Greetings!
Spring is finally here, and with it comes a focus on budget cuts and creating cost effective professional development calendars for the coming school year. As graduation requirements become more stringent we find that many of you are calling to ask about best practices for teaching literacy skills in your middle and secondary schools. This is of course a very important area. Being EBISS districts we appreciate that your emphasis is on team collaboration aimed at identifying research based or validated programs that address reading and writing skill development for students and teachers in the 6th - 12th grades.
For this reason we are dedicating a significant portion of this newsletter to that topic. In this edition of our newsletter you will find links to free, high quality professional development including an excellent guide to literacy programs and decision rules from Tigard-Tualatin School District.
Please take a moment to click around our April newsletter. We are confident that you will find something that will be useful to you and your district.
Sincerely,
Your EBISS State Coordinators
PS We really enjoyed seeing you at the NW PBIS conference last month. There was certainly plenty to celebrate.
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 Middle-Secondary Literacy Resources
Tigard-Tualatin Middle-Secondary Reading Protocol, pages 7-11.
The recently released Oregon K-12 Literacy Framework professional development modules.
Adolescent Literacy presentations from CTL Conference 2010 - free access. You will need to create a free account and then go back and find the strand above. Contains lots of great information including a very practical classroom intervention presentation by Kevin Feldman.
Anita Archer video series - Literacy Teaching Strategies .
Amazing on-line training modules with something for everyone from the IRIS center at Vanderbilt University. |
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Education News In Brief
White House Turns Attention to Bully Prevention in Schools
In support of this a new federal program and companion website has been launched: Safe and Supportive Schools. The idea being that students can't learn if they don't feel safe and experience a supportive and caring community. This website will be a good place to check from time to time for evidence based practices around bully prevention and drug and alcohol prevention. They include PBIS among their recommended programs for bully prevention. The PBIS bully prevention programs are free and easily downloaded to your computer.
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Technology Tips
Still doubting the power of social media? Check out this real-time counter that gives you, among other things, the number of twitter accounts set up or emails sent in the last second. It will boggle you mind. Seven excellent social media tools for teachers! As you gear up for Spring benchmarking, here's a fun app that puts the stopwatch right on your computer screen. We recommend the count-up version because the count-down buzzer is pretty obnoxious! http://www.online-stopwatch.com/
Check out this awesome timesaving tool for creating automatic grading of quizzes, posting results to spreadsheet, and option to email grades automatically to students - all with a few mouse clicks! Must have a free Google account to use.
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DSSP Reminder
The final DSSP is due May 2, 2011. Be sure to schedule an EBISS meeting to complete this document.
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