KWL to KWHL...too cool

Hello and welcome to my latest tweet commentary. Since we are now 4 weeks into PLN postings I thought it would be a good time to comment on the high-level project first (I will still comment on this week’s specific article below). First this has been a good project for making me think about technology in the classroom. However, although I am following people, I do not feel I am building a PLN. So far most of the things I have found make me say, “I think I would have found that (or something similar) if I had googled ‘technology in education.’” So I still need a better understanding of how Twitter is making my life easier v. being one more place to look for information I can find elsewhere.

So, on to this week’s assignment…today I started in one place and ended in another. Originally, I clicked on the Katherine McKnight (LiteracyWorld) Tweet: Presentation at National Conf on Differentiated Instruction using tech to teach writing http://t.co/V9LPvjb. This lead to a 32-slide presentation on different tech tools for ELA. I looked at blogs from the US and New Zealand. These will be good resources if unit plans work on classroom blogs in the future. There were also great examples of how to vary imbedded content in a blog and how to display information differently on the page.

While that is all worthwhile in the long-run, the most immediately useful tool came in a link off of slide deck. The link took me to http://langwitches.org/blog/. Where I found an article reinventing the KWL chart we have studied in our NLU classes. The site suggested adding an “H” to the chart making it a KWHL chart. The newly added “H” represents “How.” So the chart now means: Know, Want to know, How to know, Learned. The key to the new “H” is to get students to answer the following questions:
• HOW can we find the answers to these questions?
• HOW can we find out what we want to learn?
• HOW did the learning take place?
• HOW can we learn more?
• HOW will we find the information?
The great thing is that these questions obviously lend themselves to the integration of technology into the classroom. By adding the “H” we can get kids to self-start on how to find answers AND how to use technology to do it. I thought this was straightforward, simple, and brilliant.