The Professional Development & Resource Center (PD&RC) Pride is a monthly email communication celebrating the work facilitated by BT BOCES PD&RC to advance teaching and learning. This will also be an opportunity to highlight upcoming regional events. We hope you find this communication helpful and welcome your feedback.
Scaffolding Strategies for Vocabulary Comprehension
For a struggling reader, a difficult piece of text can be like a puzzle with the pieces missing. In Scaffolding Strategies for Vocabulary Comprehension, teachers worked with our Special Education School Improvement Specialist (SESIS), CathleenStewart and Literacy Specialist, Tina Conklin, to look at ways to put some of those puzzle pieces in place. Participants discussed and developed strategies for direct teaching of specific words as well as teaching students how to use independent word learning strategies. Teachers applied their new strategies to passages at their own grade levels and left the session with activities and lessons that they can use right away to improve their students’ vocabulary comprehension.
Hummingbird Robotics
Robotics can be used to teach many important skills, from programming and problem-solving to teamwork and communication. Teachers and administrators from around the region spent a day with Dustin Andrus, Technology Integration Specialist, learning how to build and code their own robots using the Hummingbird (Duo) Robotics kit. This active, hands-on session also included opportunities for teachers to discuss cross-curricular connections with robotics. In ELA, robotics provides opportunities for technical writing, and in math, there are opportunities for students to practice logical and sequential thinking. Robotics and coding can be used to build physical models in science that can be programmed to demonstrate anatomical systems and structures, cell structures and behaviors and so much more. Participants were excited about their day of learning and many of them celebrated by sharing a video of their robot on Twitter.
