Words Their Way, Reading Programs, and Literacy Curricula

For a long time there's been different approaches to teaching recently. Recently, the Reading Wars have ebbed as most schools settle into a system which relies in large part on classic phonics but for decades before that, the Reading Wars between the Whole Language and Phonics people raged.

Currently the big fights in literacy curriculum have more to do with the increased demands (ie rigor) of the Common Core and how the heck to teach it.  Schools are struggling to develop skills at teaching close reading and the ability to do sophisticated synthesis and comparisons between two or even three informational texts.

But in the background, there remains some big disagreements on the role of curriculum, standards, and technology.  Some people still believe in and rely on the classic basal readers which provide a recipe and all the materials for each grade level. Reading Street, Journeys, and Wonders reign as leading reading programs. An alternative approach which has had great traction across the country is Words Their Way (now it belongs to Pearson) which has students sorting out sounds and cutting them into little pieces.

These are are very traditional programs in terms of delivery so they often get paired with slick modern technology solutions such as VocabularySpellingCity.  Here's a success story on the mechanics of combining  Words Their Way with VSC and a research study that talks about how the high effectiveness of pairing VSC with WTW:

VocabularySpellingCity is the only resource we've found that has the capacity to be paired with the Words Their Way approach to accomplish the goals of spelling, phonics and vocabulary instruction,” write Nielsen-Winkelman and West. “As educational technologies emerge and evolve, it is essential to use a critical eye toward the specific tool affordances when making decisions about instructional practice.”

The article, “Improving Word Study — Moving Beyond Paper and Pencil to Transformative Educational Technology,” was published in the June 2015 issue of Literacy Special Interest, the Journal of the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) Literacy Professional Learning Network, in conjunction with the ISTE 2015 Conference.

Creating A Streamlined Process

Nielsen-Winkelman and West identified six key components for phonics, vocabulary and spelling instructional practices and used them to evaluate VocabularySpellingCity (VSC) and Words Their Way (WTW): (1) systematic instruction, (2) explicit/direct instruction, (3) making connections, (4) repeated exposure, (5) comprehension of material read silently or orally, and (6) oral reading of connected text.

Credit: Nielsen-Winkelman, Tiffany and West, Lynnea

Does Moodle Support the Technology Enhanced Items for Assessment in the Common Core

Does Moodle's LMS support the seven new technology enhancements to  Common Core tests?

One user of Moodle (Plymouth University, UK) says that these types of questions are available in Moodle: (Links go to Moodle documentation)

• Calculated question
• Simple calculated
• Calculated Multiple choice
• Drag and drop into text
• Drag and drop markers
• Drag and drop onto image
• Drag and drop matching
• Embedded answers (Cloze)
• Essay
• Matching
• Multiple choice (MCQ)
• Numerical
• OU Multiple response
• Random short answer matching
• Select missing words
• Short answer
• True/false

What are the technology enhancements to  Common Core tests from PARC and Smarter Balance.  Edudemic has a good article which reviews

1. Drag and Drop: This item type does exactly what the name implies. Students need to drag an item from one part of the screen to another. IS it click, drag, click to drop?

2. Multiple Select: This item type is most similar to a traditional standardized test format. It is a multiple choice question, but instead of just one correct answer, there are many, and students must choose all of them to get the question correct.

3.Text Selection/Highlighting: This item type requires students to click on words, phrases, or entire sentences as a way to answer questions about specific parts of a text.

4. Equation Builder: This item is like a mini word processor that includes specialized mathematical symbols, ranging from simple division signs to more complex trigonometric symbols, such as sin and cosine. WILL THIS SHOW UP ON LANGUAGE ARTS TESTS?

5. Drop Down Menus: This item type includes a menu that expands when clicked on. From the expanded menu, students can see possible answer choices. They click on the word or number that completes the answer, based on context.

6.Constructed Response: This item is an embedded word processor. It has simple word processing functionality, like the ability to change text size and style and to cut, copy and paste.

7. Multiple Part Question: This item is not a new item type; rather it is a new way of organizing items. The Multiple Part Question asks related, tiered questions using a combination of other enhanced item types.

The new generation of advanced standards, mostly the Common Core, has a new generation of tests, mostly from Smarter Balance and PARC. There are of course the Texas and Florida versions of the standards and a few others.

The FL standards are different than the Common Core standards in a number of truly insignificant ones. But, by Governor Dick Scott demanding that Florida not use the Common Core, he becomes a hero to some people on the right. He also  forces all the teachers and educators in FL to spend millions of hours trying to slightly rejiggle all those great common core materials into something they can use to support their work by doing a crosswalk of the national materials to their local needs.

Who are the big technology education companies with the expertise that I need:

Moodlerooms
Classroom Revolution
Webanywhere