Before,+During,+and+After+Reading

WORDLE: I think this would be a very useful pre-reading tool for students who benefit from visual learning. I like how the words that are seen more frequently are larger in view; it really grabs the reader's attention and automatically helps activate one's prior knowledge, if any, of the words seen. I find that Wordle could be very useful for students as a pre-reading strategy, as it lends itself very well to helping create predictions, make connections to prior knowledge, and to create questions about what the reading will be about.

Using this particular Wordle, I'd be able to predict that this article has to do with some sort of oil spill that is costing a lot of money and affecting a large number of people. I'd be curious to know who Feinberg was, if this article connected at all to the BP oil spill of last spring, and what claims have been made and why.



3.4 After Reading: = Spill Fund May Prove as Challenging as 9/11 Payments = The article mainly discussed the struggles that Kenneth Feinberg, a Washington lawyer, is dealing with as he currently tries to settle how much money should be appropriated to various people that were affected by the BP oil spill last spring. It discussed the many gray areas that come with figuring who should get money, and why - businesses, families, and workers that lost jobs, incomes, or family members in the spill. Feinberg compared this situation with the one he faced after 9/11, and found the BP case to be much more difficult in many ways, simply due to the uncertainty, even still, of how much was lost or ruined.

My particular predictions, based on using the Wordle, were for the most part accurate, if a little vague. I was able to discover who Feinberg was, and my connection to the BP spill was correct. I think that marking up a text is a fabulous way for students to keep track of their own thought process while reading. It is also a great tool for accountability - students are required to think their way through the reading, and in doing so, are able to both clarify and deepen their understanding in a way that may not have been possible without such active annotation.

3.5: SLIDE

For my slideshow, I tried to find images that conveyed the main points of the article - the actual oil spill itself, the man responsible for settling all claims that came from the oil spill, the jobs and people affected, and then finally the comparisons to the claims that arose from 9/11.

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