Love this site! Lingo to word will translate either direction (traditional text to txt msg or reverse) and help you improve your texting vocabulary. I love that students could use this site to help with code switching, and teachers could use it to learn what students are saying. I think it is really important that we not discount how digital natives use language.
translated to text speak...
lov dis site! Lingo 2 wrd wl transl8 Itha direction (traditional txt 2 txt msg or reverse) n hlp u improve yr txtN vocab. I lov dat studnts cUd uz dis site 2 hlp W cod switching, n tchaz cUd uz it 2 lern w@ studnts r sAyn. I tnk itz realy impt dat we nt discount hw digital natives uz lang.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Conference
This conference looks amazing - am going to try and think about how to attend. Such good stuff, thanks Travis for the tip! http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/
Monday, March 9, 2009
Great Resource
Just saw this great website so rich with resources. I am really looking forward to digging deeper.
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/
Monday, March 2, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Tensions of New Literacy in Old Structures
This week E Sky-McIlvain responded to an earlier post
What is missing, from my point of view, is creativity - a literacy that we seem to be killing, even in laptop classrooms. It is interesting that the new 2.0 literacies can be just as limiting as they can be expanding. Enter the teacher/bar-setter (which can also be student peers) and the platform for creative ideas to be showcased. Are teachers afraid of that? Yes, I think they are. How many history teachers would let students immerse in Vietnam without learning about other 20th century wars? How about just immersing in "war" as a concept, with facts and documents gathered and organized and shared for emotional rather than academic messages? Confining technologies to facts and outcomes has to go if we are to reach those higher, newer, levels of use.
I could not agree more with her sentiments and found myself returning to this post as I was reading a chapter from W Kist's book New Literacies in Action. In the chapter "My Grandchildren's Time Zone" he talks about the tensions inherent in new literacy classrooms and questions if the current structure of schools can support this new kind of learning. Just as Betsy questions above, these new literacies can really begin to free teachers and students to examine ideas and content in new ways, but not if confined to old methods of assessment and understandings of being a teacher. Additionally Kist makes a wonderful point that if we embrace these new literacies and multiple forms of presentation and communication, we must question if we still revert back to text once students have had this new learning. I know as a teacher I have been guilty of this! You ask students to engage, create, explore, all those good things, and then...you ask them to write about. This return back to traditional response and print media has to be examined. I am not sure it is never appropriate, but if we always come back to the same place, have we gone anywhere.
Kist presents many tensions - the role of the teacher, the return to the same media, the time spent on projects, the presence of assessment and grading demands. These realities of how we understand school exist, and as teachers look to change the way we educate students how can we help explore and ease these tensions such that we avoid black and white answers, but instead deal with the ambiguity that is always present in education and life.
What is missing, from my point of view, is creativity - a literacy that we seem to be killing, even in laptop classrooms. It is interesting that the new 2.0 literacies can be just as limiting as they can be expanding. Enter the teacher/bar-setter (which can also be student peers) and the platform for creative ideas to be showcased. Are teachers afraid of that? Yes, I think they are. How many history teachers would let students immerse in Vietnam without learning about other 20th century wars? How about just immersing in "war" as a concept, with facts and documents gathered and organized and shared for emotional rather than academic messages? Confining technologies to facts and outcomes has to go if we are to reach those higher, newer, levels of use.
I could not agree more with her sentiments and found myself returning to this post as I was reading a chapter from W Kist's book New Literacies in Action. In the chapter "My Grandchildren's Time Zone" he talks about the tensions inherent in new literacy classrooms and questions if the current structure of schools can support this new kind of learning. Just as Betsy questions above, these new literacies can really begin to free teachers and students to examine ideas and content in new ways, but not if confined to old methods of assessment and understandings of being a teacher. Additionally Kist makes a wonderful point that if we embrace these new literacies and multiple forms of presentation and communication, we must question if we still revert back to text once students have had this new learning. I know as a teacher I have been guilty of this! You ask students to engage, create, explore, all those good things, and then...you ask them to write about. This return back to traditional response and print media has to be examined. I am not sure it is never appropriate, but if we always come back to the same place, have we gone anywhere.
Kist presents many tensions - the role of the teacher, the return to the same media, the time spent on projects, the presence of assessment and grading demands. These realities of how we understand school exist, and as teachers look to change the way we educate students how can we help explore and ease these tensions such that we avoid black and white answers, but instead deal with the ambiguity that is always present in education and life.
Monday, February 23, 2009
What makes something a new literacy
As the snow is swirling outside my mind too is trying to make sense of how and when we can label something a new literacy. Lankshear and Knoebel (2007) argue that in order to be labeled as such there needs to both new "technical stuff" and "ethos stuff" (p. 7).
The technical stuff side makes more sense to me, I can understand and appreciate new technologies that promote user generativity. The ethos side of things for me is not more difficult to understand, but rather it is more difficult to accomplish and promote in an academic setting. As Lewis (2007) in a different chapter of the same book points out, schools have not moved beyond the technology or technical stuff for the most part (p.230). As I was reading about the new ethos stuff, and the social and relational aspects of new literacies - I am struck by the parallels with Type I and Type II technology integration. Type I is focusing on the tool, whereas in Type II the tool enables a new experience or learning environment that is not possible previously. The movement from an Internet focused on "use, reception, consumption" to one that allows for "participation, interactivity and agency" (Lankshear and Knoebel, p. 16) is a wonderful shift, but one that still is largely taking place in the private lives, not in the educational lives of students.
Why is this the case? Does it have to do with trust in schools? Power ideals of teachers? Outdated policies of Internet use? Lack of guiding standards for education?
Reading the new 21st century Skills Map it is clear that there are those organizations trying to push these new ideas through the standards-based channels. Talking with teachers it is clear that individuals are working to make these changes in their classrooms, but there still seems to be little comprehensive movement to align personal and academic understandings in the 21st century school. I hope this change is coming...
The technical stuff side makes more sense to me, I can understand and appreciate new technologies that promote user generativity. The ethos side of things for me is not more difficult to understand, but rather it is more difficult to accomplish and promote in an academic setting. As Lewis (2007) in a different chapter of the same book points out, schools have not moved beyond the technology or technical stuff for the most part (p.230). As I was reading about the new ethos stuff, and the social and relational aspects of new literacies - I am struck by the parallels with Type I and Type II technology integration. Type I is focusing on the tool, whereas in Type II the tool enables a new experience or learning environment that is not possible previously. The movement from an Internet focused on "use, reception, consumption" to one that allows for "participation, interactivity and agency" (Lankshear and Knoebel, p. 16) is a wonderful shift, but one that still is largely taking place in the private lives, not in the educational lives of students.
Why is this the case? Does it have to do with trust in schools? Power ideals of teachers? Outdated policies of Internet use? Lack of guiding standards for education?
Reading the new 21st century Skills Map it is clear that there are those organizations trying to push these new ideas through the standards-based channels. Talking with teachers it is clear that individuals are working to make these changes in their classrooms, but there still seems to be little comprehensive movement to align personal and academic understandings in the 21st century school. I hope this change is coming...
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