Some of the teachers that attended the MUSD, Session 3, inquired:
How to convert a PDF file into a Word Document
With Adobe Acrobat
*Note: you’ll need the paid version of Acrobat
to use this method. If you don’t have Acrobat, or only have the free version,
skip to the next section.
Open the PDF document
you’d like to convert.
Click File, then Save
As.
In the drop-down menu
labeled Format, select the .DOCX format.
Click Save.
You may have to wait for a moment.
Without Adobe Acrobat
The free version of Adobe Acrobat won’t allow
you to make conversions, so for those of you who don’t feel like shelling out
$300 just to do a single file conversion, we’ve detailed a completely free way
to convert your PDF into .DOCX below.
In the pop-up window,
find the file you want to convert, select it, and click Open.
Enter your email address
in the box.
Complete the Captcha code
on the bottom to prove that you’re a human.
Click the blue Convert
button at the bottom.
Head over to the inbox of
the email address you entered in step 4, and look for an email from pdftoword.
Open the email and
download the freshly-converted file.
Batch file converting
If you’ve got a whole bunch of PDFs that you
need to convert into a word-friendly format, here’s the best way to do it
Download Wondershare
PDF to Word for Windows or Mac. The free trial lasts for 15
days, but it doesn’t have any limits on the number of files you can convert.
Follow the instructions
to complete the installation process.
Open Wondershare.
Import and convert your
files. Wondershare can batch convert up to 50 PDF documents at once.
We dove into depth of knowledge and text complexity!
Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Bloom's Taxonomy vs. Norman Webb's
depth of knowledge
The Common Core Standards
are the cornerstones of the Smarter Balanced and PARCC assessments, Webb’s
Depth of Knowledge (scale of cognitive demand) and Blooms Revised Taxonomy
(levels of intellectual ability) are the framework and the structures that will
be used to evaluate students. Assessing curriculum, developing formative
assessments, evaluation curriculum, and evaluation of student's knowledge at the
highest levels is being shared by two progressive cognitive matrices. Depth of
knowledge, and complexity of knowledge is the heart of the more rigorous
assessments being implemented this year.
They share many ideas and concepts yet
are different in level of cognitive demand, level of difficulty, complexity of
verbs vs. depth of thinking required, and the scale of cognitive demand.
Teachers need to learn how the frameworks are used to develop curriculum and
how to use them to enhance instructions. Teachers and students can use Blooms
Questions Stems and Webb’s DOK questions stems to create higher order thinking
and improve achievement.
Are you ready to
use the DOK or Blooms daily in your class?
The links below
are great resources of Blooms Taxonomy and Webb’s Depth of Knowledge.
1.
How rigorous is your curriculum i.e. your teaching expertise, knowledge and or
skills?
2.
What resources do you use to insure all students are learning at high levels?
3.
What is the quality of the professional development being used in your school
to develop curriculum i.e. teaching expertise, knowledge or skills?
4. How many
rigorous learning characteristics do you see in your school? examples:
Higher/deeper levels of thinking (non-routine), collaborative learning;
constructing knowledge, problem-solving, higher-order thinking, teaching to
others, convey content ideas in multiple formats i.e. speaking, writing,
modeling, incorporating knowledge from other content areas.
Placing the burden of teaching literacy
entirely on ELA
I
believe the Common Core standards open a window of opportunity for
systematically building students’ knowledge as teachers shift from “just-right
texts” to complex texts. Another potentially transformative shift of the Common
Core standards is the acknowledgment that literacy extends across all content
areas. This is explicitly recognized by the standards in two ways: 1) the
inclusion of literacy standards for social studies, science, and technical
subjects in grades 6 – 12; and 2) the demand for an increase in informational
texts.
Under
key design considerations in the introduction
to the literacy standards, Common Core’s authors state that the inclusion of social
studies, science, and technical subjects “reflects the unique, time-honored
place of ELA teachers in developing students’ literacy skills while at the same
time recognizing that teachers in other areas must have a role in this
development as well” (bold added).
They
furthermore point out that “because the ELA classroom must focus on literature
(stories, drama, and poetry) as well as literary nonfiction, a great deal of
informational reading in grades 6–12 must take place in other classes”
(bold added).
Critical thinking is a way of deciding, making inference,
and or drawing conclusions whether a claim is true, partially true, or false.
Critical thinking is a process that leads to skills that can be learned,
mastered and used. The Common Core emphasizes development of critical thinking
as a tool by which one can come about reasoned conclusions based on a reasoned
“Socratic Method” process. This critical thinking process incorporates
background knowledge, opinion, fact, passion and creativity, but guides it with
discipline, practicality, pragmatics, and common sense. Critical thinking is an
important component of many fields such as math, education, politics, business,
science and the arts.
How do
we apply, learn or judge values and morals?
Why are
personality traits perceived as positive or negative?
How
does the author use figurative language to help the reader infer the nature of
each sister?
How
would you rank the amoral traits of the antagonist?
How
would you rank the moral traits of the protagonist?
How are
the elements of plot used by the author to teach the reader a moral lesson?
Common
Core Critical Thinking Reading Passages - College and Career Readiness
Critical
thinking reading passages are the foundation of Socratic seminars and quality
close reading. Selecting reading passages that inspire curiosity, critical
thinking and can be used for either close reading or Socratic seminars takes
pre-planning and a bit of text analysis. One of the best methods for selecting
Critical Thinking Reading Passages is using a Syntopical examination of how
many great ideas the passages contain. Dr. Mortimer J. Adler created a list of
103 philosophical topics that can be used to analyze text for the quality of
ideas presented. Text selection is key to quality close reading and immersive
Socratic seminars
ONE PAGECRITICAL THINKING PASSAGES ALIGNED TO the COMMON CORE from Depaul University
One website that helps determine the Grade
Level Equivalency (GLE) of a passage is called STORYtoolz. You simply
copy and paste your text into the box, and it averages several different GLE
programs to provide an overall GLE score.
The other website provides information about
the percentage of words in a passage that are high frequency words. This vocabulary profiler website looks
daunting, but it's really quite easy to use. You simply copy and paste your
text into the box and click the submit window. You will then be shown the
percentage of words in the text that fall within the 1,000 most high frequency
words and the 2,000 most high frequency words.
Use these websites to check readability levels
of passages your ESOL students read to ensure that you're providing students
with readings that are level appropriate. As a rule of thumb, ESOL students
should know 90% to 95% of the words in a passage to be level-appropriate.
Helps you read more,
understand difficult English faster, and learn words in new ways.
Another resource
that I discovered recently is the Readability Calculator at Online-Utility.org. The tool allows you to either enter a URL or directly copy
and paste text into a text box. Their algorithm is more or less spelled out in
the analysis, and the results are estimated for several different metrics
including the Flesh-Kincaid. This is a must bookmark for any teacher.
Another web-based resource available to
determine a Lexile® score.
A Lexile® score takes into account the frequency of the vocabulary used within
the text, as well as sentence length. This is an alternative to a
Grade Level Equivalency measure.
The Lexile® Analyzer is a tool
developed by MetaMetrics that
you can use to determine a Lexile® score for text that you write or select to
ensure that the text is at an appropriate reading level for your students.
After submitting your text on the Lexile® Analyzer, the tool will generate
a Lexile® measure. To do this, you first have to register on the Lexile® website with your email address
and password. Then you prepare your text by saving your text as a plain text
file (using a ".txt" extension). Then you upload the file, and the
analyzer tool will generate the Lexile® score.
Literacy Leveler – Quickly Determine a Book’s Reading Level
Literacy Leveler
is a an iOS app (iPhone and iPad versions available) that allows you scan a
book’s ISBN barcode and discover the reading level of the content of that book.
Literacy Leveler supports Lexile®, DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment®), and
Guided Reading leveling systems. If you don’t have a book’s ISBN barcode
available, you can search for books by title or author. After discovering the
reading level of a book’s content you can add it to a library in Literacy
Leveler. Literacy Leveler’s database is focused on books that are appropriate
for elementary school and middle school students.
These are the two video clips I showed during this session:
Organize Your Thinking to
Critically Analyze Text
Grade 5 / Social Studies / Reading
CCSS: ELA.RI.5.2 ELA.SL.5.1
I originally saw this video at my friend's presentation at the CTA Good Teaching Conference - South in Anaheim, CA Her name is Barbara and she has a blog on Math Lesson Study: commoncorecohort.wordpress.com
