Tag: Writing

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Educate for 21st-Century Skills: Fad or Necessity?

educational fad
educational fad

Another shot at progressive education. The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skill By Jay Mathews Washington Post January 5, 2009. He writes: 

Granted, the 21st-century skills idea has important business and political advocates… It calls for students to learn to think and work creatively and collaboratively. There is nothing wrong with that. Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece. But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?

Actually millions of students are learning to think and work creatively, it’s just not in school. They do that stuff at home on their own time. Meanwhile much of their class time is now mandated on mind-numbing test prep on those “19th-century skills.” Teachers who want to have a more engaging classroom have to sneak it into the curriculum – project-based learning has been pushed to the back of the class. 

Columnist’s like Mr. Matthews have to realize that new technologies have already put students in charge of the information they access, store, analyze and share. Students are using new digital media to share their creativity with the world. 

What can schools do to support learning in the digital age?  Monitor the information flow and and thinking in the classroom. This changes the role of teacher from dispensing information to instructional designer. Students can’t simply give information back to their teacher. They need a chance to to create a product that asks them to communicate their thinking to a more authentic audience. Teachers will need the support and training to create supportive learning environments that considers basic questions like:

  • How is information flowing through my class?
  • What level of thinking skills are students being asked to use?
  • How do students get to share what they’ve learned? - Who is their audience? - What is their purpose? 

Image credit: flickr/boskizzi

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In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

In an era of "tweets" limited to 140 characters, it refreshing to return to power of long-form writing. "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" (The Atlantic / June 2008) details the struggle of the adjunct college lit teacher in the lower reaches of academia.

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. 
… But my students and I are of a piece. I could not be aloof, even if I wanted to be. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening.

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The Digital Literacy Debate: Are We Really Reading on the Web?

A new series examining the debate on 21st century literacy skills is beginning at the New York Times See: Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? by Motoko Rich, July 27, 2008.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. … But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires teenagers who might otherwise spend most of their leisure time watching television, to read and write. …Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends. More Literacy_Debate_Online,_RU_Really Reading?  120KB pdf

Each medium of communications leads us to codify reality in unique ways. For example, oral communication is very mosaic – we communicate not only with words, but gestures, inflections, and tone. Over time we learn to read all these bits of information and merge them into a cohesive message. Print, in contrast, is very lineal. Writing forces our thinking into some sort of conceptual “meat grinder” that sequences our disparate thoughts together. Following rules of grammar and mechanics, we compose our message into the an equivalent of one long “fortune cookie” of text. The skill set needed to “literate” in speech and print very different as are the relative value we place on effective communicators in each media. A similar case could be made for the unique ways we codify reality in graphic novels, film, video, dance, ASL and so on. Searching and reading on the web is not the same as reading a book.

See the diagram below for distinctions between reading books and online sources (source NY Times). Click image to enlarge

New-readers

The digital literacy debate will continue to rage on, in the meantime educators and parents need to learn more about how the new media are shaping the thinking and perceptions of our children. Students will forge ahead without us. As Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English stated,  “Nobody has taught a single kid to text message. Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.” 

Note, I last commented on this subject in my post “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” 
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Students Can Create Videos to Teach Us “How To”

There’s an emerging genre of internet videos that fall into the category of “how to’s.” Lots of folks are offering up instructional guides for how to do everything imaginable from How to Chill a Coke in 2 Minutes to How to Fold a Towel.

Explaining “how to” requires students to research a subject, evaluate what’s important, and create a guide for someone else to follow. It gives them an opportunity to write for an authentic audience and purpose and use skills that rank very high on Bloom’s taxonomy.

If you want to get your students writing and shooting these videos here’s some suggestions:

1. Get the new Flip Ultra video camera – remarkably easy to use and only $114 at Amazon. Works with Mac or PC. I’ve been using one for a few months and I’m impressed with the sound and image quality and the simplicity of use.

2. Have students take a look at this ingenious “how to” done by Common Craft – no elaborate props or on-screen talent required. The Flip camera won’t be able to shoot as closely as the Common Craft video below, but students can easily recreate the look on a larger scale using the classroom white board and the optional Flip Ultra tripod ($14 at Amazon).

3. Post the video to TeacherTube – a safe alternative to YouTube.

OK – time to make a movie!

Note on editing. The Flip video comes with its own software that works with Mac or PC. Ingeniously, the software resides on the camera and works anytime you plug the Flip USB into a computer.� The Flip video files are created in an AVI format that can be edited on a PC using software like MovieMaker. Mac iMovie won’t accept the Flip video AVI format directly, but you can convert an AVI file to a (iMovie-friendly) m4v file format using free iSquint software. Students can design, shoot and edit the video, then do a voice over. That way they can focus on the visual message separately from the audio message.

8/08 Update: The latest version of Flip video software will allow direct import of files into Mac iMovie!

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Students Can Become Proficient Writers – Try a QuickWrite

The recently released NAEP report suggests that only about one-third of our eighth graders and about one-quarter of the nation’s high school seniors are proficient writers. The results are not much better than the results of the NAEP’s last report in 2002. More

If we want to bring these numbers up, students should be writing on a daily basis in all of their classes. So how do we give students more opportunities to hone their writing skills without overburdening our secondary teachers with loads of papers to grade?

Why not use the QuickWrite strategy.

  • As students enter class, they see a prompt on the front board that requires them to revisit a previously lesson. This makes more productive use of the opening minutes of class where teachers are usually tied up in “housekeeping” tasks.
  • Students are trained to write briefly, but in complete sentences.
  • After five minutes, selected students read their answers aloud to the class. Students are instructed to read exactly what they have written. This requires quick organization of thoughts and prevents rambling oral replies.

The QuickWrite is followed by short discussion. Teachers call on volunteers, drawing out divergent viewpoint:

  • “Does anyone have a different idea?”
  • “How did those two students’ QuickWrites differ?”
  • “What do these QuickWrites tell us we should study today?”

This strategy stimulates students’ higher-order thinking about a concept from the previous day. Teachers can easily check for understanding before beginning a new lesson. The class is now ready to link this newly anchored understanding to the content of the upcoming class. 

Most importantly, a QuickWrite gives students a chance to evaluate what they think is significant and share what they’ve learned with their peers. It restructures the typical teacher-led discussion that too often finds the teacher playing “guess what I’m thinking?”

For more ideas and resources, visit my literacy posts on this blog.