Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Tech

  • Perpetuating the Story of Difference? or Literacy, revisited.

    Literacy is a topic close to my heart.

    I became a teacher 12 years ago because I felt a call to do whatever possible to make sure that all children knew how to read. Since then, the theme has deepened for me, coming to mean much more than just knowing how to read.

    Dennis and I recently hashed out our working understanding of literacy in Boy in the Bubble revisited and in Literacies – digital and otherwise…or not. Christopher has explored the historical roots of education and literacy and we discussed what this might mean in a contemporary context in Digitality or Why ‘Literacy’ is Dead and again in Literacies – digital and otherwise…or not, referenced above.

    I am coming to know literacy as being able to use cultural tools to make sense of the world we live in.

    When I couple that with my understanding of experience and story – see Who are teachers? and my comment to SASSY reviews CNN’s Black in America: Black Men – I need to respect that there are many ways to do this, to make sense of the world we live in – to make sense of me in the world I live in relation to you and you in the world you and you live.

    And so I am unsettled this morning as I reflect on how we – those of us who champion educational technology – think about, blog about, talk about, present about, attempt to persuade about, make assumptions about sense-making in our world.

    This unsettled feeling has been creeping up on me, hanging out in my shadows. It stepped out of them for a moment this morning as I read Doug Belshaw’s EdD Thesis Proposal, in particular his equation of literacy in the 21st century with digital literacy. I commented (or at least I tried to, until edublogs’ server dropped the connection to the site … once again…):

    Yup, still unsettled by the equation
    literate in the 21st century = digitally literate

    I think it is part of the equation, one of the ways to get there, but the sole definition of contemporary literacy?

    Certainly excludes people without much access to digital media. Is there a danger of creating an even larger illiterate world by virtue of this definition?

    I’m curious as to how you will explore this.

    And I still ask the question – are we creating an even larger divide between peoples and cultures with different access to media when we make statements like:

    “Literacy today depends on understanding the multiple media that make up our high-tech reality and developing the skills to use them effectively” (from Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century (2006) by Barbara R. Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne L. Flannigan)?

    Can we really say that literacy depends on that? To rephrase using somewhat out-of-date terminology, by doing so are we creating an even larger divide between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd worlds? And what about between the different socio-economic situations within our own countries?

    Are we honouring different stories and experiences by limiting our definition of literacy to digital, or at the very least by claiming it to be the most relevant?

    Are we making the differences even more apparant?
    Are we making the differences even more apparent? (UNHD 07/08 World Literacy Map)

    I have a lot of questions.

    I feel unsettled.

  • Wordling away :)

    Here’s a fun site to create instant tag clouds based on 3 different sets of criteria:

    • text you type in
    • url of a site with a feed
    • del.icio.us user name

    Here is one I created with this blog’s url:

    I see a few possibilities for this:

      • Seeing frequently used words in websites or various texts, written by or for students
      • Vocabulary words – a teacher could create a visual data mine for frequently misspelled or correctly spelled words to post in class
      • For fun because there is nothing wrong with doing things for fun :)

      I would like to see it embeddable…for now it seems to only be able to pop a tiny image into my blog (as you can (barely) see above.

      I discovered Wordle via TechnoSeeds. Thanks :)

    • An Essential Question for EdTech

      Integration

      Integration by me: I realized this painting was ‘done’ when I had integrated colours from the daffodil’s cup into the petals.

      Recently I wrote a post on digital literacy within the wider context of literacy and, in writing, touched on what I realize is central to my own teaching:

      an essential question for educators today is how do we integrate literacies in our students? and in ourselves?

      It is not enough – it really, really isn’t – to advocate for technology in the classroom because it looks good and because others say it is important. A reflective school leader – administrator, teacher, support staff, consultant – will start digging deeper for essential questions around student learning in relation to the use of technology, as well as apply those questions to their own learning.

      I use technology in my teaching because literacy is the central focus for me at all times. “Literacy is about being able to make sense of the world we live in” (Dennis Harter, in comment to my post) and my deepest desire as a teacher is that I help students to begin to achieve this, that I give them the tools with which they can make sense of their/our world.

      I use a mashup of communication tools in my teaching, from word processing, to podcasting, to text readers, to visual editors, to blogging, to wikis, to debate, to improv, to (perhaps the most important) simple conversation. I do this because each of these tools can help different students make sense of the vast amount of information that is available to them in different ways. This is essential because each of my students need the opportunity to discover the tools that work best for them and I recognize that these are not necessarily the tools that work best for me.

      If I did not use technology in my teaching I would be going against all that I stand for as a teacher.

      That being said, if I return to my essential question from above, I need to stress that using tech to improve literacy is only part of the picture, part of the system. Literacy is a complex system made up of many and diverse components.

      I am moving more toward thinking about how my job is really to assist students in integrating their literate selves. In doing so, I need to recognize and honour the role(s) played by different technologies in their learning and in my own. That is essential for me.

      (this post was inspired by this one)

    • Literacies – digital and otherwise…or not.

      It’s a recurring theme – how do we develop our students’ literacy skills? Literacy is “an essential component of a learning society” and as educators we strive to ensure that our students develop the keenest literacy (and numeracy) skills possible so they can be active and productive members of society…blahblahblah…so that they can belong.

      Lately I’ve been thinking on how literacy is becoming more complex. Dennis has brought out this conversation in me, first on Learning 2.1 in response to the blog post: What is Web 2.0? and then on his own blog via Boy in the Bubble Revisited.

      (I made this, er, image with the tools at polyvore.com. Pretty fun little image collecting site. Go play :))

      Basically, with the technologies that have become a way of life – especially for our kids who didn’t know life before myspace, facebook, im, texting, etc…- literacy has whole new dimensions to do with immediacy of communication. We need to recognize and honour it in our teaching – this I believe. I also believe that we need to see it as a subset of the larger context of literacy.

      We can do this, perhaps, by asking questions like:

      • how does it fit?
      • where and when is it valid to use this type of literacy and where and when isn’t it?
      • how do we negotiate between different types of literacy?
      • and – how do/should we teach all of this?

      Dennis responded:

      Both have value, both need to be tapped. Stretching the mind is ALWAYS a good thing. And understanding culture and thinking and the wonder of human ingenuity and creativity has to continue.

      Personally I think there is more than a ‘both’. Looking at literacy as either digital or everything that came before is too dualistic for me – if I see literacy as a system (and I do) then digital literacy has an affect on all of literacy and vice versa. But I see where Dennis is going with this. It is a way(s) of reading and thinking and interacting with words, numbers, and thought that affects the way we need to teach.

      “Literacy is on shifting sands,” [Heather] Blair says. “It’s a moving target. Our definition of what literacy is is a moving target. Our definitition has changed radically.”(from What is Literacy, Nov. 2005, CBC News Online)

      Teachers struggle with motivation all the time. Intrinsic motivation – the motivation that comes from within ourselves – is seen as the type of motivation that triggers authentic and meaningful learning. By using tools that students are already comfortable with to access other forms of media/text is one way of developping intrinsic motivation – it may encourage students to ask: how does this fit in my world? And. more importantly, how do I fit in the world?

      So, all of this is leading to why I don’t think we can look at literacies as one or the other, as dualistic. I think that an essential question for educators today is how do we integrate literacies in our students? and in ourselves?

      If we continue to look at new ways of being literate in contrast to more traditional ways then I think it will only be all the more difficult to make connections with our students while we are teaching. And isn’t that what we are trying to do?

      I’m just starting to think about this. I’m hoping y’all comment, ask me some questions to help me clarify exactly what I am getting at here…

      tracy

    • Invention at Play

      I discovered Adam Hunt via his comment on my latest LeaderTalk post. When I went to peruse his blog, I was met with his review of this great (fun) interactive game resource for the classroom (click the logo to go):

      I’m having fun and I’m going to test it out on my students next week.

      I also like the conversations on play that are available for viewing on the site, including transcripts. Here’s a quote from the site:

      “Children are making up theories of the world, going out and testing those theories, doing experiments to explore those theories, and that testing and experimentation is what we see when we see play. Even the very youngest children are already doing some of the same things that scientists are doing.”
      –Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, co-author, The Scientist in the Crib

      Here’s a direct link to the section of the site with the videos –> Does Play Matter?

      Do you play in your classroom?