"And yet, in many classrooms these devices and the texts produced with them are still perceived to be irrelevant, and even dangerous, in relation to children's learning and their development of powerful practices with text."
-- From the introduction, this quote got my attention because I think it very true in a lot of our schools. Maybe educational systems are nervous to bring all these new technologies into the school out of fear. I think opening the digital literacy door wide open will benefit students and school all around.
"How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economical and political future of our society?"
-- This is a tough question. If we provide the necessary tools in the school environment then we need to be sure to educate our students fully on what we expect them to learn, because some students (maybe more than we realize) will not have access to these same learning tools outside of school.
"Further, in exploring meanings, we can take into account not just the written word, but also images, layout, font, sound, gesture, movement and so on."
-- Written word is becoming only a single way of communication. Images obviously speak 1,000 words, but adding font color, size, music or sound, and movement can all help our words speak more loudly than we ever hoped. As educators, we need to be creative in ways to get our point across and gain the attention of our students. I think the tools we are taking from this course will help immensely with that!
"This research aims to understand how digital texts are used by a small purposive sample of preteens and early teenage children to create and perform their social identities."
-- I used this section of text in my interview blog, but I want to use it again here because it still blows my mind how young people today are balancing this whole digital world with so many social media outlets. My sister listed three or four, and that is a lot to me. I know there are even more out there! I think it can be a good thing- for students to figure out what they like, and who they want to represent themselves as, but this can also be a bad thing because sometimes we cannot take back the things we post on the internet and it can be detrimental to our lives. Just something to think about..
Polly I liked all your comments they all affect our learning process for teachers and students. Fear can sometimes hinder progress. If we are expected to incorporate these great new technology tools then we should be trained on how to use and incorporated them into the classroom.
ReplyDeleteThen there is the question of how does a teacher incorporate this in the classroom without the appropriate resources this could mean not enough computers, internet access and time.
We are all learning.
Polly check you Animation I can't see anything I hear it but nothing is happening.
Polly, I could not agree more with your first explanation about schools being afraid to allow some new technology into their buildings. In my school, Pinterest is now blocked, as I believe it is in most places around the state because of 1instance where it was misused by a teacher. I can't allow my students to look up relevant videos on YouTube because then I would have to give out my password. Music stations like Pandora, which would be nice to use to play some classical music in my room are blocked. While I understand the fear, I feel like we are losing out on some great experiences because of this.
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