If students read a document from start to finish without scanning it first, without marking up the text, or without taking notes or otherwise processing it, they will retain very little. In a face-to-face classroom, you can directly facilitate the critical reading process, where it is fairly easy for your students to mark up printed material with a pencil or highlighter. In a remote learning environment, where students will often be reading and viewing content on a computer screen, the critical reading process is not as intuitive. Our hosts this week, Ty Stevenson and Paul Beckermann, will share strategies and tech suggestions for guiding your students through deep reading protocols for digital content. They will also meet with Dr. Stephanie Couch to learn more about invention education.
Dr. Stephanie Couch is Executive Director of the Lemelson-MIT Program within the School of Engineering at MIT. Her research focuses on invention education and STEM learning opportunities, as well as invention education’s impacts on students (especially those from underrepresented backgrounds), schools, and local communities. She has an extensive background in leading work within multi-stakeholder STEM education networks, including formation of the statewide California STEM Learning Network, and the Gateways East Bay STEM Network in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara after working in the California State Legislature on education policy issues.
We created mini-lessons of ways you would work as an inventor from home…fun activities you could do with things you have around the house that get the creative juices flowing and give you a taste of what it’s like to work as an inventor.
Dr. Stephanie Couch, Executive Director of the Lemelson-MIT Program
Resources
These resources and strategies were discussed during the Livecast and may be useful to you when teaching virtually.
Strategies and Tools That Support Digital Critical Reading
Consider which text-based or multimedia formats you plan to post for your students and choose the best strategies and tools for your learning situation. You might decide to offer your students several choices for each format, so they can find the option that works best for them. The following are examples shared during the Livecast.
Highlight Tool Add-on in Google Docs
- Create and name highlighters to represent important concepts you are reviewing and save them to your library.
- Extract the highlights by color or sequence for a quick summary of your annotations.
- Export highlighter sets and share them with your students.
- Help students extend beyond the text, or the video in this case, and allow them to synthesize and communicate their interpretations to others.
- ReClipped is an example of a tool that allows you to upload original video, or a video from YouTube, to share with your students.
- Students can make and reply to comments from their peers.
Inventing Matters With Lemelson-MIT
Explore the unique ways that inventors find and solve problems with “invention education” to help students develop the skills needed for the workforce and prepare young people to be creative problem-solvers in their communities and beyond.
- According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, Americans throw away over 300 million pairs of shoes each year. These shoes end up in landfills and can take 30 to 40 years to decompose. Imagine that you were asked to design and create an earth-friendly sneaker that not only is comfortable for your feet but also completely recyclable. What would you design?
- Have you been feeling bored or stressed because of staying at home due to COVID-19? Do you know that experiencing bad feelings for a long time may potentially lead to health issues? In this activity, you will work on a “Cure it!” invention project by creating your own musical instruments. Music can certainly help cure us! You will develop the hands-on skill of using common materials to create a string instrument.