Pathfinders
Exploring Curriculum Pathways & Instructional Technology
Curriculum Pathways offers a suite of Quick Tutorials: Spanish for learning core Spanish content for beginning, intermediate and advance levels. Students watch a video and listen to native speakers, Carmen and Roberto, as they discuss several topics. Each tutorial highlights the proper use and form of a grammatical element in
Active (close, engaged) reading involves analyzing the meaning and context of new content. According to ASCD, the goal of close reading is to uncover many layers of meaning. But first students must grasp the functional meaning of each word and reference in the text. Writing centers at George Mason and many other universities offer
Too often both students and teachers overlook the tools that technology offers to assist in the active reading process. Online tools that streamline the challenging steps in close/active reading give teachers the opportunity to engage as coaches, helping students to explore the layers of meaning in a text. For instance, try Explore!
Authentic materials are not produced for the purpose of language teaching; instead, they are created by native speakers for native speakers (e.g., realia such as menus, literary excerpts, poems, broadcasts, ...). For English Language Learners, teachers need to make sure that the authentic materials and resources (#authres) contain appropriate features
The purpose of our innovative Writing Reviser tool is both significant and, I think, subtle—the tool aims to teach students how to write. No one would argue that this is easy. It isn't. We’ve all seen writing programs that take the “easy” path—marking student errors, subjecting students to endless “drill and kill”
When I’ve had the chance over the last few years to show Writing Reviser in classrooms and at conferences, I’ve been careful to point that its purpose is not punitive. Specifically, I mean that the tool does not simply search for and highlight mistakes that student writers inevitably make. Instead,