Vocabulary Archives

Online Learning: Supporting Teachers

March 21, 2020 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

e-Tutoring and Online Learning:

With the Covid-19 crisis gripping the country, there have been major changes to everyday life: social distancing, cancelled schools, closed businesses and deep economic uncertainty. These changes are having profound impacts on education as teachers, schools, and students are forced to adjust to e-Tutoring and online learning. This shift can be challenging, thus we’ve organized a number of suggestions to help smooth the transition and aid educators in providing a positive learning environment for students in these difficult times.

Logistics and Tech:

For e-Tutoring and online learning, there are a few technological essentials. First, you need a mode of clear audio and visual communication with your student and luckily there are plenty of options! Services such as Skype, Facetime, Google Hangouts, or Zoom all provide free video conferencing. Additionally, it’s important to make sure that both you and your student have reliable internet access and a quiet location to work. Communicating digitally inherently presents a barrier and it is crucial to remove any additional distractions; lagging calls, freezing screens or a barking dog can all damage the effectiveness of your session.

Also, it is important to have some manner of a shared workspace with your student for online learning. We recommend a shared white board program such as Groupboard, or the screen sharing available in Zoom. For math subjects, it is essential to be able to work through problems visually together; a Wacom writing tablet (or similar type) will also speed up your ability to draw diagrams and write out equations. For English and grammar exercises, however, it may be preferable to work in a shared Google Doc. Your choice of shared workspace may change with your student’s needs, so it is prudent to become comfortable with a few different options. Simply put, writing out diagrams on paper and holding them up to the camera is not the most efficient or effective way to communicate with your student.

Finally, regardless of how you plan to communicate with your student, it is important to make these decisions before you start your online learning. This will give you time to ensure that both you and your student have access to and familiarity with whatever technology is required. You want to avoid spending ten minutes of your session trying to guide your student through the functioning of a Google Doc, unless the purpose is digital coaching a tutorial of this platform or tool.

Reducing Friction from Online Learning:

When e-Tutoring and delivering online instruction, it is essential that you and your student both have copies of the material. We recommend having a dedicated channel for file sharing. Whether it is an email thread, text chain or the chat option in your video conferencing program, you both need to know how information and documents will be sent. Then, if you need to add a worksheet to your lesson plan or send over another round of practice problems, you won’t waste valuable time logging into emails or sending links to the wrong place.

Additionally, if you are not using software that includes screen sharing, you should vocalize every time you change tabs. While it may seem obvious to you that you’ve moved from the digital white board back to the worksheet, if you do not explicitly tell your student, they may not change tabs with you and get lost. Each time you and your student are not aligned, you risk disrupting the flow of the lesson.

Finally, if a student is completing any homework offline, you need to ensure that you have a way to view it. This can be achieved with a document camera during the session, or by having the student scan their work and email it to you before the session. If students don’t have a typical scanner, they can take a photo and email, text, or upload it to a designated spot.

Maintaining Student Interest:

Because you will lack many of the non-verbal cues that indicate if a student is engaged with online learning, it is harder to know that your student is paying attention during a remote session. In order to keep them interested, it is key to have the student actively participating in the session. You should constantly ask questions and have the student rephrase any information you provide in their own words. Remember, the moment you are talking and your student is not, they may have opened another tab or drifted into a dream world.

Additionally, because you are no longer in the room with your student, you should aim to ratchet up your enthusiasm. Learning from a screen can feel stiff compared to learning in person, so it is up to you to compensate for that gap with fun and purposeful activities, a positive attitude and consistent energy.

Flexibility of Session Length and Schedule:

Because online learning doesn’t require travel, it allows you to be more flexible with your schedule. Breaking up a full-length session into two smaller sessions or scheduling short follow ups are now options that you can offer your students. Be creative! You can now schedule a session to outline an essay and another one to edit the final draft, or three thirty-minute sessions to do math drills and review content consistently throughout the week.

Providing Normalcy and Minimizing Disruption:

Given the current disruption to your students’ school life, you should check in on how they are handling the transition in their schools. Your students may have issues with their new remote classrooms and you can help them develop strategies to learn more effectively. This can be an ideal opportunity to model problem solving behavior; rather than prescribing solutions, use targeted questions to help guide your students to strategies on their own.

Additionally, be open to feedback. Ask your students about how your remote sessions are going and try to incorporate their suggestions. Check in about what they like and don’t like about online learning and be willing to adapt your approach to their needs.

Finally, in the midst of this crisis, online learning will act as an emotional support to your students. This is bound to be a trying time for your students; their daily routines, education and social life are all in upheaval. By continuing to provide the same warm, reassuring presence that you bring to your in-person sessions, you can be an important anchor of normalcy in their life. The very fact that you are taking additional steps to meet with them in the midst of a crisis signals your commitment to their education and general well-being — it will not be overlooked.

By Jacob Backer, Private Tutor, and Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed. and Learning Specialist

Annotate Digital Texts Successfully

June 19, 2019 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

The Future of Reading

Taking notes is important when reading academic material whether the text is digital or analog. There is a growing group of young minds, particularly generation Z (born between 1995 and 2012) who prefer consuming content exclusively on digital devices. Not all of these students annotate digital texts efficiently. This generation is the first born completely immersed in the internet and its associated channels and devices. The phone, tablet, and e-reader have become integrated with their lifestyles choices, almost like extensions of their bodies. Paper and pen is now often optional. For a student and parent, there are immense benefits in consuming content on digital devices. Textbooks are usually cheaper if downloaded and also extremely portable. I remember the days when I had to carry ten pounds worth of textbooks in my school bag. Now more and more academic institutions are even switching over to tablets and laptops for content consumption. When I see students consuming content digitally, for some students there are challenges with new information being easily retained and accessed. This becomes very important when writing research papers when items in the text may need to be annotated. Fortunately, with a little planning (and a piece of paper) it’s not too difficult to ensure students annotate digital texts efficiently and access the information they need.

Annotation Tips and Tricks on Kindle and other Tablet devices

E-readers such as the Kindle allow students to annotate digital texts through the highlighting feature and type in a note on the device. It’s later centrally stored and easy to access. However, this not always enough. When reading a print book, you can underline text, write some comments in the margin and even stick a small post-it note on the page. This ensures that the essence of the underline is remembered and immediately accessible. On a digital device, even though highlighting is possible, it can become time-consuming to type notes.

Kindle’s on-screen keyboard may be cumbersome to type notes for some students.

Recently I worked with two students reading the same book for class. One had the print version and the other had the Kindle. The first student was able to quickly use his pencil to underline text and write notes in the margin. The second student had to do a variety of swipes and presses and then carefully type in his notes in the rather clunky digital interface. However, there is a workaround to inputting text into the kindle device. Amazon has a digital notebook you can access on your computer with all the books downloaded and synced. All the student’s bookmarks and highlights are catalogued here and it’s very easy to copy and paste for quotations. Whenever you make a highlight in your Kindle device, it synchronizes the same text to your digital notebook. You can enter notes associated with every highlight in a corresponding text box online. This is usually faster than inputting on the kindle device with two thumbs. However, this means that you have to read with your Kindle and laptop, which might be off-putting and distracting for some students. Amazon does offer Kindle users the ability to read their books on their computers through a downloadable desktop application. The app has the same intuitive reading experience as on the Kindle device. But taking notes is still cumbersome in regards to accessibility. Once a student begins writing their assignment, it sometimes takes a while for them to find the information they are looking for in a very long text. Is there an alternative? Yes! There is. We recommend maintaining a master annotation sheet indexing all highlights in one location. A simple piece of paper is instantly accessible. For literary works with many chapters it can take much less time than accessing the corresponding highlights digitally. This is our little hack so students annotate digital texts more efficiently.

Using the Master Annotation Sheet

Digital annotation is very easy. We recommend the student split the paper in half longitudinally. In the first column, they write the chapter and letter pertaining to annotation. The number is for the corresponding chapter and the letter is for each idea. So three annotations in chapter 3 would look something like this:

3A Death of the queen

3B Riots in the streets

3C First kiss tension

Having this master sheet saves time for the student when they are writing their paper. They can quickly find the chapter and section highlighted, corresponding to the idea they would like to elaborate on.

Many students prefer to read on digital text and if it encourages students to read more, that’s a good thing. The Kindle is a powerful device with it’s built in dictionary and vocabulary builder. When you look up words definitions, they are automatically added to the vocabulary builder on the device. With vocabulary builder, you can use digital flashcards to later practice remembering these definitions. Most importantly, it is critical to make sure students can remember what they read and can easily access that information as effortlessly as possible. By having a little “old school” annotation sheet, they have a foolproof method to annotate digital texts and ensure their research writing is as efficient and effortless as possible.

By My Learning Springboard Editorial Team

Is Speed Reading Good Reading?

March 20, 2019 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Last week, a new speed-reading app was announced by Spritz, a technology developer. The company claims that:

“Reading is inherently time consuming because your eyes have to move from word to word and line to line. Traditional reading also consumes huge amounts of physical space on a page or screen, which limits reading effectiveness on small displays…Now, with compact text streaming from Spritz, content can be streamed one word at a time, without forcing your eyes to spend time moving around the page… Our “Redicle” technology enhances readability even more by using horizontal lines and hash marks to direct your eyes to the red letter in each word, so you can focus on the content that interests you.”

When the app was announced, Internet commenters immediately weighed in, mostly with positive feedback. However, is this app–and speed reading in general–a good thing for reading? According to a recent article in The Atlantic, this is not the first time that speed reading has promised to revolutionize reading and reading comprehension. “In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Evelyn Nielsen Wood discovered that she could read at a much faster pace than the normal 250-300 words per minute by sweeping a finger along the page as she read, reading entire groups of words at a time, and by avoiding sub-vocalization, or saying each word mentally. These techniques helped Wood reach 2,700 read words per minute, she claimed, and it was these principles she espoused in Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, her speed-reading business. By the 90s, though, the speed-reading craze slumped again. Perhaps because its students found the method to be harder than it sounded, or perhaps because those early Clinton years were simply a more relaxed time.”

People do speed read on their own to a certain extent, by skimming an entire text or reading key sections to pack in the most information in a short amount of time. However, according to The Atlantic, “a 2009 study found that skimmers did not remember very many details, nor could they make inferences from the text.” Most research points to a correlation between reading quickly and a lack of comprehension: that is, as reading speeds up, comprehension goes down.

The fact is, when we allow our brains to process the words individually, we are able to understand the text more fully and be able to speak to various layers within the text. Ultimately, what is important to reading comprehension–and quicker reading–is practice. According to Michael Masson, a psychologist at the University of Victoria, “what differentiates fast and slow readers is not how they read, he points out, but their overall language skills and vocabularies…Beginning readers can expect to read faster as they gain more practice, but eventually we each reach some upper limit. The simple answer, then, is ‘read more.’”

Here are some ways My Learning Springboard thinks about reading:

Should 9th Graders Study For College Entrance Exams?

January 29, 2019 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Worrying about college entrance exams — the ACT and SAT — seems to start earlier and earlier, which can unnecessarily derail important resources during the 9th grade year. It’s important to remember that many of the skills and concepts that you learn throughout high school — starting day one — will help develop the skills needed to succeed when testing time comes.

Freshmen year is an important foundation year to learn lessons that underpin the rest of your high school journey. It’s also when you should establish or continue good study patterns and organizational habits for the years to come. These habits will help when you cultivate test taking strategies and start officially preparing for college entrance exams in January or February of 10th grade. During freshman year of high school, it’s best to focus on a successful transition to high school both academically and socially.

Classroom Instruction and College Entrance Exams

One of the most important ways that students can prepare for college entrance exams is by recognizing that daily classroom lessons are already preparing you! You will encounter terms, concepts, and ideas every day that will serve you in the test taking to come.

Keep in mind that the “boring” basics are vital to your future success. Building vocabulary is key. Look up words as they appear in texts to minimize drilling later. Learn grammar now. English teachers will provide sentence level corrections on essays at this stage so that subsequent teachers focus more on organization, concept development, and higher order writing skills. This is the moment to establish and retain grammar rules because you will have so much more to study later. Math and language classes are strictly sequenced so mastering those foundation skills will ensure you succeed in and enjoy future classes.

The PSAT

Most schools organize a PSAT date during the Sophomore year. Many students worry about and even compete for high PSAT scores, but studying for the PSAT isn’t really necessary unless you aspire to earn a National Merit Scholarship. For most students, the purpose of the PSAT is to provide a concrete experience with college entrance exams and to show what knowledge areas you need to enrich and what types of questions are hardest for you.

The PSAT simply provides an initial baseline from which to judge your strengths and areas that require additional attention. It’s an abridged multiple-choice test, thus stamina and attention factors aren’t pushed to the same limits as full length SAT or ACT test, and it does not include a writing section, so this testing yields only limited information for planning purposes. Therefore, don’t take time away from your school work to study for the PSAT.

Test Taking Strategies

One of the challenges with college entrance exams are their structure, and that’s where learning the format of the test and developing some basic test taking strategies really helps. However, strategies must be taught in conjunction with content. Like tools in a toolbox, students need to know when to choose a particular strategy, or they’ll end up trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver. As content is mastered, strategies help with efficient pacing and approach.

As a means of demonstrating subject matter mastery and building test taking skills, many students are in a position to take at least one SAT subject test at the end of 9th grade. If a SAT subject test aligns with a 9th grade course that is also a subject area of strength for you, then we strongly recommend taking it. Popular 9th grade choices are biology or foreign language, particularly if the student is a native speaker. Math 2 and physics are usually too difficult to take until junior or senior year. Subject tests related to chemistry, history, English, and literature are often managed during 10th and/or 11th grades. For students enrolled in AP courses, these exams are typically layered in during grades 10, 11 and 12. Students enrolled in IB programs have other specific planning to manage that can be leveraged for SAT subject tests or AP exams.

Regardless of school environment, it’s often the case that a school course isn’t completely aligned to any particular standardized test, or the course pacing isn’t on target to cover all necessary content. In January of 9th grade, we recommend you take a baseline assessment as a benchmarking opportunity so that any supplemental private tutoring needs and/or independent study can be strategically managed.

Timing For College Entrance Exams

Ninth graders don’t need to be thinking too much about college entrance exams, but they should be thinking about developing their intellectual engagement with the world in order to be prepared for those final high school years when tests and applications dominate. Ninth graders should also be thinking about their extracurricular activities and exploring new interests and hobbies, or deepening existing ones. Ideally school breaks and vacations allow students to discover their own pleasure reading, take fun workshops or courses in areas of interest, and/or manage a part-time job. They are, however, also an opportunity to create and launch a study plan for college entrance exams as well as SAT Subject tests, AP tests, or challenging subjects in school.

Most students should plan on taking college entrance exams officially for the first time in the late fall, winter, and/or spring terms of their Junior year. We recommend completing diagnostic testing in January or February of 10th grade in order to make an informed and strategic choice between the ACT or SAT. It’s absolutely not necessary to manage both tests.

Targeted instruction, structured practice, and accountability are all critical to your success with college entrance exams. Baseline ACT or SAT testing will reveal strengths and areas for growth. The summer between 10th and 11th grade is a great time to work more intensively. If a private tutor hasn’t already been established, now is the time to find one that will help address the specific areas of competency that need improvement. Taking the test 2-3 times during Junior year ensures that you have completed one of the major components of the college application process. With college entrance exams completed, you can spend the summer between 11th and 12th grades focusing on college visits and developing the Common Application essay as well as supplemental essays.

For a college planning overview from grades 7 through 12, please click here.

To further discuss high school and college planning as well as private tutoring, please contact our office.

By Brad Hoffman, MS.Ed., and Faya Hoffman, MA, and Charlotte Kent, Ph.D.

Engaging Young Writers

January 12, 2019 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Engaging young writers can be a formidable challenge for any parent or teacher. In thinking about how to motivate students, it is helpful to step back from our preconceived notions about academic writing and lean into thinking about our own adult writing lives.

Can you remember the last time you sat down and wrote a five-paragraph essay? Perhaps you spent a few minutes crafting your thesis and three supporting details and then moved on to mapping out your writing on a graphic organizer before sitting down to type?

For most of us, thinking back to our last experience cycling through the writing process transports us immediately back to sixth grade English class, nervously mapping out three strong reasons that supported your mother as your hero. This form of writing was born, bred, and remains firmly in our middle and high school experiences. The writing process we shepherded through as students—the meticulous, often redundant planning, the stagnated, structured paragraphs, and the clever closing— is far removed from our current, everyday writing experiences. Engaging young writers requires a step back from our preconceived notions of academic writing and a step towards thinking about writing in the world.

In our day to day, writing takes on a more organic, natural feel. We write to-do lists for the week, notes to our children’s teachers, emails to colleagues, and thank you notes to friends. We put pen to paper when the tasks are relevant to our lives and personally motivating. Our everyday writing is task oriented— a means to an end. When we do sit down and write for pleasure, it is often a project of passion. We write because we are moved by an experience, whether it was a delicious meal to review on Yelp or an amazing trip to recount on a blog.

Our professional writing tasks are the ones that often require the most planning, thinking, and following of a firm structure. They are the writing pieces most closely aligned to the ideal middle school essay. And not surprisingly, for most of us, we go through the process of completing these tasks with the same lack of joy we experienced when crafting our introduction on George Washington as an 11 year old.

As we reflect back on our academic writing experience, it should be of little surprise that our students are often reluctant to engage in the writing process. School writing often sets students up to only think about writing through the lens of five perfect, thesis-supporting paragraphs. It is no wonder so many of our students are uninspired and unmotivated to engage with the written word.

But, like any other craft, when it comes to developing stronger writing skills and, ultimately engaging young writers, practice is key. The strongest, most confident writers are those that write often. With increased time on task, young writers develop the courage to play around with new vocabulary and varied sentence structure. They develop writing self awareness and identify what topics, formats, and ideas inspire them to write. They begin to self monitor, editing and revising as they write instead of as prepublication chore. The more students write, the stronger they become at writing.

So, how does one inspire their student to write? The key to engaging young writers is finding what motivates them and giving them choices and ideas for how writers operate outside the parameters of a five paragraph essay.

Here are some ideas to engage your student in writing:

Set up an email account: There is something incredibly joyous about sending and receiving letters. Setting up an email account establishes a natural tool for writing. Instead of calling grandma to tell her about a playdate, your student can send a written account of the adventure.
Start a bullet journal: If you have not yet googled bullet journalling, you are in for a real treat. Invented by a designer and sensationalized by Instagram, bullet journaling is a recent phenomenon that is part sketchbook and part planner. “Bujo” enthusiasts track, organize, and memorialize their day-to-day life using every medium— from patterned washi tape to neon highlighters. Start exploring #bujoinspiration with your young writer and head to the craft store to stock up on supplies. They will be hooked and writing daily in no time!
Write a graphic novel: While the inexperienced reader may shrug graphic novels off as comics, the astute consumer knows that they are filled with incredible dialogue, sophisticated vocabulary, and nuanced plot lines. If your student can not pull their head out of their favorite graphic novel, it may be high time they write their own! Pick out a printable comic frame online and your young writer is just a few pen strokes away from creating a new character or illustrating their summer vacation.

Writing does not have to be a stressful experience. Engaging young writers can be a meaningful and rewarding task!

For help supporting your writer, contact us about private tutoring.

By Marisa Krohn, Learning Specialist

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