Literacy Smarts


Book Description

This highly readable book is about keeping the mind open to the amazing possibilities that the digital world affords teachers and their students. Aside from the ability to give immediate feedback and save responses, interactive whiteboards can facilitate using assessment to improve student learning. Literacy Smarts advocates for student-centred learning, where teachers act as guides on the journey of learning that includes student choice, focused assessment, differentiated curriculum, collaborative work, and higher-level thinking. Based on extensive classroom experience, the book argues that interactive whiteboards can create numerous possibilities for teaching and learning. It describes how interactive whiteboards can lead us into the future of learning -- interpreting, managing, exploring, and expanding our students' thinking and enabling authentic learning. It will enable teachers to help students grow as learners as they think, interact, and engage with a wide variety of texts across the content areas.




Reading for Our Lives


Book Description

An award-winning journalist and literacy advocate provides a clear, step-by-step guide to helping your child thrive as a reader and a learner. When her child went off to school, Maya Smart was shocked to discover that a good education in America is a long shot, in ways that few parents fully appreciate. Our current approach to literacy offers too little, too late, and attempting to play catch-up when our kids get to kindergarten can no longer be our default strategy. We have to start at the top. The brain architecture for reading develops rapidly during infancy, and early language experiences are critical to building it. That means parents’ work as children’s first teachers begins from day one too—and we need deeper knowledge to play our positions. Reading for Our Lives challenges the bath-book-bed mantra and the idea that reading aloud to our kids is enough to ensure school readiness. Instead, it gives parents easy, immediate, and accessible ways to nurture language and literacy development from the start. Through personal stories, historical accounts, scholarly research, and practical tips, this book presents the life-and-death urgency of literacy, investigates inequity in reading achievement, and illuminates a path to a true, transformative education for all.




Book Smart


Book Description

In Book Smart: How to Support Successful, Motivated Readers, the experience of reading together is used as a vehicle for discussing the varied yet interconnected language and literacy skills that jumpstart the career of a successful reader.




How Learning Works


Book Description

Praise for How Learning Works "How Learning Works is the perfect title for this excellent book. Drawing upon new research in psychology, education, and cognitive science, the authors have demystified a complex topic into clear explanations of seven powerful learning principles. Full of great ideas and practical suggestions, all based on solid research evidence, this book is essential reading for instructors at all levels who wish to improve their students' learning." —Barbara Gross Davis, assistant vice chancellor for educational development, University of California, Berkeley, and author, Tools for Teaching "This book is a must-read for every instructor, new or experienced. Although I have been teaching for almost thirty years, as I read this book I found myself resonating with many of its ideas, and I discovered new ways of thinking about teaching." —Eugenia T. Paulus, professor of chemistry, North Hennepin Community College, and 2008 U.S. Community Colleges Professor of the Year from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education "Thank you Carnegie Mellon for making accessible what has previously been inaccessible to those of us who are not learning scientists. Your focus on the essence of learning combined with concrete examples of the daily challenges of teaching and clear tactical strategies for faculty to consider is a welcome work. I will recommend this book to all my colleagues." —Catherine M. Casserly, senior partner, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "As you read about each of the seven basic learning principles in this book, you will find advice that is grounded in learning theory, based on research evidence, relevant to college teaching, and easy to understand. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in applying the science of learning to college teaching, and they graciously share it with you in this organized and readable book." —From the Foreword by Richard E. Mayer, professor of psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara; coauthor, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction; and author, Multimedia Learning




Oregon Reads Aloud


Book Description

Oregon Reads Aloud is a collection of twenty-five read-aloud stories for children, written and illustrated by Oregon authors and illustrators. The twenty-five stories in Oregon Reads Aloud are a celebration of all things Oregon, including a great food cart feud, the dance of the Chapman Swifts, the creation of Oregon’s mountain ranges, and a legendary African American cowboy at the Pendleton Round-up. The book is a tribute to twenty-five years of SMART Reading’s work empowering Oregon children for reading and learning success. Oregon Reads Aloud proudly features the state’s rich trove of talent within the children’s literary community, including Eric A, Kimmel, Elizabeth Rusch, David Horn, Brian Parker, and Trudy Ludwig, among many others.




The Upside of Digital Devices


Book Description

Trying to police and protect a child from screen time is unquestionably one of the most confusing and frustrating responsibilities of good parenting. It's a tough job being a 'media monitor' all the time. Technology is at the center of everything we do--TVs, smart phones, computers, and tablets are no longer luxuries, they are necessities for navigating life today. But technology can also be detrimental to growing minds, and parents must master the necessary skills to help their children not only survive in this digital world, but to actually thrive. Kids love smart phones, tablets, computers, TVs, anything that gives them screen time. They come by their dependence honestly--they learn it from us, the 'adults.' We've become a culture of screen addicts, and that's especially challenging for parents. But the solution is not found in constantly policing the time kids are glued to a screen or in protecting what they are being exposed to; it's found in how they are engaging and interacting with that screen. Nicole Dreiske, founder and director of the International Children's Media Center, is one of the most respected pioneers in the understanding and cultivation of new techniques for transforming the way kids view, use and engage in electronic screens. In The Upside of Digital Devices, recipient of The National Parenting Center's Seal of Approval, she provides parents with simple, practical instructions as well as a variety of effective tools for creating meaningful moments and critical thinking skills that can mark a turning point in their children's lives and futures.




Media Literacy in the K-12 Classroom


Book Description

"The average 8-18 year-old spends over 10 hours a day consuming media. Unfortunately their minds are often "shut off" as they watch TV, surf the web, or listen to music. Help your students "tune in" so they can begin to analyze messages and understand techniques used to influence them. By incorporating media literacy into the curriculum you can teach your students to question marketing, recognize propaganda, and understand stereotypes, and you'll also be teaching them valuable critical thinking skills they need for a successful future.




So Many Smarts!


Book Description

Encourages readers to look at their own combination of brain power, skills, abilities, and capabilities to determine how they might learn best, excel, and be themselves. Age range: 4-8.




Robot-Proof, revised and updated edition


Book Description

A fresh look at a “robot-proof” education in the new age of generative AI. In 2017, Robot-Proof, the first edition, foresaw the advent of the AI economy and called for a new model of higher education designed to help human beings flourish alongside smart machines. That economy has arrived. Creative tasks that, seven years ago, seemed resistant to automation can now be performed with a simple prompt. As a result, we must now learn not only to be conversant with these technologies, but also to comprehend and deploy their outputs. In this revised and updated edition, Joseph Aoun rethinks the university’s mission for a world transformed by AI, advocating for the lifelong endeavor of a “robot-proof” education. Aoun puts forth a framework for a new curriculum, humanics, which integrates technological, data, and human literacies in an experiential setting, and he renews the call for universities to embrace lifelong learning through a social compact with government, employers, and learners themselves. Drawing on the latest developments and debates around generative AI, Robot-Proof is a blueprint for the university as a force for human reinvention in an era of technological change—an era in which we must constantly renegotiate the shifting boundaries between artificial intelligence and the capacities that remain uniquely human.




Smart by Nature


Book Description

"Describes strategies for greening the campus and the curriculum, conducting environmental audits, rethinking school food, and transforming schools into models of sustainable community"-- P. [4] of cover.