English Teachers

Networking: The New Literacy

Our students must be nomadic, flexible, mobile learners who depend on their ability to connect with people and resources. As educators, we need to master this as well, we must know for ourselves how to create, grow, and navigate these collaborative spaces in safe, effective, and ethical ways. We need to create our own Personal Learning Networks not only to learn ourselves, but to model these shifts for our students. Come join this session with Friday’s Keynote Speaker Will Richardson as we discuss what steps administrators can take to ensure that they – and their schools – are meeting the needs of our students.

Capture Everything: What's worth capturing in my classrooms? My building? My district? Audio? Video? Text-based assignments? Student work? Writing? Share Everything: Where can I share it? With whom? What audiences is our organization working to serve? How will they benefit from these shared items? Who needs to see what’s going on? Open Everything: What are the closed silos of information in our schools that shouldn't be? What things outside of our schools have we closed (blocked)? What can we do to open both of those up? Only Connect: How can I help my students and teachers connect with content, with each other, and with others outside the classroom (students, teachers, experts, mentors, the community, etc.) in a meaningful way?

InkScape is illustration software similar to the commercial packages Adobe Freehand and Adobe Illustrator, but without the cost. If you would like to try making some really nice clean computer drawings like you see in magazines or on television this software can help you get started. I played with the software and quickly created this smiley face. Illustration software is essential to learn for anyone wanting to be a graphic designer. Why not start today with similar tools similar to what the pros use? For more information please look at http://www.inkscape.org.

This requires not only knowledge that people have thoughts that are different from our own (basic Theory of Mind concepts) but that they also can narrate a story across time and/or sequence so the reader can follow and make reasonable conclusions to avoid confusion (this is called narrative language). They also have to recognize that people move from ideas (gestalt or main idea) to thoughts (details). To help the reader the writer has to organize his information so that he introduces his idea and then supports it with a reasonable set of thoughts (details).

1. Teach them how we brainstorm information related to the topic we are going to write about. Most 2nd grade students learn about "brainstorming" through the use of what are called, "graphic organizers". "visual organizers" or "mind maps". This lesson needs to be extended for our students and taught much more extensively.

2. Learn to tell the difference between ideas or what we call in writing "main ideas" and how these are different from "details".