts!

This morning I had kind of burned out on podcasts, I knew I had reading to do for my graduate class, and I wanted to try a trick I'd learned about from my co-workers at CAST (an accessibility in education non-profit): having my iPad read to me.

Anxiety, fear & work avoidance - the missing link

 Review of "Skill-Building Approaches to Anxiety-Fueled Work Avoidance"

I love this article.  

As an executive function coach, I've been focused on strategies with my new clients.   What app can I suggest to a young person?  What kind of grid can we make to help them plan their homework?  What accessible technology can I teach them?

In this flurry of reaching for the "right" tool to share or show (and worrying that I won't remember the "right" one for them in the moment!), I'm realizing that it's easy to overlook the more important, and, in my experience, the deeper and more intuitive side of executive function issues: the mental space that goes along with success or failure.    Because at the end of the day, what is procrastination, task avoidance, task initiation problems, or lack of planning?  According to this article, it's a challenge, struggle or deficit often coupled with anxiety.   

Here's my take on CLT & constructivism:

....it's a work in progress.

Cognitive Load Theory asks the intriguing question: is it ever helpful to withhold information from students?

This question matters to this debate because, in the end, this is at the heart of constructivism.  The idea is that students uncover information & principles through their own investigation - and thus "own" this information in a way that is completely different than if they had simply been told to memorize a rule or concept by rote.

For example, I've read about teaching elementary students about calculating volume not by teaching a formula, but by having them mess around with 3-D models of buildings, shapes made of 1 cm blocks, jars of different sizes filled with water, and by having them predict & calculate volume, and, when faced with unexpected results, find their own motivation to explore more, gather more data, and develop a rule on their own.

To me, that sounds mega-cooler than simply memorizing a formula.

Constructivism & Cognitive Load Theory: fight to the finish?

So, my most recent instructor had a bunch of readings on these two theories.  (If you bothered to read this post, I'm assuming you are some kind of education nerd like me and are somewhat familiar with these....if not...may I recommend wikipedia or...Wikipedia...?)

But in any event...in many of the articles I've read about these approaches, it seems like the authors are putting them in opposition to each other.  That there is a great debate about how to teach people and Only One May Prevail.  I get this for battling academicians out to make their reputations.  But for me as a teacher...I almost can't understand how I wouldn't use both...

Constructivism, as I understand it, is tied intimately to the project of sense-making or meaning-making.  As I get it, it involves presenting learners with a problem or discrepancy, and asks them to try to a) solve the problem and b) as a result of their observations and experiences, come up with general principals or theories related to the topic. (am I getting warm, oh studiers of educational theory?)

To me, this is very appealing.  It imagines learners as active participants as opposed to recipients of knowledge - not bank accounts where information may be deposited, but rather sovereign humans, with experiences and opinions and brains, who learn through their own analysis of their world.

Cognitive Load Theory, as I've encountered it thus far, is just a different animal.  It looks at how our brains work, particularly our two different kinds of memory, and how new things are (or are not) integrated with old things that we already know.

To me, this is also very appealing.  It draws its lifeblood from carefully controlled research and statistics, and interrogates some of our treasured notions of teaching.  It looks at how we actually process information and solve problems, and challenges us as teachers to justify why we are including each element - will it really help learners understand new material?

The Cognitive folks seems, so far, to be either dismissive or...carefully neutral around constructivist teaching.   Most CLT research has been completed around simple problems in the STEM fields with correct answers and easily-testable solutions.  I think this research has brought us tremendous insight...but does not encompass the all of teaching.

The $64,000 question these days is - what about complex, unpredictable problems?  What about problems for which the very method of solving them is unknown?  How can we prepare students for that?
And of course...innovation.  Can we prepare students for "creativity" or "innovation" or are those things a bit immune to teaching?

My answer, in the next post....

Digital tools for reading & writing

Resources?  You want resources?  We got resources!

Well, after a whole summer of researching & learning about how to make a writing class "safe for all brains" - one answer I came up with was...technology.   "Productivity Tools" (so-called) can allow students to add whatever supports are necessary for them without self-identifying as "disabled" or even "different."    The truth is...we all can use support for some aspect of our workload - why force students into a certain medicalized box in order to get the support they need?   Using technology allows for students to personalize HOW they learn.  

But what tools should I be using?

The truth is, there is an endless supply of tools to help students, and more (and better!) ones are being developed all the time.   Main areas to think about are reading, writing, brainstorming/pre-writing, attention/distraction support, vocabulary support for ELL students, and ways for students aural, instead of visual processing in reading & thinking (like using voice recorders to jot down ideas, screencast tools to demonstrate understanding, or text-to-speech tools to read).   These tools can instantly make your class more accessible...if you're willing to think about how to teach technology as well as your subject matter.  (I'll report back this semester, but from what everyone says, students can get a real kick out of working with some of these tools!)

So here's a great article to get you started.   It's mostly focused on tools that can be used as part of Google Drive/Chrome browser extensions (perfect for K-12 schools using Chromebooks....less perfect for a crazy diverse BYOD environment like Higher Ed), but if you like the concept, there are apps and programs that do most of this stuff that you can find simply by using any internet browser.

Enjoy!


18 Digital Tools and Strategies That Support Students' Reading and Writing

And here is one teacher's website with links to a gosh-darn plethora of useful tools (mostly Google or Chrome-centric!) to help with pre-writing, reading, research & editing.  Totally awesome:
 Inspired Writing by Dana Levesque

What can we learn from...pre-school teachers?!

review of Hybrid Pedagogy's "LEARNING FROM EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION: HIGHER ED AND THE PROCESS OF BECOMINg"

This article, remarkably, touches on a lot of concepts that I've been thinking about as a teacher lately.  These include issues like how to encourage a growth mindset, learning as risk taking (and how to encourage it), and how to bring aspects of affect into the classroom (i.e. how to care about students as whole learners, not just a set of skills- for of course skill growth and how one feels about oneself as a learner are deeply connected!).    While the authors compare the way a pre-k teacher might give a gentle hug to a student, they list "other ways to 'hold'" students by talking to students about their own concerns, goals and intentions, and "In these ways we hope to separate our care for them as persons from assignment grades or other elements of class."   Lovely. 

Another section that struck me was in their section about respecting students as human equals, with the idea that setting ourselves up as holders of knowledge doesn't make room for knowing and learning to be a two way street, and takes away students' ability to influence a course:

 It is almost as if we make a deal with students: we will give you information if you leave your self, who you are and what you otherwise care about, at the door (and we promise we’ll do the same). Learning will be better, we imply, if it’s not mixed up with actually being people.

Yikes.  And yet....as much as I base my thinking about education on non-"banking" principles, I've come to run a very transfer-based course.   My students need so much guidance around writing that I did not feel comfortable letting them "flounder" - pursuing the same old strategies that have led to failure in the past.  At the same time, although my course doesn't leave a lot of room for students to choose their own topics, I'm trying hard to more explicitly create room for their responses and experiences in their writing.  In the end, how the hell else can students have an opinion or form an argument if it's not based on some part of their own life experience?

[To deal with this problem,] teachers can minimize traditional forms of information transfer (lecture or videos). In their stead, we can create environments where students care about practicing, feel supported in practicing, and are challenged to practice both disciplinary and soft skills.

This to me is the real challenge.   In my online courses, I have had experiences where I care about practicing.  It is always where one of two things is happening: 1) a topic I feel passionately about or 2) knowledge that moves me forward in my profession (or both!).  This week I'm excited to learn video software, read new articles, and work on a research paper on supporting neurodiversity in a writing classroom because I feel thankful to be learning these things!  Anything that feels un-relevant immediately sparks up boredom, annoyance and resistance .  In this way, I think being a student myself, and reflecting on that experience, has been the best guide for me as a teacher.  Without empathy for their experience as learners, how can we design learning that makes sense to them!?

The link between AD/HD and executive function

A new post from the Beyond BookSmart blog about AD/HD and EF issues - A great explanation of how these issues are connected!

The Relationship Between Executive Function and ADHD in Children