personal (and personable) support in the classroom is the key to the success of any technology-rich program, and 21st century literacy is no different.
I believe that the read/write Web, or what we are calling Web 2.0, will culturally, socially, intellectually, and politically have a greater impact than the advent of the printing press.
Because it is in the act of our becoming a creator that our relationship with content changes, and we become more engaged and more capable at the same time. In a world of overwhelming content, we must swim with the current or tide (enough with water analogies!).
You may think that you don't have anything to teach the generation of students who seem so tech-savvy, but they really, really need you. For centuries we have had to teach students how to seek out information – now we have to teach them how to sort from an overabundance of information. We've spent the last ten years teaching students how to protect themselves from inappropriate content – now we have to teach them to create appropriate content. They may be "digital natives," but their knowledge is surface level, and they desperately need training in real thinking skills.
Independent school culture is such that teachers need to make certain they build on the rich heritage of what works and yet make room to rethink delivery of AP courses and such so that these kids not only get into some of the most prestigious colleges around, but they are fluent in the new literacies when they arrive.
Web 2.0 – and
ultimately School 2.0 -- is all about this
two-way or group communication. The Web is no longer just a place to search for
resources. It’s a place to find people, to exchange ideas, to demonstrate our
creativity before an audience. The Internet has become not only a great curriculum resource but a great learning resource. The second generation Web is in fact,
laying the foundation for ideas such as Classroom 2.0, Teacher 2.0 and Learning 2.0.
Independent school culture is such that teachers need to make certain they build on the rich heritage of what works and yet make room to rethink delivery of AP courses and such so that these kids not only get into some of the most prestigious colleges around, but they are fluent in the new literacies when they arrive.
subjects used them as an opportunity to reinforce their own beliefs.
"Since people have more choice, they can choose to read the things that reflect what they already believe.
If one quack repeats the same piece of information to you five times, it's nearly as effective as hearing the sound bite from five different reputable sources.
MLA handbook doesn't, in my opinion, do a very good job differentiating between a static personal home page and other kinds of self-published websites (such as an annotated bibliography or an anthology of short autobiographical essays). Citing a weblog isn't much different from citing any web page, but students may appreciate a clear example.I would prefer to put angle brackets around the URL, but my blogging software chokes when I try that.
I heard a
vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to redesign
the process of teacher certification that in his opinion this country
became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action
of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers
who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none
of them very formal; if schools had pre-empted the right to teach
computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of
leading the world in this literacy.
In modern society,
said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations--not by
their own individual accomplishments. It such a world people who
read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately
empowered, they know too much, and know how to find out what they
don't know by themselves, without consulting experts
Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make
reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork.
New York State, for
instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European
Economic Community nations combined.
rederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century
Germany, fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children"
in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as
the vegetables.
Kindergarten was created to be a way to break the
influence of mothers on their children.
Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce,
alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of
a poverty in education.
The world's narcotic economy is based
upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many
powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an
important sales outlet.
Senator Ted Kennedy's office
released a paper not too long ago claiming that prior to compulsory
education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never
again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990
in the United States almost nobody who reads,
writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers,
This article also appeared in the Charlotte Observer. The question I have is "how can we teach students to read deeply online?" Because online text isn't going away.