Finding time to instruct digital literacy in a full curriculum is certainly challenging. The minutes in an instructional day are limited. I know all teachers face a time crunch. Here’s a snapshot of my week. I give this not to complain or use it as an excuse not to face the task of teaching digital literacy, but in the hopes that you, dear reader, might have ideas to assist me in being a better educator. Two heads are better than one… and the more, the merrier!
My possible schedule for a week could include any grade from K to 8th. Typically it is rare to have students enrolled in lower elementary, and currently, if there were students in every grade level, they would need to be paired up in multi-grade sessions because we have only two teachers for K-8. Think of me like a coordinator for a homeschool student who has the advantage of having classmates and a teacher with whom he gets to check-in every week. For the K through 5th, I teach all 4 core subjects: ELA, Social Studies, Math, and Science. For the 6th-8th I teach ELA and Social Studies. My schedule is set at 25 instruction hours per week with an extra 7 hours set aside for prep and meetings that include 1-1 student meetings, IEP meetings, parent conferencing, team meetings, a weekly meeting with the principal, and professional development on Wednesdays. Let’s take a typical Tuesday: 8-9am IEP meeting, 9-10am 7th grade ELA, 10-11am 7th grade Social Studies, 11-12pm 2nd grade Math and ELA, 12:30-1 pm one-on-one with student who was absent yesterday, 1-2pm 5th grade Social Studies and Science, 2-3pm 3rd grade Math and Science. Bear in mind that is the ONLY hour that week that the student attends that class; the rest of the learning and work is done at home through independent studies. Students receive 3 hours per week of class time. This year we expanded 8th grade to 4 hours. Our classroom is a little bit traditional and little bit flipped. During the hour a week per subject, we go through what the student studied at home to assess learning and preview and frontload the next week’s content. It is very fast paced and bare bones. The students and parents are truly in control of their own learning. So you can see that when I throw around the idea of teaching digital literacy, I will have to also think outside the box and think about putting the learning in the hands of the learner. That being said, I think the best approach is to integrate the instruction into the existing curriculum. Rather than think of digital literacy and digital citizenship as a separate lesson that needs to be taught as a stand alone lesson, or teaching technology for its own sake, I’d like to take the approach of truly integrating technology and digital use into the learning. For example, let’s take a 3rd grade learning unit where the students’ end result is to create a slide show for an animal report. In the research portion of the lesson the students would learn about efficient ways to search for online information, critical thinking skills to filter information, how to identify legitimate academic sources versus sources that are not credible sources. When the students move to writing their paragraphs and presenting information, they would learn how to cite sources and give credit to others. When creating slide, they would learn how to use images that are in the public domain and to give credit to the source. If they chose to purchase an image, there would be learning around internet commerce and safety. Effective digital visual design could be a mini-lesson. When sharing their slide show with the class or publishing it to the web, learning around appropriate collaboration and digital communication could occur. One of the aspects of teaching digital literacy that I would like to explore this semester is non-teacher-led lessons, or asynchronous, student accessible lessons. My students need to be able to access effective and engaging learning units from home, not just for digital literacy, but for ALL of their content areas. As their teacher and the one ultimately held responsible for “teaching” them, I need to find a way to motivate the students to seek their own learning and a way to hold them accountable to putting in the effort and time from their “classroom” at home.
4 Comments
James
6/18/2017 12:46:28 pm
Nancy,
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Nai Saelee
6/18/2017 03:51:47 pm
Hi Nancy,
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Patrick
6/18/2017 10:19:54 pm
I like your all around blended approach. I agree with the conclusion that digital literacy is at its best and most authentic when it is side by side with curriculum in a meaningful way. I also agree with how you pull pieces of traditional and flipped models. I was sent to some presentations on pure flipped models and honestly didn't think it was enough. It left too many questions open and too much up to individual student's circumstances. I really do think pulling things together from different areas is what makes this successful. A classroom cannot be purely game-based or purely flipped or purely traditional (at least in a math setting). If there was one easy answer or one best system, we would all be doing it by now. Experimentation and Frankensteining together the approach that is best for a particular year's cohort of students seems to me to be the best way forward. For now at least.
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Dan
6/19/2017 11:22:32 am
Hi Nancy,
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