A Tale of Three Strategies

Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers:
The purpose of asking students to answer questions before beginning a topic is to get them to access their prior knowledge, as well as to get them to move their mind set from whatever they were thinking about to the topic you want them to learn about next. I think the most effective technology tool I have to approach this strategy is Kidspiration. I remember one summer I took a class on Kidspiration and decided to use it in my classroom the next year. I was using the Rapid Fire tool with my third graders for brainstorming, and it worked really well! Like most people, I can type much faster than I can write, so as they were firing ideas at me, I could keep typing them in, and with the Rapid fire feature I did not have to worry about starting a new column, or bubble, or whatever, because it automatically does that for you in Kidspiration.
Nonlinguistic Representation:
The purpose of asking students to use nonlinguistic representations is to solidify their knowledge of their content area. There seem to be a lot more visual learners out there than auditory learners, and nonlinguistic representations like graphic organizers and physical models improve student learning. Last year I decided to change a project I do every year to include nonlinguistic representations. Every year I do a project with my class that includes pairing up each student with a resident from our local nursing home, visiting them each month, and do a culminating project in which my students write a book about their residents' lives and present it to them on the last day. Last year I decided to incorporate Windows Movie Maker, and it really went well! My students LOVED taking what they learned about their residents and turning it into a movie that they made all by themselves to present to the residents on the last day. The students and the residents enjoyed the project, and it left each of them with a project that had helped enhance their learning through the frames they had created on the computer. It meant a lot more to the students than simply making a book that they would have to give away in the end.
Summarizing and Note Taking:
The purpose of teaching students summarizing and note taking is so they can take a piece of information and learn to disregard the unimportant information and condense the relevant information to put it into their own words. This seems to be one of my most difficult tasks with third graders, and I can't recall a time it has ever worked well! Summarizing and note taking are both really difficult concepts for third graders. I would like to try some of the software ideas our text mentions, like using summary frames or using the track changes feature in Microsoft Word to teach this strategy.