FOR-PD Update

April 2006

Latest FOR-PD Numbers

12,516 students
910 sections
67 participating districts
7 participating universities
5 participating community colleges

Dear Colleagues:

The Spring 2006 sections of the FOR-PD course are coming to a close. You will receive all completion information by June 16, 2006. The teachers who have taken FOR-PD this spring have done an extraordinary job! Many have come to new AH-HAHs about their instruction and what works best for their students. Facilitators have also done a great job of keeping participants focused on making connections to instruction and student learning.

In this update you will find information on:

Registration information for summer and fall. Please share these dates with teachers in your district and with other offices such as Alternative Certification Programs.
Information on the College of Education's - 8th Annual Literacy Symposium.
Information on the reopening of the FOR-PD e-store.
Information on the April edition of the Literacy Newsletter.
Information on April's Reading Strategy of the Month.
Information on the April edition of the Facilitating with Felicity e-Newsletter.
Information on the FOR-PD Help Desk.
Information on facilitator effectiveness from our new evaluation report.

We appreciate your ongoing support of FOR-PD and always welcome your feedback.

We will continue to update you on our successes, challenges, and solutions to online professional development. Thank you for your ongoing collaboration with the FOR-PD project.

Best Wishes,
Catherine Glass
Director, FOR-PD
407-207-7294
cc@orion.itrc.ucf.edu

District Registration Summer 2006:

Districts wishing to register sections for summer must complete the district registration file and send it to Richard Scott (Richard@orion.itrc.ucf.edu). The district registration file can be accessed by going to the following website: http://www.itrc.ucf.edu/register/district.html. When filling out the form, please provide the subject area in which the teacher is assigned to teach. We also request that you adhere to the dates provided. During the month of June, we will be updating the FOR-PD course and will not be able to run sections.

Summer 2006
6/26/06	Registration file must be received in the FOR-PD office
7/10/06	District courses begin
10/09/06	District courses end

Fall 2006
8/14/06	Registration file must be received in the FOR-PD office
8/28/06	District courses begin
12/11/06	District courses end

Upcoming Open Enrollment Dates

Teachers wishing to register during open enrollment must do so by registering on our website. Please advertise these dates to those teachers who will need to take the FOR-PD course.

Summer 2006
5/8/06	Open enrollment registration for summer begins
6/26/06	Open enrollment registration for summer ends
7/10/06	Summer courses begin
10/2/06	Summer courses end

Fall 2006
7/10/06	Open enrollment registration for fall begins
8/7/06	Open enrollment registration for fall ends
8/21/06	Fall courses begin
12/4/06	Fall courses end

The UCF College of Education - 8th Annual Literacy Symposium

The 8th Annual Literacy Symposium was a great success! We had approximately 500 educators attend the event. If you were unable to attend this year's event, you can still access some of the presentations given. FLaRE has posted several of the presentations on their web site. Check them out at the FLaRE presentations site.

Presentations housed at this site include:

ReLeah Lent's	Opening Session - Engaging Adolescent Learners
Enrique Puig's	7 Guiding Principles for Effective Literacy Coaching The 7 guiding principles presented in this presentation serve to guide literacy coaches and administrators to maximize the use of literacy coaches in any school reform model to support student learning. Each principle is accompanied by explicit examples to highlight features and benefits to literacy coaches, teachers, administrators, and student learning.
Connie Cain's	Picture Books for All Students: Bringing Joy to Reading Experience the joy of using picture books to motivate students through hands-on activities with powerful picture books that reach students of all ages. Teachers learned how to use picture books to extend student interests and make strategic reading processes a reality for students.
Linda Tuschinski's	Exciting Ways to Promote Literacy in Content Areas This interactive presentation provided a plethora of ideas including handouts for participants to take back to their schools for immediate implementation. Participants learned the benefits of all content area teachers sharing in literacy instruction.
Larry Bedenbaugh's	Graphic Novels in My Classroom This presentation examined the reasons and available research for including or not including graphic novels in a school library/classroom. The benefits and uses of the graphic novel in the classroom were examined in detail. Topics discussed included: defining and describing types of graphic novels, reasons for using and teaching with graphic novels, and suggestions for selecting and using graphic novels. Additional resources were provided (electronic and hard copy) along with the opportunity to examine a variety of graphic novels.
Cindy Gardner's	Jazzing Up Literacy By Integrating Technology Participants considered the technology available to them at their schools and how they could use this technology to jazz up their literacy instruction.
Ilene Heller's	Class Wide Peer Tutoring In this session, participants learned how to incorporate Class Wide Peer Tutoring in their classrooms. Class Wide Peer Tutoring encourages students to assist each other and be supportive of accurate reading and approximations, and focuses students' attention on comprehension strategies.
Brian Dorman's	Incorporating Novels in Social Studies This presentation showed how to incorporate novels in the social studies curriculum. Included were reading strategies that can be incorporated in the social studies content area and through which students show an increase in their overall performance.

FOR-PD e-Store Now Open

FOR-PD is offering the following materials to Florida educators. To get any of these items for your school or classroom, fill out the form located on the E-store page and FOR-PD will mail you the items free of charge, while supplies last.

FOR-PD Flyer: the flyer for the Florida Online Reading Professional Development online course

FOR-PD Brochure: the brochure for the FOR-PD online course

Instructional Posters - These posters are designed to assist teachers during reading instruction. FOR-PD suggests that teachers laminate these posters and use them during instruction to model various reading strategies. After instruction, teachers can post them in their room as a reference for students.

Check out the new e-store page for more details! http://www.itrc.ucf.edu/publications/estore.html

FOR-PD Literacy e-Newsletter

Please read the April issue of the Literacy Newsletter.

This month's Literacy Newsletter focuses on the instructional strategy of reading aloud to students. Reading aloud to students is an excellent strategy that supports students when they are confronted with challenging material in the classroom. There is a body of evidence that suggests being read to by an adult enhances literacy development. Likewise, there is a strong association between exposure to read-alouds and positive motivation to read. Read alouds provide variation in the classroom routine of learning from text materials; a non-threatening and supportive oral reading experience for students; and invite interaction between students and dialogue about what is being learned. Teachers can use a wide variety of materials, both fiction and nonfiction. Encourage all teachers to make reading aloud a part of their classroom. See this month's In Focus section for additional information and resources.

FOR-PD's Reading Strategy of the Month

April's Reading Strategy of the Month focuses on visualization. Visualization is the ability to build mental pictures or images while reading. Helping our students gain visualization skills is an important way to foster greater comprehension when reading. It gives students the ability to become more engaged in their reading and use their imagery to draw conclusions, create interpretations of the text, and recall details and elements from the text (Keene & Zimmerman, 1997). Struggling students' ability to monitor and evaluate their own comprehension is enhanced by mental imagery (Gambrell & Bales, 1986). When a breakdown in comprehension occurs, and a mental image cannot be visualized, students will become aware of the need for a fix-up strategy. Check out the resources included in this month's reading strategy.

We invite you to take a look at our current reading strategy and the examples provided from elementary and secondary levels. Try this strategy in your classroom and then email us and tell us how it worked (forpd@mail.ucf.edu). Also, don't forget to share the strategy with your colleagues. Each month we feature an effective reading strategy, explain the rationale behind the strategy, give directions on how to use the strategy with students, present ideas for adapting the strategy to different content areas, present ideas for assessing the strategy, and, of course, provide a printable PDF version of the strategy. Check out our Reading Strategy Archive to see past Reading Strategies of the Month.

Facilitator Newsletter

Please also read our April Facilitator Newsletter.

In our "Facilitation with Felicity" e-Newsletter, our focus is still on online learning communities as this is the focal point of all we do with this project. We all continue to learn about how to improve and sustain our online community.

Many literacy coaches (we refer to our FOR-PD facilitators as online literacy coaches) who are not familiar with what our facilitators are doing, don't realize how much effort and time goes into building and maintaining an online community. Many people have erroneous assumptions. For example:

Who needs goals and expectations for an online learning community? Well, all of us know that without goals and expectations there'd be no community at all between FOR-PD and facilitators and among facilitators. The work FOR-PD is doing with facilitators and also the facilitation you provide help advance our mission.
Everyone will want to participate in an online discussion. Okay, we hope that everyone will want to participate...but...not everyone does. Actually, most or all of you at some point had to ask your participants repeatedly, had to call them, and had to work hard to stimulate their participation. Many teachers in our courses have misconceptions about online learning; they think they are lone rangers on their own island. Of course, there are many other reasons for their lack of participation; e.g., time, technology available to them at home or school, etc. We have seen progress in this area, but we also have much work to do.
Building and maintaining an online community doesn't take much time or staffing. WOW! Is this a misconception or what? It takes an entire project and much more to build and support an online community. Think about all you have been doing; think of all the ways we support you and participants in trying to develop and maintain the online learning community. It takes expertise, time, qualified staff, and support mechanisms to do so.
We don't need strategies to promote our online community. We absolutely need ongoing planning, implementation, evaluation, and reflection for promoting and maintaining our online community. Vision, planning, data-based decisions, and ongoing evaluation are a must for building and supporting the FOR-PD online community.

This month’s facilitation resource is an online article entitled "The Role of the Online Instructor/Facilitator." This short article lists the roles and functions of the online instructor. The most important role of the online instructor is to model effective teaching. Berge (1995) has categorized the necessary conditions for successful online instruction into four categories: pedagogical, social, managerial, and technical.

Facilitator Professional Development

During the month of May, the Facilitator Professional Development Focus will be on comprehension. We will be using the following materials as the basis for our discussion:

A Focus on Comprehension [PDF 549.35KB]
by Fran Lehr, MA; Jean Osborn, MEd (2005)

A Focus on Comprehension examines what research tells us about factors that affect reading comprehension and about what instruction must contain and what it must do to help students better comprehend the content they read.
Teaching Reading Workshop -

This is a video workshop provided through Annenburg Media. We will be using the Workshop 3: Building Comprehension. Comprehending text is one of the main goals of reading. In this session, literacy expert Nell Duke discusses what good readers do and strategies teachers can use to help students build comprehension skills. Classroom footage provides examples of comprehension strategies. You will need to fill out the Annenburg registration form in order to view the video workshop.

FOR-PD Help Desk Hours

Our Technical Team continues to improve the services they offer. They have added a Live Chat feature that is available on the Help Desk Web page. In order to use this feature you must follow these directions. First, make sure that you are online. The button below will tell you whether you are online or offline. Next, click on Set Screen Name and type your name. Then, click in the light blue box below to type your message. Press Enter to send it. This requires you have Macromedia Flash installed on your computer.

The Technical Team has developed additional layers of support for FOR-PD participants. The course Tutorials and Troubleshooting Guide provide a wealth of information on the tools used in the course and specific technology problems past participants have had along with solutions to these problems. They have made these resources more interactive by using Captivate to create short movies. These movies visually show participants, in a step by step manner, exactly what to do and click as they attempt to solve their problems.

The Technical Support Site lists the most up-to-date Help Desk hours. Our hours are as follows:

Monday through Friday 9:00am - 4:00pm EST and 6:00pm - 10:00pm EST
Saturday 10:00am- 3:00pm EST

The phone number is 1-866-863-READ (7323) toll free, Florida calls only. Out of the state of Florida, please call 407-249-4702. Technical support is also available through the Tech Help form our Help Desk Web page. Additionally, technical support is available through AOL Instant Messenger, screen name "forpdhelp."

FOR-PD Notable Quotables

What factors contribute to student success in the FOR-PD course? Our participants say the facilitator!!! We all know it has been a semester of change and each of us has had to adjust to those new changes. Everyone has done a great job! Keep up the wonderful work that you are doing! (Data from FOR-PD's Phase III Evaluation Report.)

Do you have comments about the course? Have you received any comments from people in your district? We are always looking for feedback so send it our way. Email forpd@mail.ucf.edu.