The idea of transliteracy has made me challenge my philosophy on literacy, the direction of my capstone project and my future instruction as a language arts teacher. The question, “Will reading as we know it become obsolete?” keeps echoing in my mind.
After reading and listening to Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on the development of literacy over the centuries and in different cultures I began to wonder if my notion of literacy was limited. Literacy has not always been reading a text from left to right to understand and transmit ideas. Before written language, people communicated ideas, culture, and their shared history through oral stories memorized and taught. The “academics” of these societies were poets such as the Greek, Homer. Communicating and forming a “village” was done orally and symbolically. When language developed to the written form, only a small population was educated in its use and only the wealthy could afford to use the materials for written communication. Reading and writing became a function of an elite portion of the society. It was arguably a social class divider. It was not until the advent of the printing press that written transmission of ideas became accessible to the general population. A shift in the “village” appeared. Now communicating could be done by an individual alone in a room sending an idea and received by another individual alone in a room at a different time and place. The notion of a community became simultaneously more global but also more individualized and isolated. Literacy morphed from a group collaboration to an individual activity. This history represents those cultures where language is phonetic, typically western civilization. Historically and currently for many languages , literacy is not even a left to right scanning of phonemes to make meaning. In some languages reading and communicating is a visual representation of symbols that carry their own meaning, for example, in languages such as Chinese or Japanese. The distinction is important when considering the brain’s process of making meaning. This is, afterall, the foundation of literacy. In linear text with a phonetic alphabet, the brain translates meaningless bits of sound/text into meaning. In text that is symbolic, the eye and the brain processing can hop from place to place and makes meaning from symbols that carry meaning in and of themselves. The digital age is marrying the ideas of literacy being oral, visual, and textual. Digital communication gives us the ability to be both individualistic and collaborative. It also expands our village to the global community. Has the pendulum swung from far left to far right and is it now coming back to the center? Is transliteracy an ideal place to land? I am pushing my thinking to question my bias toward traditional reading and accept the positive aspects of transliteracy. I value reading as we know it. I think it is also safe to say that as a whole, we are still a world that values literacy. “Reading” conjures the image of a person alone with a book or screen reading text. In 300 years, will “reading” be something entirely different? Will it be obsolete? If you hand a 12 year old a copy of The Hunger Games, will she know how to decode it? With my current love of curling up with a book and losing myself in another world, I know my answer is “I hope not”. And I think not. At least in my lifetime, I don’t believe traditional reading will disappear. Yet it is undeniable that transliteracy - communicating ideas through varying formats - is here to stay. The value of transliteracy to support literacy is the new direction of my driving question and my capstone project. At the outset of my new driving question and without the benefit of having done the literature review research or my own action research, I can already see how the idea of transliteracy is changing my teaching practices. I am embracing not only the textual aspect of reading, but also the oral, visual, video, digital, and collaborative aspects. Most teachers are already practiced at drawing out students’ prior knowledge at the beginning of a learning unit. We know that background knowledge is a key component of building student understanding. So take for example, my 8th grade ELA unit on “Suspense”. Before digging into rigorous texts, the new curriculum introduces the Big Idea by introducing the students to Alfred Hitchcock. What kid today has even heard of him, let alone seen one of his movies? Where there is a lack of prior experience, audio-visual presentations are a helpful and engaging way to shore up students’ foundation. The new curriculum, StudySync, provides videos of Hitchcock to expose the students to the background knowledge. Collaborating with other students to hear their stories and experiences is valuable. Previously, this would all have been accomplished by yet more reading, which was problematic because it required the labor of reading to get to the pre-reading idea. StudySync seems to be designed with transliteracy in mind - it provides video presentations done by students with mini-lessons on skills and content. Each text is also available orally - the program will read the text (in this case with a British accent). Students can slow it down, pause, repeat,and highlight the text to follow along. These transliterate strategies are more engaging for students. I also find that the content is more accessible for reluctant and struggling readers, students with special needs, and second language learners.
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A box to stand on. The goal of the graduate program of education at Touro University is “to promote social justice by serving the community and larger society through the preparation and continuous support of professional educators to meet the needs of a constantly changing, challenging, and diverse student population.” When I first joined the Innovative Learning program, my understanding of the overall program did not take such a large, deep scope. I came with the desire to challenge my own thinking around the uses of technology and new teaching & learning strategies. I had realized that I had become too comfortable with my repertoire of pedagogical tools, classroom management routines, and teaching strategies. I was using a quickly stagnating “bag of tricks” and needed to stretch my comfort zone. I purposefully, and a bit fearfully, chose an area of study that I knew would push on my current biases. As well, over the years I had noticed an increasing need to address the needs of a changing population. In this regard, my goals and the T.U. program goals were already aligned. My observation has been that students are coming to us with heightened anxiety, a range of special learning needs, and from a diversity of cultures that increases through time. I have always felt that justice demands that each child receives what is due to him. Not the same treatment - but what is particularly needed to address specific needs. It is the distinction between equal education and equitable education. That goal is a philosophical underpinning. The very practical part of me knows that I need to walk away with concrete activities that I can use in my classroom so all of the deep thinking around innovative learning is not just an academic pursuit that will be shoved aside in the fast paced day of a classroom. Authenticity. As I’m wading through the process of reflecting on the content of the courses and creating my own capstone, I am constantly aware of my tendency to hold on to what I already know. I fully realize I come from a conservative family background, a traditional teaching past, and have a temperament that doesn’t like to take risks or be involved in conflict. Pushing the comfort zone is not simple. I can also find myself hyperfocusing on one idea and following it down a path I later question. Often I just don’t know where to start and sit there spinning my wheels in mud without driving anywhere! I also realize that I am an interrupter (middle child of 7 - it’s a bad, learned habit of survival in that pack of siblings) and can talk too much during class. What I desire from my cohort buddies is that they offer their honest thoughts and that they feel free to “bust me” when I’m too closed minded, narrowly focused, frozen with uncertainty, or need to listen more and talk less. Knowing the group already, I trust their intelligence, kindness, and ability to do all of the above with a sense of humor. An encouraging word. One thing I hope to do for my cohort is to offer encouragement throughout the process. We’re all full time teachers/coaches and we lead full, busy lives. It often helps to hear the good things about our projects, blogs, and teaching dilemmas. I can offer some insights based on 20+ years in the trenches. My experience doesn’t make me a better teacher than anyone else, but it’s given me a whole host of failures and successes to draw upon to help others. My thoughts about being an innovative educator are eloquently expressed by a famous innovator, Albert Einsten. “Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analysing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, or replaced if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.” Albert Einstein To paraphrase this groundbreaking thinker, as innovators in the classroom, we should become practiced at analyzing our past and current practices. It is not a waste of time, an idle game, to examine the concepts under which we operate in education for their usefulness and correspondence to the reality of the human experience, particularly the student perspective. We must be able to justify our choices as teachers. If our practices are not resulting in deep learning, remove them. If we add too much superfluous material - too much and unnecessary, correct it. And when we find a new system that we prefer for good reason, replace the old with the new. Einstein does not say to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When I began the journey through the Innovative Learning program, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical - I had a preconceived notion that most people who bandied about the word “innovative” were jumping on a bandwagon of glittery newness simply for the sake of the novelty of the strategy or the cool factor of the technology. After being in the trenches for a couple decades, I’ve seen many fads come and go. What began as the latest greatest idea was, a few years later, proven to be poor practice. Then a few more years down the road, that same idea came full circle again, refurbished a bit, rebranded, and “voila!”, suddenly it was the thing to do again. I entered determined not to follow blindly a new trend unless I was thoroughly satisfied that the philosophy, concept, and practice would truly benefit my students. Many of the educators on the forefront of the innovative education movement impress me with the depth of their considerations. At the moment, the thinking that most resonates with me and sums up my evolution in thought is George Couros, a modern innovator in education. He also does not advocate newness for newness’s sake. He defines innovation as being new AND better. He also does not insist that a digital tool must be included in an idea for it to be innovative. Of course, he does encourage the use of technology when it is a better, more efficient, more engaging, less expensive choice, and he particularly notes that technology gives us the ability to access information and learning that we could not previously access. Another advantage is the ability to connect to other people:for educators and students to share ideas and connect globally. One analogy Couros makes that speaks to me is that using social media to network with other teachers is like placing yourself into a stream of information and ideas. A deluge of ideas rush past you and you watch them stream by and use the ones that spark excitement, creativity, and innovation. Not all ideas are usable, not all ideas will “getcha”, some will need to be tweaked. But at least you’re in the path of innovation. Einstein and Couros also agree on another aspect of innovation. Concepts should be corrected if they are superfluous to the given thing. I’ll take our “given thing” to be setting up the ideal learning environment. As a learner in this program, and one who comes to the table not having grown up in the digital age, I appreciate the idea of focusing on the necessary, essential elements first and growing from there - especially when it comes to infusing digital tools into my repertoire. One of the powerful, thrilling opportunities for educators is the vast array of digital tools available to enrich our classrooms and our students’ learning. It can also be daunting. I felt what can only be described as relief when a go-getter innovator like Couros says in his chapter on professional growth for teachers, “If we aren’t intentional, we may promote confusion and burnout, instead of inspiring innovation and deep learning” (The Innovator’s Mindset). His advice is to focus on a few new ideas and practices at a time. Achieve mastery and then add more digital tools to your arsenal. Images are powerful tools. Often they speak more succinctly than words. So here’s the image of my thinking before this program. And here’s where I am now.
Although I didn’t call it by this same name, gamification has long been a part of my classroom. Gamification happens in a classroom anytime a teacher sets up a management system with rewards, points, team efforts, levels of achievement. For example, where I did my student teaching, the entire school had a gamified system for math fact fluency. Every classroom did a 5 minute speed/accuracy math facts quiz daily. When you achieved accuracy and fluency you leveled up to the next quiz. Quizzes were grouped in sets and the students on that set belonged to a level named for an animal. After mastering a particular set of quizzes you moved to the next animal group. Many teachers gamify their classroom management system. Fred Jones has a system he calls PAT (Preferred Activity Time). The class begins with a certain amount of PAT time and can increase or decrease their time by meeting behaviorial or procedural goals. For example, a teacher has given the class multi-step directions on how to move into small groups and prepare for team projects. She wants to minimize the transition time and discourage dallying. She tells that class she thinks the transition will take 4 minutes. If they can be ready in less, the extra time is added to the PAT time. Shazam! Gamified! Often, PAT time, the reward, IS time for learning games. Which begs the question… how are games for learning different than gamification? Gamification is the system for incentives. Learning games incorporate this incentive but dive deeper and include content knowledge. Their goal moves beyond motivation and active participation. It’s purpose is mastery of content and/or a skill. One particular experience comes to mind when I think of the power of learning games. One of the courses I took for my K-8 credential was Teaching Math. Thankfully, the course content included the idea that playing math games was a valuable practice. I tried out a game with my students that was simple yet powerful. The game is used to introduce place value units. I’ve now tweaked this game for use in 5 different grade levels. Let’s call the game “Make it Greatest” or “Make it Least”. The object of the game is to make the number with the greatest or least value, you pick or alternate. Players all draw one digit card or roll a die to get a digit. They must place the digit into a place value frame. This can be as low tech as lines on paper, and you can choose to what place value they play. For example, first grade students would begin with ones and tens while fourth graders might play to the hundred thousands and one millions places. Students must all draw digits simultaneously and place them into the frame before drawing another digit. Make the game more complex by including zero as a digit. After creating their numbers, they read them out to one another and discuss who has the greatest/least number. So simple. I found that playing this one game caused the students to experience at least 4 or 5 of the lesson concepts from the unit. Effectively, they practiced actively the concepts that were meant to be instructed over the course of 4 or 5 days of direct instruction. And they had fun doing it. So did I.
Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on how gaming can make a better world highlights these strengths of gamers. As a gamer herself, McGonigal makes a very convincing argument for teaching and learning through extensive, multiplayer games. She makes the case that the qualities gamers cultivate will be valuable assets for our future need to solve problems. It’s easy to see the distinction between gamification and gaming for learning. Gamification is part of learning games, but gamification alone does not always result in learning. This is not to say that gamification doesn’t have a useful purpose in school. It’s a fun motivator. It’s uses as a motivational tool are not just useful in school. Look at the world around us and you see gamification everywhere. Rewards cards at retail and service providers is a form of gamification. Earn points by more purchases, get more purchasing power. Retailers are playing the game to get your business. Many work places incentivize by gamification. A local resort tries to motivate safe work place practices by entering every employee into a Bingo game board for every day that there is no accidents reported in the work place. Employees have a greater chance to win for every incident free day and the cash winnings increase for every “safe day”. There isn’t any harm in using gamification to grease the wheel of classroom management and systems & procedures, just make sure that if your goal for a game is actual content mastery, that you choose the correct game to provide deep learning.
The phases of the design process have certainly clarified the vision of my end product. It’s taken a shape in my head, with room for improvement and the door still wide open for creativity and inspiration. One question still lurks in the back of my mind and I pondered it this week as I mapped my project. Is my project innovative? Does it have the hallmarks of what students will need to meet the demands that the nefariously unpredictable future will make upon them? Am I simply holding onto old pedagogies and perceiving a need that is no longer relevant and dressing it up with fancy tech tools? Will reading ever be obsolete? Is it still necessary for people to be literate with words? In his introduction to the TPACK model (https://youtu.be/eXLdqO0fY3w) Punya Mishra makes a provocative statement. He says that technology has not only changed how we teach (pedagogy), but also what we teach (content). He points out that information no longer comes in a drip, it comes in a deluge. We don’t teach knowledge, per se, of a content area anymore, we teach how to access and filter information. I would add that information and knowledge are not synonymous. Knowledge is constructed and becomes part of a person’s mind. It is usable. It is information put to action by a whole host of other skills, character qualities, and choices. So I asked myself this about reading - is it information? Is reading in danger of becoming obsolete through that lens? No, it certainly provides information. It is the skill and process by which we access information. Certainly reading will change with the times. Already the physically bound book is making its way into the annals of the past. Reading, writing, publishing, storing information - all of it will be digital. Those of us who love the smell and heft of a book will need to visit a museum or make our bookshelves our own museums. Probably reading will become more reliant on what we used to call textual clues - pictures, charts, photos. Now infographics and videos will BE text. It’s a matter of semantics. But I’ll maintain that reading itself will not disappear. I’ll use two of the standards for 21st century learning as a couple reasons why. Reading is intrinsically tied to two of the 21st learning skills - critical thinking and communication. Reading well - fluent enough that you can think about the ideas you read and analyze them, is also part of the filtering of the deluge of information. Reading fluently and with automaticity, a necessity for deep critical thinking, comes partly through reading much and many and with absorption. One of the most painless ways to achieve this fluency is by enjoying reading enough that you choose to do it much and many. A bit of a catch 22. Regardless, reading provides fodder, both process and content, for critical thinking skills. Another 21st century learning skill reliant on reading, in partnership with writing, is communication. Communication, especially if it will be global, crossing time zones and long distance, will need to have a written manifestation. Writing, and therefore reading, is not likely to become obsolete as long as humans strive to communicate. So now I’ve answered satisfactorily for the purpose of this project that reading itself won’t become obsolete. (Whew!) What about the innovative aspect. I got to thinking I should analyze my prototype through both the 4 C’s of 21st century skills, but also through the lens of the ISTE standards for students. In my mindmap, I labelled in purple some of the places I saw traits that demonstrate these standards: empowered learner, creative, communicator, constructing knowledge. And finally, I thought about something George Couros said in his book The Innovator’s Mindset. Couros begins his whole book by defining what innovation is and is not. Innovation is not just something new. It must be something done in a new and better way. Further, he proposes that in the context of education, innovation must also be student centered. That is to say that the needs of the student are considered. He treats the quality of empathy as crucial. Empathy is more than just seeing someone’s need. At its fullest, it is being able to feel almost the same thing as another human because your experiences are so similar. At second best, it is using imagination, sensitivity, and intelligence to try to feel what another experiences. For me, teaching a student to love to read is an empathetic outreach. I’ve spent enough years working with students of all ages to have observed the pain a kid feels when he or she doesn’t enjoy reading. I’ve heard enough people, adults and kids alike, say “I wish I liked to read” to know that the endeavor is worthwhile, perhaps even crucial for the sake of our kids heading into the next century. So back to that Catch 22. How DO you get a kid to enjoy reading so that he will choose to keep doing it, much and many, for the rest of his life? If a student gets to 6th grade and doesn’t like to read, is there a “do over” for her? We can’t erase a child’s negative experiences with reading. We can’t turn the ship overnight. But we can turn it! I can say from experience that I’ve seen reluctant readers go from dreading reading to having their noses buried in books. My prototype will attempt to create one humble model to follow. EdPuzzle: I used EdPuzzle to add to a video I found on YouTube. I chose the cropping tool to shorten the ending. I did not choose to use the audio track or to insert audio notes because the soundtrack for the video was already expertly done. I did choose to insert quiz questions that had to be answered in order to continue through the video. I can see how this tool is very useful to assure that students are actually watching the videos with a certain level of interactivity. The teacher gets a summary of the students’ answers and a time stamp for when the student watched the video. You could actually use this feature as an assessment, of course, in the context we were exploring you wouldn’t use the quiz feature as a summative assessment. It could, however, be used as a formative assessment. I really liked this tool because you can find already vetted videos and adapt them for your more specific use. Jing/Screencast: Jing was a very simple (and free) screencasting tool to use. You can simply take snapshots of any portion of your screen and copy them into a document or share them using Screencast. You can also take video and voiceover of your screen. I liked this tool for its simplicity! It’s an easy starter tool for those of us just beginning our journey into screencasting. I used this tool to do a demo for my students on how to use an interactive plot diagramming tool on the ReadWriteThink site. WeVideo I chose to try WeVideo because I’m looking for a way for my students to make their own videos or storyboards for books they read. WeVideo provides a basic video editing platform. It seems most suited for uploading and editing photos and videos you take of real footage. It provides some basic themes, a few overlays (like POW!), sound effects, and music background. You can splice together 2 tracks. Storybird: Continuing on my quest to find a site for students to make their own versions of a story, I found Storybird. This is a website for making and publishing your own storybook, short story, or illustrated poem. The user brings their own text and uses illustrations provided by users, both amateur and professional. The site seems to begin at the premise that the image is the beginning of the story. When designing your story, you begin by choosing images. The illustrations are varied, grouped by themes and by illustrators. The interface is simple - select and drag the image you want for the page, type in the text. Add the next page. In my opinion the artwork is of good quality. StoryboardThat Of all the storymaking sites I explored, this was my favorite. For my capstone project, I want my students to interact with their favorite books by storyboarding. StoryboardThat lets you choose how many frames you want and select and drag the elements into each frame. Provided for the user is a multitude of backdrops, characters, dialogue bubbles, and the ability to upload your own. All of them are able to be layered, positioned, and edited in multiple ways. Though there are MANY options for editing, the interface is amazingly easy to use! There is a certain style to the outcome, but the storytelling tools are vast and rather easy to use. The site also comes with sample lessons already created. As always, when using digital technology, student access to devices and the internet can be an issue that must be considered. Another aspect to take into account is that each tool takes time to learn. Just my own surface investigations of these sites took hours of time. When giving assignments that incorporate making videos or storyboards, the time commitment involved must be taken into account. I also think it would be wise to stick to one or two platforms to give your students (and you) time to master it and plumb the depths of its capabilities. Dearest Cohort 12, I’ve just come from my 1:1 with Brenna and I find myself in that simultaneously exciting and frightening place where ideas are igniting and swirling and some shape is beginning to form around what my final capstone project will look like. So I find myself needing to write a different kind of blog - rather like a brainstorm: a bit more freeform and seeking the insight and suggestions of the group. Why-How Ladder In working through my Why-How ladder, I started by going back to my real passion. It was behind my driving question for my 790 research topic and I keep coming home to it. At the center of my ladder is the provocation: “How might we help students enjoy reading?” WHY might we...? Here, my ladder branches into to 2 answers.
Proceeding through the Ladder gave shape to my passion. Exciting. Victory! Alas, it seemed to broaden the topic and not narrow it! Frightening. Defeat! Enter the 1:1 with Brenna. Her advice...keep it simple. Less is more. If you want a student to enjoy reading for the rest of his life, well, it starts with one encounter. Make the first encounter a positive one, and he is more likely to repeat. And repeat. And repeat. So begin with one experience. Obviously, we can’t get a “do-over” of childhood, but we can build one enjoyable experience with reading. Why not simplify the driving question to focus on one lesson? Provide an experience where a student gets invested in her reading choice in the hopes that she continue to be invested in choosing books of interest and therefore continues reading in general. Use digital tools to help the student take away obstacles and connect to the book and to other readers. So now the provocation, or driving question, becomes “How do we use digital resources to create an initial positive, enjoyable experience for a reader?” Next steps:
Before joining NVUSD this past year I was not a Google suite user. As I’ve progressed through the year, I’ve become familiar with the suite, but by far do not consider myself a fluent user. Surprisingly, I had only been asked to fill out about a dozen forms surveys over the course of this last school year. This was my first attempt at creating my own Google Forms and I am excited to see where the adventure leads. Since my students work predominantly from home, I wanted to create a survey meant to discover what their home access is to the internet and to what kind of devices they have access. My first question was a yes/no answer. Depending on the answer, the student would or would not have to answer a few more questions. I recalled my frustration in taking a couple surveys when my answer should have eliminated the next questions but didn’t. I did a little searching around, and to my delight, found that Forms has a function to create sections and to jump to a new section depending on the first answer. So, for example, when a student responded NO, she did not have a cell phone, she was not required to answer questions about the functionality of that nonexistent phone, but skipped to the next section on home access to internet/devices. My students come to school once or twice a week. If they are absent, they still have to turn in work in order to get their attendance credits. If a student is unable to get a ride to school, this presents a problem. I made a form that enables students to submit work from home. The next step is for the student to schedule what is called an “intervention” meeting. The students find a list of available times to schedule. The add-on Choice Eliminator will take a time off the list when a student chooses it. Choice Eliminator can be used for scheduling, sign ups for parents, students choosing topics for projects when you don’t want more than one group/student doing the same topic. The next form I created was done mostly to track when students check out and check in books from the class library. Mosty I did this one because I wanted to play around with Autocrat, which is a mail merge add-on. When students check out a book, a spreadsheet is formed and a letter is emailed to the student with a confirmation and a due date. You create a folder in your drive to collect the individual letters, so they can be emailed again or emailed to the parent if the book does not come back. I kept it simple for my first run, but I can see how an email could also be sent when the book is checked in. I would like to use forms and the autocrat add-on to have parents check in on orientation day, when they give us basic necessary information. I’d like to find out their preferred method of contact and to send a welcome letter to them from that information gathering. Dr. Bobbe Baggio presents a very strong case for the use of effective graphics to promote learning through the visual perceptions She provides many usable and practical tips. A piece of knowledge about brain function that I had heard before that Baggio reiterates is the fact that the brain experiences cognitive overload. Too much is too much = the brain shuts out or dumps excess information. Either it ignores the over stimulation and the information never makes it into short term memory, or the brain puts unused information into cold storage, which makes it the most difficult to retrieve. Visual information, or graphic design inputs, can be just as overwhelming to the eye, and therefore the brain, as a page full of words. As I was perusing various twitter feeds, I ran across an infographic that connects Baggio’s information to Clark’s ideas to some of the digital technology with which Cohort 12 is experimenting to my still vague notion of where I want to take my Driving Question for the next phase. Indulge me while I work it out! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDPvi0BXUAAIMsk.jpg Baggio is saying that roughly 80% of the population learns visually. The infographic suggests we need to move beyond that to maximize retention. So add an additional audio layer from our cohort’s experimenting with various screencasting tools that allow for sound overlays. This moves us up to 50% retention. Put those same tools in the hands of the students themselves, and they are saying and doing themselves. Say and Do = 90% retention. Enter Clark’s advice on technical training. A key idea on effective lesson design is to know your desired performance outcome. This is a specific task that the student will be able to do; it is a VERB followed by a MEASURABLE TASK. Say and do. Clark also advises that within the structured lesson design there is supporting information provided with information displays and also a key lesson task that consists of practice exercises. It is also referred to as remember and apply. My previous driving question was to explore the impact of free, voluntary reading (pleasure reading) on reading proficiency in middle school students. The results of my action research showed me that increasing pleasure reading time as a single factor was not as effective as it should have been. One hypothesis as to why my results varied so drastically from the results I found in my literature reviews is that my population has specific qualities and needs. Using the SITE model helps understand these learners. My student population is about 65% special needs or at-risk. Many of them face significant obstacles to reading proficiency. Some have never mastered learning to read, yet they are at the stage in school and life where they need to read to learn. Here the idea of mediacy enters. Mediacy is described by Paul Strassmann as, "the ability of individuals to successfully cope with communications in their civilization." Literacy and mediacy working together can help them succeed. Another significant obstacle for my students are affective (emotional domain) perceptions. Anxiety, depression, frustration from learning difficulties often color their perception of school in general and of learning tasks. In the SITE model, paying attention to these influences would be understanding their sociocultural motives and values. As Baggio notes, positive graphics can be a powerful tool to influence the affective perceptions of students. Enter the SITE model’s technical subcontext. Perhaps digital resources could be used to support their reading. Some examples of text readers and voice to text I found while following a weekly twitterchat ( #engchat, #edhat, #sschat): Chrome Speakit!, Announcify, and Read & Write for Google. Chrome SpeakIt! Announcify Read & Write for Google My concept of my capstone project is evolving to include an audience that is partly students and partly other educators. I am envisioning a resource page for the students that is visually alluring and provides digital reading support resources. Other parts of the capstone pages would be directed at fellow teachers, especially those who have a need to support learning outside of class time. Essentially, it would provide research, suggestions, and resources. My teaching context is that of independent studies. Often I ask how I can assist my students from afar. They are at home, I am at school. I know other teachers at my site struggle with the same question. Likely, many teachers in many teaching contexts would also benefit. Both the student page and the teacher page fill this need.
“How can digital resources be leveraged to support reading success for at-risk & special needs students?” How can/Should social media be used to help you develop/collaborate/communicate as a professional? What are the critical issues to consider? When I first began teaching one of the Go-To resources for teachers was Harry Wong’s First Days of School. I still keep my copy and believe most of what he proposes is valuable for classroom and education practices. I’ve read the book several times, watched the video series and its spin-offs, listened to the audio, and attended several workshops around the content of this book. One of my favorite catch phrases cemented in my mind from this experience is that when it comes to developing as a professional, teachers “beg, borrow, and steal” the best ideas from one another. All my best tools, lessons, and classroom management strategies have come from other teachers. A 35 year veteran teacher I know volunteers his time to serve on a WASC team, just so, he says, he can stay fresh (after 35 years) and get into other teachers’ classrooms to get some good ideas. Getting around physically to see other teachers in action is, needless to say, a challenging proposition. After all, we’re all in class at the same time! Finding time to attend professional development workshops, conferences, even a coffee date with a fellow teacher - that’s not always in the schedule. So how do we experience one another’s little microcosms? We use social media. Student aren’t the only ones who can benefit from the use of social media. In Steven Anderson’s Blog on Three Untapped Social Media Resources for Students, he cites a Pew Internet Research Study from 2016 showing that of all U.S adults,
I have no hesitation in using social media to connect professionally with colleagues. I do think it wise practice to create separate accounts that are used for purely professional reasons and are never intermingled with personal accounts. One critical issue I think we need to consider is the “unfiltered” aspect of using social media for sharing ideas. In Darrell West’s article How Blogs, Social Media, and Video Games Improve Education, he points out that social media can tap into the expertise of the general population. He calls it democratizing the flow of information. “There is no longer any need to wait on professionals to share material and report on new developments. Today, people communicate directly in an unmediated and unfiltered manner.” West does not state it directly, but implies that it is a positive shift that we do not any longer have to rely upon experts to inform us, we can all just weigh in our thoughts without any mediation nor filter. But we must keep in mind when wading through the vast array of ideas available through social media that mediation can provide judgements of accuracy. Peer reviewed articles are more reliable than unfiltered thoughts. Increased, expedient participation via social media is certainly a good thing, but not at the expense of quality. Not all participation is equal in merit. Just as we are trying to teach our students digital literacy skills, such as how to weigh the credibility of an internet source and how to apply critical thinking to what they read, we as professionals must be savvy about applying these same digital literacy skills to using social media for communicating, collaborating, and developing as educators. What would you do if you were to come across an inappropriate post made by one of your students outside of the school. Currently, I wouldn’t probably come across an inappropriate post made by a current student because I very purposefully do not follow, connect with, snap, chat, or gram any of my current students. My understanding of the school district email and social media policy is that teachers are supposed to conduct all communication with students using NVUSD email addresses. Appropriate communication with students and parents by teachers is absolutely essential in this litigious age. Aside from directives from our superiors, it is simply wise to be prudent in how deeply we interconnect our professional and personal lives when we’re role models, mentors, and sometimes a highly scrutinized adult presence. We are teachers… it’s our calling to instruct our students, and that does involve caring about who they are as people. Yes, we need to know their interests and maintain a warm, inviting, safe emotional space for them. Yet we still need to draw a boundary between being a caring mentor and being friends, buddies, or...social contacts on social media. Once students are graduated or I have changed schools, I do occasionally connect with them or their parents over social media. The day will come when I will stumble upon a comment on social media by one of my own students that is inappropriate or harmful to another student. Especially in the latter case, I would feel it my responsibility to speak with the student and the parents. If necessary, I would involve the principal to mediate any restorative steps. In Patrick Larkin’s example (What do you do when you see inappropriate social media posts?) the comment is not directed at another student, so he advocates taking the approach of a teaching moment rather than disciplinary steps. I agree that showing a student WHY not to be so careless with his digital footprint is more valuable than an extrinsic negative consequence. Show the student the natural consequences that may arise from public consumption of what might have been a thoughtless, impulsive social media post that doesn’t show him in the best light. |
Nancy JaminetArchives
December 2017
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