Check out this cool site with success stories from former Read 180 students!

http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/read180/success-stories/

While I love the Read 180 program, it is very structured and sometimes I like to deviate a bit and I KNOW the kids like to also. I found a site I use on Fridays for The Week in Rap. It is from Flocabulary and has cool rap videos for lots of language arts, social studies, math and other academic subjects. You can sign up for a free trial and then pay $7 a month for only the months you want. I think it's worth it. To me, helping kids, and myself, stay abreast of current events is very important.
http://www.flocabulary.com

I've just explored  feedly and found a site I think I'll be able to use and others may also find useful. There is a nice blog called Free Technology for teachers by Richard Byrne and he lists most popular blogs.  Socratic Smack Down is one I especially like as the discussion strategies go along perfectly with the Read 180 program and I can easily incorporate it into some lessons and mix things up a little.  I know many teachers are using the socratic discussion activities in their classes and this looked cool.
http://www.freetech4teachers.com

 http://www.instituteofplay.org/work/projects/print-play-games-2/socratic-smackdown

I'm looking forward to seeing more blogs like this.

I want to explain a little about how the Read 180 program works.  The class is about 90 minutes long  and the students rotate through four stations; whole group , small group, independent reading, and topic software.


This is the independent read area where students read from books in their lexile range and can also listen to audio books. They take quizzes after reading from the Reading Counts portion of the software.

This is the dashboard students first see when they log onto their Scholastic Read 180 site. It tracks their progress on the software and they earn awards all along the way. 

This shows a sample video from one of the topics in the reading zone. All reading stories begin with an interesting video and then go onto a short story with questions following.

 

This is the book (sideways) we use that incorporates science, social studies, literature and life skills topics within the workshops. Each workshop has a writing component as well as 21st century skills. Our first workshop is on the New Americans, with an informational paragraph we will be doing on how immigration has impacted our community.

I can't wait to add pics of the kids!

 This blog is a way to share information about our Read 180 program that has recently been implemented in our district. Read 180 is a reading intervention program that incorporates technology with engaging software and motivating videos as well as whole group instruction, small group differentiated instruction and independent reading.

I plan to share information on the workshops from the rbook, the topic software, and student success with their writing and reading.

This will be a perfect place to share activities we do throughout the year such as our guest speakers, gardening and fund raising.