Pearson Education Canada - Celebrating Literacy

Schedule

Day 1 | Day 2

8:15 - 8:45 a.m.	Opening Ceremonies/Introductions
8:45 - 9:45 a.m.	Keynote: Linda Hoyt Getting MORE From Your Nonfiction Read Alouds Read aloud times are a perfect opportunity to increase demonstrations of how good readers interact with print, to show students how we use a wide array of strategies to deepen our understandings about the world, and to intensify the innate pleasure children find during read aloud time. Through intensified demonstrations and minilessons, readers can load up their tool belts with strategies to apply during guided and independent reading or during content area studies. With the addition of music and rhythm, our read alouds can be exciting models of fluency and fun. Join this session for strategies you can use tomorrow.
9:45 - 10:00 a.m.	Break
10:00 - 11:30 a.m.	Interactive Sessions (these sessions are held concurrently) Linda Hoyt Time-Tested Strategies for Powering Up Comprehension This session will provide an overview of comprehension strategies to support deeper levels of understanding while building oral language, writing skills and reading proficiency. You can anticipate flexible strategies that will work with any book and support differentiation across the wide range of learners you serve. Linda will share strategies from her current Heinemann titles as well as her newest work, Explorations in Nonfiction Writing, with co-author Tony Stead. Marc Prensky Part One: Thinking “People and Passions” not “Content and Classes” One important part of partnering is that it is “passion-based.” In the first half of the workshop we will work on identifying student passions and using those passions to differentiate and personalize instruction in any subject. Part Two: Making Learning REAL (and not just relevant) Another important part of partnering is that it is about students’ using what they learn immediately to change and improve the world in which they live. In the second part of the workshop we will work on making everything that we have to teach REAL (and not just relevant) for our students.
11:30 - 12:15 pm	Lunch
12:15 - 1:15 pm	Keynote: Marc Prensky Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for REAL Learning Today’s major problem for educators is dealing with change in many areas at once: changing students, changing pedagogy and changing technology. In his talk, Prensky shows the way to meet the needs of today’s students is to return to the kind of student-centered education many experts have long advocated. That is letting students learn on their own, with their teachers’ coaching and guidance—but now supported by technology. This “rediscovered” type of pedagogy, in which students are responsible for finding information, creating presentations and using new technologies, and teachers are responsible for creating guiding questions, assuring rigor, and quality and providing context, is what Prensky calls “partnering.” In this talk, based on his new book, he discusses the reasons partnering pedagogy is required in today’s classrooms, and ways for teachers to implement it successfully in whatever subject they teach.
1:15 - 2:45 pm	Interactive Sessions (continued)
2:45 - 3:00 pm	Break
3:00 - 3:30 pm	Digging Deeper Facilitated Discussion