Blog Part A: Description of Need or Opportunity
Educational Need: The educational need in my wicked problem is to promote fluent literacy skills in the primary grade levels. Many students are below grade level expectations when it comes to reading fluency and comprehension. This puts them behind as they move on in their educations. Students that never fully develop their reading skills are more at risk to drop out of school. Struggling readers are best reached in the primary grades to prevent continual struggles throughout their education.
Technology Solution: I propose a three-step program to help increase literacy skills of struggling readers. The first technology tool to employ is audio books. Audio books are proven to increase both reading fluency and comprehension. Audio books allow students to replay specific passages multiple times, which eliminates the demand of a one on one instructor to practice fluency. But, audio books alone do not solve the wicked problem of struggling readers. To help create a purpose for reading and to test comprehension the full integration of the program Accelerated Reader(AR) is the next step in this proposal. This program offers online comprehension and vocabulary quizzes for students after completion of reading an audio book. Teachers need to include AR as a part of their daily routine, otherwise the students will not buy into the program and therefore it will not be as effective. The AR quizzes track student progress towards individual goals and also allows teachers to track students’ individual progress. The final technology step is to have students blog on comprehension prompts. This blogging will increase student motivation and will allow the student to make meaningful connections in order to promote real world learning. This is an alternative to paper and pencil responses, which aren’t as effective because they don’t allow easy student tracking of progress and instant peer feedback. All the above steps are reasonable approaches that are low to zero cost. Teachers are able to rent audio books for free from local libraries, many schools are enrolled in Accelerated Reader and student blogging is free.
Logistics of the Solution: This program will be used on a daily basis with quarterly tracking of progress. The program can be implemented as a workshop where pairs of students take turns using computers for audio books while other students read independently. Another computer will be used for AR quizzes and comprehension blogging. It will be used in 2nd-5th grade classrooms. Teachers will need to implement this plan throughout the entire year. This will allow students to meet quarterly AR goals, move up in reading levels due to audio book supprt, and track their personal growth of blogging responses. It will be the grade level teachers responsibility to enforce the program and promote it as a daily activity.
Resources:
The Importance of Reading Practice Implementation Plan: To implement this plan during this course I will create a best practices presentation outlining the steps to apply this plan in a classroom. This presentation will explain how to effectively set up each step and the benefit of each step in regards to promoting fluent readers. After this course is complete, I plan on sharing this presentation and hosting a “getting start” workshop session in order to help teachers set up the program in their classrooms.
Indicators of a Successful Project: To track student reading progress teachers will be able to look at three resources of data: The first is the accelerated reader quizzes results and individual student goal progress. The second source is tracking student reading progress on standardized MAP testing. The last is to analyze Dibels results (one on one reading assessments). All these resources will offer data to indicate if the program is increasing reading ability. An additional informal indicator of success is to track student progress on their comprehension blogs.
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