I’m a 21st Century Tool!
Suitable for framing, blog badges and t-shirts1. Wear it proudly and let people know you’re preparing kids for the workforce of tomorrow2!
Grab the code!!!!
Related posts
Thinking About Digital Literacy
I was asked to speak at the VCU School of Education’s Teaching Literacy in a Digital World Conference this past Saturday. I’ve haven’t spent much time thinking about “digital literacy” in the past few years. It’s been somewhat mashed together with other terms that overlap like- digital fluency, computational thinking, etc. – and like those terms there’s not much agreement on what it is. I glanced at a few definitions prior to making this but didn’t really stick with one. When Dr. Leila Christenbury started the conference she referenced the “find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet” definition of digital literacy so I added that while I waited and it makes as good a framework as anything else. A chunk of the presentation is on GitHub here or you can fork it here. I opted to do the presentation with reveal.js and on GitHub mainly because I need to be expanding my own competencies (digital and otherwise). I struck the “differently” portion because I wanted to orient things more towards the idea of doing things and didn’t want people getting caught up in the nuances of whether it was really “different.” This was an attempt to connect with the audience. I believed they were mainly k12 teachers or faculty in the School of Ed (who […]
Literacy Status: It’s Complicated
I’m writing this stuff down in an attempt to hash it out in my own head. Feel free to help me find the right path (if there is one) or even decide if this is worth thinking about. Tool Exposure vs Literacy What we have going on today in many cases is the illusion of teaching literacy. In reality we’re just exposing students to toolsKeep all exposure puns to yourself.. I see quotes similar to this one all the time- The literacy tools of our day, today, include the web, netbooks, cell phones, cameras and recorders, etc. We are responsible for teaching students how to be literate. – source So essentially, we have to teach kids how to use all these things because that’s what it takes to make it in the world. In the past it was just reading, writing and some math so the only general tools you had to be able to use were a pen/pencil, paper and a book. Now the idea is, we have to teach students (and learn ourselves) how to use all this stuff, to learn which buttons to push on lots of different objects. Where these comments get messy for me is delineating what really requires different kinds of thought (bigger conceptual framework) and what is just today’s tool which needs only […]
Magic Bullets Don’t Exist
Techlearning has an article that was passed around our school email celebrating Eight More Reasons for Technology in Education. After reading it, I’m feeling a little like the crab in the photo above. Now you may have noticed that I?m a fan of technology in education but I feel this list is, for the most part, the kind of thinking that leads people down very wrong roads. We’ve been looking for a savior for education for a while. It’s time we started realizing the savior of education must be the teacher- use all the tools available but it’s really up to them/us/you. You can read the point by point below or my summary here. Technology does nothing by itself. Technology doesn’t change teachers or how teachers teach. It simply makes certain changes easier. The sooner we stop celebrating magical techno things that don’t happen the sooner we’ll have real conversations about what needs to happen in school. Teaching with technology takes just as much work and planning as teaching without it (if not more in many situations). This is no Utopian ideal. Teachers need staff development, planning time and lots of hard work to start integrating technology into the classroom in the ways described below. Technology doesn’t make it happen- teachers do. Using technology involves the student in the learning […]
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Comments on this post
I think this image has everything to make it a winner:
1)Comic Sans Font
2)Bad clip art
3)Poor color scheme
4)Strange changes in font size
5)Random pattern on a prominent feature of the image
Well done sir 🙂
I plan to have it tattooed on my back once I find an artist who can really capture the beauty and the raw joy that is comic sans.
Don’t underestimate the taste of the American public. Head on over to Cafe Press and slap that artwork on everything you can find! 🙂
Comic Sans rocks, the rest of the world just won’t admit it!