educators

Rather than a Digital Native/Digital Immigrant dichotomy, students have a wide spectrum of digital competence positively correlating to their digital exposure.

Our student bloggers and digital writers of all backgrounds are part of a journaling culture which America has not seen since the great age of diarists during the Transcendental movement, when Thoreau and Emerson recorded their daily lives for eventual public consumption.

“Who did you help today?” It is simple. It inspires empathy. It shows what we truly value… and I look forward to the day when my daughters ‘favorite part of the day’ is also the answer to ‘who did you help today’.

This April, the NEA is marking National Autism Awareness Month by publicizing its ASD resources for teachers and families, including The Puzzle of Autism, a guide to assist educators, inform parents, offer ways to help identify the typical characteristics of ASDs, and provide ideas for ways to work successfully with children who have the disability.

I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

In many schools and even states, it's been, rather, a movement to block and bust: no blogs, no cell phones, no IM. We take away the powerful social technologies our kids are already using to learn and, in doing so, tell them their own tools are irrelevant. Or, instead of using the complex and challenging phenomenon of a site such as Wikipedia to teach the realities of navigating information in this new world, we prohibit its use. In fact, at this writing, the U.S. legislature is in the process of deciding whether schools and libraries should have access to any of the potential of the Read/Write Web at all. When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus.

I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won't be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners?

Through iPods and mp3 players, Facebook, cell phones and texting, young people become familiar with current technologies and often view them as an extension of themselves, Kennedy says. As a result, they’re drawn to learning techniques that employ novel devices. “Most of this younger generation has grown up entirely with the Internet. How can we not incorporate technology into our curriculum?” she says