Last spring, my vice principal, Ed Norman, e-mailed the district staff the link to a program that aired on PBS’ Frontline in January 2008, “Growing Up On-Line.” Busy at that time (1 40
Students have been and will always be ahead of parents, teachers, and administrators when it comes to how technology is put to use not only in the lives of students at school but also at home. The gap, however, is widening exponentially. If we do not get studying, researching, and dialoging, we may never be able to build bridges, to construct collaborative platforms, on which to meet and work with our students in cyberspace in the future.
Starting off the issue with one of several articles offering both theory and practice, Kevin Pyatt’s “When Immigrants Design for Natives” gives those of us who are digital immigrants (those who came of age before computer integration into schools) a way to tap the learning potential of technology for digital natives (those who have grown up with computers). It is critical that we create environments in which to engage learners in information-age fluencies, to provide them with learning opportunities they would not obtain on their own. “This requires a paradigm shift,” Pyatt writes, “from content-centered design to process-centered design; from teacher-centered instruction to learner-centered instruction; and from digital-immigrant design to digital-native design.” His article concludes with a walk-through of an interactive learning space he created, “Get the Lead Out.”
Immigrant natives thrive on the internet. They dance between e-mail, instant messaging, Wikipedia, Myspace, and You Tube as fast as you can blink an eye. Students have more information they can immediately access than universities filled with teachers and libraries had at their disposal just a generation ago. In “Knowledge to Wisdom: Helping Students Navigate the Digital World,” Vince Aleccia writes about how we can guide students to put this avalanche of data to wise use through the example of a possible research paper on global warming. The research process he offers students includes an eye-opening tour of websites that offer research papers for sale, a notice to students that teachers are aware of such sites. Evaluating the authenticity, the ethics, of these sites, as well as evaluating the credibility of the information available, the necessity that teachers equip students to ferret out the spurious on the internet, is the backbone of Aleccia’s article. To this end, Aleccia offers a compilation of eight questions he gives students to assist their evaluation of electronic sources.
In an attempt to thwart the rampant use of cell phones in schools, many districts are creating policies that eliminate or at least limit cell phone use in schools. A pro-active approach, however, might be to find a way to put the ubiquitous phone into play in the curriculum. In “Zero-Thumb Game: How to Tame Texting,” Sara Bernard describes how teachers such as Cindi Rigsbee are using text messaging as a teaching tool. Rigsbee, for example, to show how we use language in different ways for different purposes, has students translate the writing on a MySpace page into standard English or translate a classic novel into texting speak.
Most of the articles in this issue discuss computer-generated media. The next article, however, describes how to use another, older medium–film–in the classroom. Another difference in this article is that it is not only about how students can learn from engaging in hands-on learning experiences, but how teachers can learn in the process as well. In “Classroom Film-making: A Learning Experience,” Bruce Robbins and Don Evans describe the culmination of a short story unit, a film project, which stretched them both out of their comfort zones. Approaching the film project as a way to expand composition to include non-print visual texts, as well as a way to engage male students unengaged by traditional teaching methods, Robbins and Evans also both learned an immense amount about video technology such as movie editing software. In the end, despite the unevenness in video quality, in “all of the students’ films,” Robbins and Evans write, “productive discussions came from our noting an interpretive decision that they had made (consciously or not) and inviting discussion about the choice and the interpretive implications behind it.”
This issue includes an article from a perspective we would like to see more of: The perspective of essential classroom support personnel. In “Picture Books on Computer,” Nadean Myer gives us a librarian’s overview of the availability and potential use of e-books, especially at the elementary level. Familiar with this media since its inception in the 1980s, Myer points us toward resources we can use not only as teachers but as parents to help us get children electrified about books.
Our students, natives of the electronic universe, are light years ahead of us in putting the internet to social and educative uses. Unfortunately, some teachers, trying to keep up, are encountering institutional restraints. Barbara Monroe, in “So Near, Yet So Far,” gives us a preliminary report on her continuing study of area school districts and their internet policies. For many classrooms, internet access is limited or prescribed by someone outside the classroom, in many cases someone without teacher certification. Not only is this a disservice to students–another case of how something they are familiar and fluent with being devalued in the schools–but to put the decision of what to allow teachers to use in the classroom anywhere but in the individual teacher’s hand is an insult to the professionalism of these teachers.
Marilyn Carpenter and Chris Valeo’s latest resource-rich column, “Books that Talk Technology and More,” provides us a twelve-book selection of novels that involve technology in some way. In Valeo’s introduction to the column, writing about how nervous she gets when her children play near the swift waters of the Clark Fork
The following statement continues to bear repeating: InLand does not always appear in a timely fashion. Our goal is to publish the fall/winter issue in January and the spring/summer issue at the end of May. We do not always meet those deadlines, primarily because the core of each issue, the five or six articles exploring the issue’s theme, was not yet filled when the deadline arrived. Often we are still beating the bushes for two or three or four articles that will interest our readers. Often that means attending conferences to goad presenters into turning their presentations into articles.
The solution? Find some way to get more INCTE and ICTE members to write for publication. I have argued that elementary and secondary teachers should be required to write for publication, though not as extensively as college professors because their teaching load is considerably heavier. But what if K-12 teachers were required to publish an article in a professional journal every three years? Would their voices not then be heard?
As a high school teacher for 18 years, it has been my experience that writing for publication has been more fulfilling professional development that 99% of the mush school districts serve up. It is demanding; who has time to write during the school year? Writing for one’s peers is daunting, yet the practice forces one to clarify one’s thoughts about important professional issues, it helps fuel the professional dialogue from within the engine that directly affects student learning, and it shows students that we practice what we preach.
To help Inland attain a timeliness that has heretofore been elusive, to maintain InLand’s stature as one of the preeminent NCTE affiliate journals, let’s see your articles piling up in our mailbox! I assure you, you can not find a more welcoming place to start speaking to the profession outside your district. InLand exists to help you be heard!