“Orchestrating Student Success”
Credit for that title is due to Angela Maiers, contracted professional development leader for Clinton Community School District. Her staff development topic today was teaching and learning in the new millenium. She welcomed us to the new literacy club by showing how basic literacy has changed since the older generations went to school and how we can teach these new literacies in our classroom.
New literacy competencies include: identify important questions; locate information; search, link, connect; critically evaluate that information; synthesize information; and communicate the answers to others. Seems easy enough….well, not to everybody in the room. I quickly discovered some shocked faces at the words blogs, podcasts and wikis. A simple example includes replacing writing or telling stories with digital storytelling. How about replacing a newsletter with a class website that could be updated frequently? Or instead of writing a journal, keep a blog? I love this – instead of presentations, do a podcast, or instead of a report do a Powerpoint or other multimedia presentation.
Technology and literacy go hand in hand, as Angela described for our eager, yet slightly quivering professionals today. There is a new world with new expectations – the tide is shifting every minute, and we need to prepare our students for this global, technological-based society. She mentioned Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat, which I have yet to read but has been mentioned on Dawn Hogue’s site as “what every teacher, administrator and parent should be thinking about!” If all of this globalization and flattening of the globe sounds foreign to you (as it sometimes does me), Friedman will break down the language and help you understand the fast-paced changes taking place in our society. More will come on this topic after I have read the book.
Hopefully with a little help, teachers everywhere and here at Clinton can adapt to the shift in literacy and learning and modify their teaching to meet the changing needs of our students and society. Then we can move from quivering professionals to confident, technologically savvy professionals who prepare individuals for a global society.
