Earth Day April 22nd
April 22nd is World Earth Day and it’s not too late to do something in your classroom that day to raise awareness.
Here is the link to the official Earth Day trailer http://www.earthday.org/greencities/earth-day-2014/
and an excellent set of resources that could be shared to bring Earth Day alive
in our classrooms http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/04/22-interactive-lessons-to-bring-earth-day-to-life/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+kqed%2FnHAK+%28MindShift%29 I have been through these resources and you will need to
register (takes 2 minutes) and even then some videos are not available due to
Rights issues. However, there is time for anyone with friends in the US to be
able to download and send to you if that is possible with PBS.
Would be great to have some activities taking place.
As you know last week the PTO held their annual second hand
book sale. In a conversation with one of the PTO organizers she informed me
that there were far fewer books donated this year and she put this down to
technology and families having fewer books in their homes. This interesting
article that I was sent last week, K-12 Education in a Post-Literate Age, extends this thinking. Definitely Food For Thought as we extend our 1:1
programmes and introduce more digital resources.
“In a post-literate world, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm suggested,
the dominant feelings are of information overload and disconnectedness. A
pervasive sense exists that too much is happening too fast to understand.
Hobsbawm described this "eerie" sensation in the early 1990s during
the Internet's infancy. He concluded that "most young men and women at the
century's end grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic
relation to the public past of the times they live in." I believe such
disconnect and overwhelm form a byproduct of the turn away from books.
Among counterarguments hailing the information age as a revolution in
personal enlightenment, the education researcher Sugata Mitra articulates
perhaps the most sweeping variant. In a TED talk, Mitra discusses providing
students with technology (laptops, the Internet, "the cloud") to
"teach themselves." He sees schools as props for a "bureaucratic
administrative machine," itself a byproduct of Western imperialism. I
applaud Mitra's boldness and am certainly no fan of imperialism. Yet there
exists troubling, long-term evidence showing that young people who most readily
access these new technologies become less independent. Today's young Americans
are, in the words of Steven Mintz, a historian of the family and children,
"isolate[d] and juvenilize[d] ... more than ever."
Post-literate schooling does isolate
students from narrative structures conveying meaning. It also juvenilizes via
technologies that oversimplify and denigrate analysis. Such tools contribute to
overwhelm and disconnect: Kids drown in data bereft of higher logic.
I have responded by assigning more books, selected for interest. I coach
students away from taking bulleted, fragmented notes and insist they articulate
higher meanings from our subject matter. I invite authors to the classroom to
discuss their work. I bring boxes of books from my home and town libraries to
assist research. I challenge kids' use of technology and sweat my own. Still, I
remain unsure whether such tactics do anything even to delay a post-literate
future beyond my control.”
Have a good Sunday, April 06, 2014
Yours
Adrian
I think we're doing kids a serious disservice by shaving resources to only digital content, or by offering them a narrow choice of research tools. I recently read about the Google Research feature, & I rejected promoting it to faculty & students because I feel it completely lacks academic rigor. Instead, I envisage students using online tools alongside print resources.
ReplyDeleteI think we need to resist the message some people give us that the transition to purely digital information is inevitable, or even preferable to, the inconvenience of consulting print resources. I think it would be a good idea to keep in mind some of our secondary teachers' concept of students grappling with concepts as evidence that they're learning. I think their words are: if students find a concept difficult, this can be evidence that the concept is robust enough for them to learn something from it. In my opinion, Google research reduces research to a trivial exercise that will produce the usual suspects in results: Wikipedia etc.
I like the Guided Inquiry research process promoted by Carol Kulthau, Leslie Maniotes & Ann Caspari. Their Guided Inquiry Design Framework includes gathering information, which includes broad & deep searches. Also, Diane Oberg's Focus on Inquiry model from the University of Alberta, Canada (http://www.teachingbooks.net/content/FocusOnInquiry.pdf), incorporates monitoring students' feelings & reactions as they deal with possibly conflicting pieces of information, helps them deal with ambiguity - a skill that helps them become mature adults. IMO, these models satisfy the IB's requirements for providing sufficient information sources to give students a well-rounded research experience. It trains them for weighing & synthesizing multiple pieces of information that will benefit them throughout their lives. Hopefully, they'll emerge with a clear personal perspective on a topic where their voices stand out from the white noise of online information.
I might sound a bit out of topic after reading these articles, I always feel that Tech is changing every single second in our life on a faster pace, which is why it leads to an generous amount of disinterest that is why if school communities can embrace blogging or if school communities can draft a blogging policy, not only Teachers will help themselves to embrace technology on a much faster pace but also it will give them an unique opportunity to promote their subject through e-portal.
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