I was just reading David Warlick’s blog and came across this information. This comes from Stephen Heppell’s keynote at the OLA superconference.
Heppell asked a group of students what a literate teacher should be able to do, and they agreed that a teacher should be able to:
- upload to YouTube
- edit a Wikipedia article
- choose a safe online payments site
- subscribe to a podcast and un subscribe
- turn on and off predictive text
- manage a groups Flickr photos (and spell Flickr!)
- look after a community in Facebook
As someone working with pre-service teachers, I would like to ask them the same question and then compare the responses. How many of them see these as new teacher literacies? And are we developing these literacies in any way in pre-service teacher education or in professional development in most schools.
And are these the literacies that we want our teachers to have? What else should be on that list. Maybe we need to start asking this question to a few more groups of people and then talking about this when we are developing a teacher education program.
And for those of you who don’t text message – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_text
I thought the questions Heppell asks are really important and relevant–for teachers and, as you point out, for pre-service teachers. The idea of asking the kids what a literate teacher looks like is an interesting one and reminds me of Aidan Chambers’ who said (something to the effect of) the best 2 words a teacher or librarian can use are: “tell me”– or show me would work equally well and I think we would all benefit from asking kids to show or tell us things that we don’t fully understand or know about.
I read David Warlick’s post over the weekend and was wishing I had made the trip to Toronto for the OLA Superconference!!
Comment by Joanne de Groot — February 5, 2008 @ 3:04 am |
What an interesting question to ask students and more interesting are their responses!
If you had asked me a few months ago if I consider myself to be a literate teacher, based on the students’ criteria, I would have had to say no! However, I now feel that I am well on my way to being ‘literate’! A digital immigrant who is beginning to feel confident and knowledgable about the use of Web 2.0 tools!
I wonder if we posed the question to the incoming student teachers if their answers would be different?
I would add using VoiceThread to the list as it has creative value, is an excellent tool when teaching and is effective for sharing student learning and assessing learning.
Comment by cindy — April 1, 2008 @ 5:40 am |