Mary G Johnson's List: Boot Camp Multiple Literacies 2013

Five educational trends that may be seen in 2013, including educational technology

As educators nationwide seek to help students meet the demands of the common core in English/language arts and mathematics, many arts education advocates are making the case that the arts can be a valuable partner. And in some cases, they're identifying ways to make the links explicit.

Everyone knows what literacy means--reading and writing words. Visual literacy is reading and writing images. The "reading" is that when you see an image, you understand what's being communicated by that image. The "writing" is when you find appropriate, compelling images and put them into materials to communicate, teach, or learn.

Lesson Plan: Analysis
How do the different parts of this lesson scaffold understanding?
What makes the word wall activity an effective warm-up?
How does identifying subjects and verbs help students make sense of the poem?

The Common Core State Standards have become a crucial needle in my instructional compass. While the standards themselves won’t define me as a teacher (they were never intended to do this), they do play a prominent role in how I design instruction.

A collection of articles hand-picked by Education Week editors for their insights on:
•Integrating literacy across subjects in preparation for the common core
•Shifting attention to informational text and other nonfiction texts
•Applying literacy research to the common standards
•Librarians' roles in preparing for the common core
•Identifying struggling readers and implementing literacy interventions

Research suggests that the arts foster critical thinking skills and processes that prepare students for college and the workplace. According to the 2012 report (PDF) by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, "the arts promote work habits that cultivate curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills," and are "a basis for success in the 21st century" (2010, p. 2).

One of the best and most robust resources for teaching digital literacy can be found on one of the Web’s most persistent trouble spots: Google. That’s right. The same search engine that educators say is often guilty of providing students with access to too much unfiltered information is also home to some of the best resources for teaching young researchers about the uses—and potential perils—of the Internet.

Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. Visit http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searcheducation/ for lesson plans, classroom activities, and more.

Help your students become better searchers. Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

High school teacher Sarah Brown Wessling unpacks the idea of text complexity and discusses how teachers can design tasks with text complexity in mind. This is an excellent video.

One of the things I talked about was worksheets. I was slow to come to worksheets. I like technology. I don't like creating waste. Worksheets seemed so high school. But now I teach with them more often than I teach without them. I use them in my credit bearing classes as a way to assess what they're actually getting and to get feedback about what is still confusing. I use them informally in my one-shot classes to give them structured notes and give them the impression someone is going to follow up and see if they were paying attention.

Today's students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Although the vast majority of today’s educators and teachers grew up with the understanding that the human brain doesn’t physically change based on stimulation it receives from the outside—especially after the age of 3— it turns out that that view is, in fact, incorrect. Based on the latest research in neurobiology, there is no longer any question that stimulation of various kinds actually changes brain structures and affects the way people think, and that these transformations go on throughout life. The brain is, to an extent not at all understood or believed to be when Baby Boomers were growing up, massively plastic. It can be, and is, constantly reorganized. (Although the popular term rewired is somewhat misleading, the overall idea is right—the brain changes and organizes itself differently based on the inputs it receives.) The old idea that we have a fixed number of brain cells that die off one by one has been replaced by research showing that our supply of brain cells is replenished constantly. The brain constantly reorganizes itself all our child and adult lives, a phenomenon technically known as neuroplasticity.

The author of "Teaching Digital Natives," whose success pushed him onto the speaking circuit, says the explosion of technology over the last 10 years is just the start of a symbiotic new world. Computers and handsets are becoming an extension of body and mind, creating a Cyborg-like population.

A “book” is not just words or a story—a great book
is also the interaction of the author’s words and ideas over time with readers, with scholars, and with
culture and history. Lexicon editor Roderick Benns recently posed some questions to Marc Prensky,
the speaker,writer, consultant, and innovator
who spoke to many members of the Student Achievement Division in September.

As education professionals—especially education IT professionals—we’d better be working on a solution to provide apps to everyone. Because, as anyone who has seen them surely knows, apps are already a huge tool for useful and engaged learning. And they are only getting better, at an exponential rate. Remember, apps for learning are still in their infancy. The many that do exist point the way to enormous teaching power, making the small devices that run them enormously powerful learning tools, both inside and outside school. Today, with apps, students can learn to read and write, identify and learn about people, places, plants, and animals, have words or concepts they don’t know explained to them, collect scientific data and run experiments, participate in history though simulation, participate in virtual teams through Face Time and texting, and participate in live world events as they happen through apps like Twitter. Unlike school books, there are apps for just about any area a student is interested in or passionate about. The most powerful thing about apps is this: wherever apps are lacking for something students need, we, ourselves—more and more of us—can create them—especially with our students. And doing so is both good for our students’ future, and likely to help many of them get jobs.

My vision is one of better people, better equipped to face the challenges of the world they will live in-that is, a world far different than yesterday's or even today's. Technology has an important place in that vision, because it has an important place in our future. But it does not dominate the vision; rather it supports it. As one of my student panelists put it brilliantly: "We see technology as a foundation. It underlies everything we do." In the end, I am far more interested in creating important, useful learning and life opportunities for our students than I am in promoting any educational technology. (Except, of course, when technology helps achieve those things.)

The switchover to teaching our kids these new forms is still going on, and is, sadly, taking far too long. In some places tools for using emails, powerpoints and blogs are still not available. In other places educators are reluctant to give up the older, outdated modes which they grew up with and know well. And in still other places the tools are available and the educators are willing, but it isn’t clear how to best use the tools and incorporate them into curriculums and teaching.

Devices-laptops, iPads and others-are finally beginning to enter our classrooms in large numbers. This is long overdue. Our "digital native" students require these tools to prepare for their future lives in the digital age. Yet the things that caused me, 10 years ago, to call our students digital natives-their comfort, for example, with digital devices and their assumption of always-available digital connectivity-will not automatically, by themselves, make them "educated." Education is a process of gradually learning how the world works, and of understanding how one can play a useful part in that world. It is typically a long process, involving considerable mental effort.