A resource that I use to think through what blogging means for the classroom comes from Will Richardson. I'm creating a link to today's post, and I'm curious about what you think. He discusses another post which discusses how Web 2.0 should be exposed for its destructiveness. That's not really Will's line of thinking. He thinks that schools should change to reflect the new technological tools, like blogs, wikis, and podcasts, which students are ready use and which he argues are the future.
It takes time to get used to blogging, at least it did for me. But I love the fact that it can discipline you to write every day, and we, as teachers and writers, can cultivate an audience and stay connected to each other to share thinking and writing.
Change is hard, and sometimes your head feels like it's exploding. But sometimes we can only get to the really great insights, the really great stuff, until we go through some tough thinking.
There's a quote from Leu and Kinzer who write that teachers are increasingly becoming irrelevant if they don't consider New Literacies in their classrooms.
What do you think?
4 comments:
Still no music I see.
I agree, and I can't afford to be both irrelevant and wrinkled. . .JoAnn Satzinger
Irrelevant sounds so harsh.
Scary. That quote is scary to me. How many get into the field of education and "get stuck" in their methods. It worked two years ago...so it should work today. Writing curriculum is the bane of my teacher existence, but it's also the pleasure when I realize I have opportunity to update practices and try to new things...to meet OLD standards. And I just realized that some of our standards haven't changed with society. I ran across these statistics one day from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics regarding job skills and MBA programs in America:
Skills recruiters find attractive in MBA graduates:
Ability to think analytically............78%
Ability to think strategically..........71%
Quantitative skills 58%
Leadership skills 56%
Oral communication skills 53%
Creative problem-solving skills 52%
Ability to integrate information 51%
Project management/implementation skills 51%
Skills recruiters feel MBA graduates need to strengthen:
People management 35%
Leadership skills 30%
Interpersonal skills 26%
I'm not sure where I was going with this now because I've been distracted so many times trying to post...but I think it is important to start using new techonological developments in our classroom so our students WILL be able to step to the plate in the world they belong to...
Just think about how much WE have changed...the writing project teachers..I know, not all of you are my age...but in 9th grade, 22 years ago, I took a "computer programming" class where I never successfully wrote the program to get my worm to go across the screen, which was black with green letters by the way. I watched Pretty in Pink and wanted Andrew McCarthy's character to send MY picture across a computer screen, which might actually be my first memory of a computer. The rest of my high school career was spent using a computer for word processing and when, my senior year, our newspaper went to "desk top publishing" we all were in awe that we could move text around on the screen and print to a "networked" printer. At home, I was fortunate enough to have an Apple IIE with the large floppy disk drive to play the two games I had...monopoly and hangman. In college, my dad bought me a new Texas Instrument typewriter with screen that lifted up for perfect typing everytime. You could erase right there with no mistakes. Four years through college gave me a computer lab...I started my teaching career with the SAME computer I used as a senior in high school. When I spent my first summer overseas, I never believed my friends in Slovakia when they told me about e-mail and that it was FREE. FREE! I didn't have an address, but my sister, who worked at Missouri State did...I signed on to AOL (You've Got Mail) and soon I was connected. Into my second year of teaching, I was the only teacher in town with the Internet and students would stop by my house to see what it was all about. The last 12 years has been a whirlwind of technology.
And today...it's all about blogging and existing in a global community and all the other new avenues this era can take us down our journey as teachers.
Geez. sorry for this rant. :) I should just re-write and post it as a new post. But I won't. Keri's question led me down a lot thought paths...
Post a Comment