Group items tagged

To be information literate, a person must be able to recognize when information is needed and has the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.

igital literacy is the ability to locate, organize, understand, evaluate and analyze information using digital technology.

Digital citizenship refers to the use of these skills to interact with society.

Our global environmental, economic and social challenges require non-standardized skills such as creativity, problem-solving and collaboration. Accordingly, these are becoming indispensable skills for learners and workers who hope to stay at the innovative edge of today and tomorrow. While these 21st century skills are essential, they aren't enough. There is a growing expectation for these abilities to be leveraged and expressed using digital tools.

As media scholar Henry Jenkins has said: "Traditionally we wouldn't consider someone literate if they could read but not write. And today we shouldn't consider someone literate if they can consume but not produce media."

The literacy of the future rests on the ability to decode and construct meaning from one's constantly evolving environment -- whether it's coded orally, in text, images, simulations, or the biosphere itself. Therefore we must be adaptive to our social, economic and political landscape. Those of us living in this digital age are required to learn, unlearn and learn again and again.

The problem is not with the teachers, but with the very definition of 'media literacy' itself. What is it, really? Can we swap the term out with 'digital learning' or 'ed tech' or 'culturally relevant education'? If so, all these terms are essentially meaningless. A student learning how to use an iPad in the classroom is not the same as a student asking critical questions of the messages in television. One is about using the media; the other is about analyzing it. These skills are as different as reading and writing. Before we can take any steps toward a national media curriculum (like the UK has had for a long time), we need to come to a consensus about the meaning of these words. If the average American can easily articulate the difference between reading and writing, he should also be able to quickly explain why we need media in the classroom. Only then can our students get the forward-thinking education that they deserve.

95 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 use the Internet? And all of this is happening while we are in the midst of an explosive rise in mobile technology.

Access to richer graphics and data, as well as superior tools, is still limited on many affordable mobiles. At the same time, many schools continue to demonize cell phone use during school, which may be an outdated policy. Not only are there an increasing number of educational applications for mobiles but, as Blake-Plock suggests, prohibiting phones now means "disconnecting the kid from what's actually happening in most of our lives."

In 2009, the FCC began developing the National Broadband Plan, a work-in-progress that aims to increase broadband access across the country by providing additional infrastructure, incentives for companies to create low-cost access, educational programs, and much more.

The best way to understand the expectations of a particular medium is to participate in that medium and identify its genre expectations as they emerge.

Students need to think of their online data along the dimensions of: * accessibility* searchability* persistence

teaching our students about the kairos of digital media, its accessibility and persistence, and the extent to which it is public and private will prepare them not only for the writing situations that they find themselves in now, but also those they will face in the future.

But here are the solutions that this challenge brings to mind. Eliminate paper from the budget and remove all copiers and computer printers from schools and the central office (with exceptions of essential need). “On this date, everything goes digital.” Create a professional development plan where all faculty and staff learn to teach themselves within a networked, digital, and info-abundant environment — it’s about Learning-Literacy. Although workshops would not completely disappear, the goal would be a culture where casual, daily, and self-directed professional development is engaged, shared, and celebrated — everyday! Then extend the learning-literacy workshops to the greater adult community. Establish a group, representing teachers, staff, administration, students, and community. Invite a “guru” or two to speak to the group about the “Why” of transforming education.  Video or broadcast the speeches to the larger community via local access, etc. The group will then write a document that describes the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the person who graduates from their schools — a description of their goal graduate. The ongoing work of writing this document will be available to the larger community for comment and suggestion. The resulting piece will remain fluidly adaptable. Teachers, school administrators, and support staff will work in appropriately assembled into overlapping teams to retool their curricula toward assuring the skills, knowledge, appreciations and attitudes of the district’s goal graduate. Classroom curricula will evolve based on changing conditions and resources. To help keep abreast of conditions, teachers and support staff will shadow someone in the community for one day at least once a year and debrief with their teams identifying the skills and knowledge they saw contributing to success, and adapt their curricula appropriately.

The district budget will be re-written to exclude all items that do not directly contribute to the goal graduate or to supporting the institution(s) that contribute to the goal graduate. Part of that budget will be the assurance that all faculty, staff, and students have convenient access to networked, digital, and abundant information and that access will be at least 1 to 1. A learning environment or platform will be selected such as Moodle, though I use that example only as a means of description. The platform will have elements of course management system, social network and distributive portfolio. The goal of the platform will be to empower learning, facilitate assessment, and exhibit earned knowledge and skills to the community via student (and teacher) published information products that are imaginative, participatory and reflect today’s prevailing information landscape. Expand the district’s and the community’s notions of assessment to include data mining, but also formal and informal teacher, peer, and community evaluation of student produced digital products. Encourage (or require) teachers to produce imaginative information products that share their learning either related or unrelated to what they teach.  Also establish learning events where teachers and staff perform TED, or TELL (Teachers Expressing Leadership in Learning) presentations about their passions in learning to community audiences. Recognize that change doesn’t end and facilitate continued adapting of all plans and documents. No more five-year plans. Everything is timelined to the goal graduate.

It also makes more clear the need to retool every classroom and equip every teacher and learner with contemporary information technologies, and instill not only the literacy skills of this information landscape, but also the literacy habits.

Project-based learning: Games are interactive, "lean-forward," and participatory. They enable players to step into different roles (e.g. scientist, explorer, inventor, political leader), confront a problem, make meaningful choices and explore the consequences of these choices. Games can help make learning more engaging, relevant and give students real agency in ways that static textbooks simply cannot.

Personalized learning: Games are designed to enable players to advance at their own pace, fail in a safe and supportive environment, acquire critical knowledge just-in-time (vs. just-in-case), iterate based on feedback and use this knowledge to develop mastery. Games can help teachers manage large classes with widely divergent student capabilities and learning styles through embedded assessment and individualized, adaptive feedback.

24/7 learning: Games offer a delicate mix of challenges, rewards and goals that drive motivation, time-on-task and a level of engagement that can seamlessly cross from formal to informal learning environments. Given that kids spend more time engaged with digital media than any other activity (other than sleep), games can enable an increasing portion of this out-of-school digital media time to effectively reinforce in-school learning (and vice-versa).

My suspicion is that they know far more about this than we adults.

Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways.

Teaching and lecturing are largely lone wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges and Universities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious of anything produced outside of their classroom or their institution.