Good Listeners Are Successful Students

Tales2Go and eSchool News offer the whitepaper, Listening, the 21^st Century Learner, and the Common Core Standards. According to the paper, a good listener is not necessarily one who sits quietly or keeps eyes focused on a lecturer or storyteller; it’s one who understands. Students who are good listeners are those who understand skills and how to use them. Good listeners know how to participate in conversations and to “reflect on what they’ve heard.”

Students with reading difficulties profit from listening to audio books—audio books allow teachers to differentiate instruction. But, where do Common Core Standards come in? They offer “a ‘staircase’ of increasing complexity for the student as he strives to comprehend more and more of what a book provides.” Students are better able to achieve the goals of Common Core if they have been exposed to audio versions of fiction and non-fiction stories. There is a lot to be said about learning through listening, especially when it comes to modeling human voices that are fluent in reading.

Study Blue Best for Mobile Studying

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) selected Study Blue, a free mobile study service, as the Best Website for Teaching and Learning. With Study Blue, students use a Digital Backpack, which helps them store, study, share, compare, and master coursework. The program features “digital flashcards with images and audio, cloud storage for notes, personalized practice quizzes, crowd-sourced study guides and more.”  According to one librarian, “Study Blue has brought an interactive and fun way to study to our young people.” So, if you are looking for help with student study skills, why not recommend Study Blue to students 13 and up? It fits their lifestyles, because they can access it from their computers, iPods, iPhones, and Androids. Coming soon is an iPad app.

For Teens Who Prefer to Study Online

The article, Teens Take Studying Online, by Jason Koebler of U.S. News Education, describes different ways students study online. Some students study with others throughout the world by using social networking study services such as Grockit.com and Openstudy.com.  Some use Skype to connect, and some study on their own on a site like Quizlet.com, which offers millions of flash cards for curricular subjects and SAT prep. Teachers use Moodle, Edmodo, Blackboard, and other services to interact online with students and to set up student group chatting. Leaders at Grockit created an internal study to see how students were studying using this online network. The findings included: students in groups studied three times longer than students who studied on their own and covered twice as much material.

Listening in Class While Taking Notes: Good or Bad?

When teachers are lecturing or there’s a class discussion, does taking notes detract from learning? Some educators, like Jacqueline Moloney, Executive Vice Chancellor and Head of Online Learning at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, think so. Although she admits that she loves to take notes, she understands that when doing so, students miss some of the content. The idea is to encourage students to concentrate fully in class sessions while cameras capture through video what’s going on in class. Students can then go back and review lessons as needed. Studies have shown that learning from Podcasts and other videos of lectures can be effective, and if students have the advantage of the live lectures and discussions plus review through technology, they do even better.