Friday, January 25, 2008

What Doesn't Matter

Part of being a successful reader of nonfiction means understanding the important information. This week, we looked at reading from the other side. We looked at the article No Drivers Wanted about robot cars. This is an article about the DARPA Challenge for driverless cars. Students highlighted in pink, all of the information that wasn't important.

Student partners went through the article and looked for trivial details, unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, and minor facts, opinions, and quotes that didn't help understand the article.

Once the highlighting was completed, student partners were combined to make teams of four. The four students compared each team's work and discussed their decisions.

Scotty D. took over as the teacher next, and students looked at the article with the projector. With Brianne managing the computer, the class as a whole had to agree on what wasn't important. Today, students will use what text that is left as they search for the W's and write a gist statement.

This is how the article looked when they finished. If you look at what is not highlighted, you should be able to see the important details, and get the gist.

Tuesday, October 11—Stanley usually seems to know where he's going. He moves quickly over rocky ground and across puddles. He works hard and he's almost always on the move. Stanley is a robot car.

Last week, 23 teams—including the Stanford University team that built Stanley—gathered in the Mojave Desert in Nevada to compete in a special race known as the Grand Challenge. The race was special because none of the cars had drivers.

Stanley completed the dangerous 150-mile course through the desert in six hours and 53 minutes, earning the Stanford team a $2 million prize from the Department of Defense. Of the 23 teams that competed, only five
actually finished. The others were stumped by mechanical or technological problems.

Sebastian Thrun, the lead robotics engineer for the Stanford team, realizes that driver-free, robot cars like Stanley still seem like something from a science-fiction film. "People by and large don't believe in this stuff," he said. "They've seen too many failures." This year's Grand Challenge was much more successful than last year's, when no vehicle was able to travel more than eight miles.


16 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think higlighting that one paper with the whole class was fun. It was fun because we didn't have to do it by ourselves, I would have not gotten it right,

Mr. McGuire said...

Josh,

I am glad you enjoyed it. AND, I am especially glad that it helped you "get it right."

Anonymous said...

I think that it was cool that we got to get into groups and work together on a paper. on of the things that i liked was that we had a partner to help each other.The first thing that me and my partner did was read the selection and see what was important and what wasn't. When you high lite things that are not important then you want it to look like a coloring page.

Anonymous said...

It was neat working on that paper with the whole class. It was really fun, especially since I was working the computer! I hope we can do something like this again.

Anonymous said...

It was really fun working on this paper. I have seen the whole class was having a great time giving their opinions of what should be highlighted. I can't wait till we do something like this again.

Anonymous said...

I think working and highlighting was a lot of fun, because we got to know every one else's different opinion's, I thought we could have done better but according to mr. McGuire's comment I guess we did alright.

Anonymous said...

It was fun being teacher. I'm glad that you picked me. Thanks for telling me that I did a good job.

Anonymous said...

I think that Scotty did a great job being teacher.









laney stephens

Anonymous said...

I like when we have somebody that is the teacher and have somebody that is on the computer. that is really fun. Scotty did really good as the teacher and Brianne did good on the computer. I think we should keep doing this.

Anonymous said...

I think that having Miss. Walisa for a sub
was a good thing because she is really nice and will not yell at all.

Anonymous said...

Man I never knew Stanley looked like that!

Anonymous said...

Scotty did do a good job.

Anonymous said...

That was really fun to have the chance to be the teacher for the class and have some control.I wish that I would get to be the teacher some day soon. Thanks for being such a good teacher,YOU ROCK THE SIXTH GRADE.!!!!!!!
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Anonymous said...

Congrates Scotty for getting to be the teacher.

Anonymous said...

Scotty did a great job being the teacher.

Anonymous said...

I think that Scotty did a great job teaching. I also think that we did a good job highlighting