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We have begun to introduce students to the language of the arts, and we have placed the acquisition of this language alongside the traditional forms of literacy and numeracy. Now I'm beginning to see some exciting things happen: Students are beginning to use the language of the arts to critique their own work and the work of others. For instance, students have been watching segments from the television show So You Think You Can Dance and writing formal critiques in response. Students are starting to use the elements and principles of the language of the arts to connect various forms of creative communication. For example, they are comparing balance in dance with balance in graphic design. They are making connections between melody in music and lines in dance and visual arts. These intertextual connections are powerful literacy moments for us all. Generally speaking, students are turning to artistic forms of expression in other curriculum areas. Dance and the visual arts have become part of our geographical lexicon as we explore the theme of migration. Drama and music have found their way into our exploration of cells in science.

But in reality, concepts and facts require different approaches and different learning strategies.

Concept maps can be read as sentences starting from the main idea and working out along the sub-paths.

Concept mapping serves several purposes, helping students: -Brainstorm and generate new ideas -Discover new concepts and label propositions that connect them -More clearly communicate ideas, thoughts and information -Integrate new concepts with older concepts

But the obvious thing to do was to evolve the potential of this very stable listserv in a number of social media ways. While I am not sure which of these will be the favourites, the idea looks something like this: share a link on the listserv and store it for easy retrieval any time in the Diigo group! share your library images in Flickr, because we need to collect the ideas from around Australia Like us on Facebook – and include us in your News Feed. Share things you find, and get into the conversation. Perhaps 140 characters on Twitter will be just the thing for you – just another way to stay in touch and build the teacher librarian community.

Most K-12 classrooms in the United States today don’t use interactive blogs. By “interactive,” I mean a blog website which permits posts from students as well as the teacher, and comments from blog visitors as well as class members. As I explained in my post earlier this week on the iThemes education blog,

The past two months, I’ve had opportunities to ask different groups of educators the same question via an interactive SMS poll powered by PollEverywhere. The question I’ve asked has been: How many different assignments last year did you invite students to share on your interactive, classroom blog? The graph below summarizes responses in early June in Fort Bend ISD, which is in Houston, Texas. Of 156 respondents, 78% answered “zero.”

When it comes to traditional literacy we have thousands of years of experience to draw on and thousands of generations of literates to learn from. T

Other than in the area of basic computer and Internet skills it is difficult to find agreement on exactly what digital literacy is or what needs to be learned simply because it is so heavily contextual and changing so rapidly. If textual were evolving as fast digital we would need a new grammar book each week.