FOR-PD Update

Latest FOR-PD Numbers

• 12,404 students
• 919 sections
• 67 participating districts
• 7 participating universities
• 5 participating community colleges

Dear Colleagues:

Our spring sections are coming to an end. Many sections have already closed and the remaining sections will close on May 29, 2006. The FOR-PD office has received many calls concerning certificates of completion and the awarding of points. I would like to take this opportunity to explain our course closing procedures.

• At the beginning of each course, FOR-PD emails participants with information on the course closing date. Facilitators also post this important information in their courses on the course calendar.
• When we reach the course closing date, the FOR-PD office goes into each section and denies participants access to the course. We do this to give facilitators time to complete administrative duties such as reviewing literacy logs and grading.
• Facilitators have two weeks after the course closing date to complete any administrative duties and email FOR-PD course closing information. During this time, facilitators are able to assist participants who may be missing two or three assignments.
• Two weeks after participants are denied access, we close out the course by denying facilitators access.
• We review the course closing information that facilitators send us.
• We then go into each course and pull grade data to keep for our records. At this time, we review who has and has not completed the course.
• Certificates are then sent to those participants who have completed the tasks required to complete the course.
• Once all completion data has been collected, we provide each district with a list of teachers who completed the course for that term. Spring data will be sent out June 16th. If you require information sooner, please contact Richard Scott at Richard@orion.itrc.ucf.edu. Please keep in mind though, for courses closing May 29th, facilitators will have until June 12th to provide FOR-PD with course closing information.

If you have additional questions please email Richard or call the FOR-PD office 1-866-227-7261.

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.
• Classroom implementation data
• Quality Assurance Checks update
• Information on the May edition of the Literacy Newsletter.
• Information on May’s Reading Strategy of the Month.
• Information on the May’s edition of the Facilitating with Felicity e-Newsletter.
• Information on the FOR-PD Help Desk.

I appreciate your ongoing support of FOR-PD and always welcome your feedback. The FOR-PD project will continue to update you on our successes, challenges, and solutions. Thank you for your ongoing collaboration!

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

 

What are teachers implementing in the classroom?

As part of our project evaluation, we surveyed participants in regards to their classroom application of knowledge and skills learned in FOR-PD and their perceived impact of FOR-PD on student learning. One thousand two hundred ninety participants responded to the survey. Of those who responded, 87 percent indicated that they completed the FOR-PD course. The results of the survey indicate that overwhelming majority of respondents (96 percent) felt FOR-PD had positively impacted their classroom.

 

Almost 100 percent of the respondents indicated they were definitely able to use the reading strategies taught in the FOR-PD course. Very few, only one percent, indicated that they were not able to use the reading strategies at all.

Respondents’ Level of Use for Various Strategies (reported in percentages)
	Never used this	Plan on using this in the future	Am using somewhat	Use routinely	Use regularly and am very comfortable with it
Explicit systematic instruction	6	5	17	36	36
Model using think-alouds	2	3	18	34	43
Use shared, guided, and independent reading	2	2	10	30	56
Activating prior knowledge	1	1	7	28	63
Building phonemic awareness and phonic skills	11	5	27	27	30
Building fluency	3	3	17	37	40
Building vocabulary using strategies	1	2	11	36	50
Building comprehension using strategies	1	2	8	34	55
Implement instructional strategies before, during, and after reading	2	2	13	36	47
Use differentiated instruction techniques and strategies	2	4	20	36	38
Print-rich environment, including classroom library & word walls	2	4	17	25	52
Screening diagnosis and progress monitoring	6	5	20	36	33

The chart above illustrates the respondents’ level of use for various strategies. Results of the survey indicate the vast majority of the respondents do use strategies taught in FOR-PD routinely or use strategies regularly and have a high degree of comfort level with them.

Participant Comments

"Thanks for giving me the practice through FOR-PD to become more comfortable with these strategies and therefore I am able to impact the lives of my students." "It is a wonderful way to have the opportunity to learn these strategies. The course gave real hands on ideas that I have easily applied to everyday classwork." "I fully believe [this course] has made me a more effective instructor/facilitator and my students are more successful learners." "I am currently a speech pathologist, but reading and language arts are included in my program. I have found FOR-PD very helpful for me to improve the instructional opportunities in my time with students."

Quality Assurance Checks for the Spring Semester

As we have discussed in the past, FOR-PD conducts several checks of each course throughout the semester. Results from this semester have proven to be very effective in helping us to address certain facilitation and participation issues. The Quality Assurance Checks have assisted us in planning for facilitator monitoring, addressing facilitator issues, and helping participants who need additional help with the course.

Difficulties and Outcomes

• We found that many facilitators did not post a Welcome Message. The Welcome Message serves a few purposes: (1) it introduces the participants to the course and (2) it allows the facilitator to discuss what is expected of the participants and what the participants can expect of the facilitator. The Welcome Message includes key information that participants need in order to successfully complete the course. The Quality Assurance Specialist required facilitators to post a Welcome Message and followed up to be sure that they did.
  
  
• We found that many facilitators also did not post a complete course calendar. The course calendar is provided as a guide for participants as it delineates when assignments are due. The course calendar is an extremely valuable course tool used to ensure participants’ success. The Quality Assurance Specialist required that facilitators post a complete course calendar and followed up to make sure a calendar was posted.
  
  
• As in past semesters, the FOR-PD staff constantly evaluated the Quality Assurance procedures so that any needed improvements can be made. The Evaluation team assessed the efficacy of the participant check component of the Quality Assurance Checks. Their findings suggest that both participant check one and two are helpful in encouraging participants to complete the course. However, it is important to acknowledge that that sample size was very small. Therefore, it is difficult to generalize the findings to all sections. Also, the evaluation team is unable to rule out other confounding variables. As a result, the evaluation team is unable to find a direct correlation with the Quality Assurance Checks and increased completion rates. However, after evaluating the results, the staff decided to keep the quality assurance procedures the same.- April 2006

FOR-PD is a data driven project. The Quality Assurance Checks are extremely valuable data that are evaluated on a weekly basis. Many decisions and modifications made during the course of the semester stem from what we are seeing in the courses that are running at that time. We will continue to keep you informed of our findings each semester.

FOR-PD Literacy e-Newsletter

Please read the May issue of the FOR-PD Literacy Newsletter. 

ACT Report on College and Work Skills Readiness

I would like to encourage you to take a look at a new report from America College Testing, Inc. (ACT). This new study conducted by ACT provides some of the first empirical evidence to support that the skills needed for work and postsecondary education are converging due to changes in our global, high-tech economy. This report shows that there are many commonalities in the types of knowledge and skills students need in order to be ready for college and workforce training programs. Reading skills for college and workforce training include: identifying main ideas and supporting details; identifying sequential, comparative, and cause-effect relationships; identifying the meaning of words; and drawing generalizations and conclusions. All of these skills can be acquired through rigorous high school courses, regardless of the context within which they are taught. I encourage each of you to read this report.

In Focus – Vocabulary Instruction

This month's Literacy Newsletter focuses on vocabulary instruction. Most educators recognize the strong relationship between vocabulary knowledge and the ability to read and write proficiently. Research indicates that students learn most new words incidentally, as they read, write, and talk to peers and adults each day, rather than through explicit instruction. While experts agree that reading is the single largest source of vocabulary growth for students after third grade (Beck & McKeown, 1991; Nagy, 1988), struggling readers are more reluctant to read and read more slowly than their more fluent peers; therefore, they are exposed to fewer words. Explicit instruction directed toward teaching students how to learn new words can greatly enhance word knowledge. The need for explicit vocabulary instruction remains a critical element of the total literacy program and in content area classrooms. Check out this month's In Focus section.

FOR-PD's Reading Strategy of the Month

May’s Reading Strategy of the Month focuses on instruction in phonemic awareness. Research has shown that the "acquisition of phonemic awareness is highly predictive of success in learning to read and in predicting success in learning to decode" (International Reading Association, 1998). Check out the instructional ideas for teaching segmentation, blending, deletion, isolation, and categorization of phonemes.

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 at forpd@mail.ucf.edu to tell us how it worked. 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 May issue of Facilitation with Felicity e-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.

This month's article, The Use of Asynchronous Discussion: Creating a Text of Talk by Allison Black (2005), discusses one professor's experiences in teaching online literacy courses using asynchronous discussions. This form of online discussion creates a text of talk that has the potential to be reflective given the freedom participants have in the response time. However, online facilitators must structure discussion so that it becomes a forum for communication as well as critical thinking. Discussion, or purposeful conversation, is a component of learning and understanding. The question remains though, how to get students to engage in these purposeful conversations?

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 the directions 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 the Set Screen Name 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."

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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.