HOW TO INTEGRATE THE NEW LITERACIES INTO OUR CURRICULUM – PART 2: DIGITAL LITERACIES

According to the definition on the Cornell University website, digital literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet. If used correctly, digital literacy enables students to think critically about information and communication as citizens of the global community while using technology responsibly and ethically. It will eventually help them become life-long learners who have internalized the fact that learning can take place anywhere at any time in multiple ways.

Digital Literacy has 3 important components:
• Technology Literacy
• Information Literacy
• Digital Citizenship

I had originally planned to write about digital literacies in one post but it became such a long post that I decided to write about information literacy and digital citizenship in another post. I know there are too many links in this post but updating curriculum to transform learning requires a lot of reading and research to be able to do it effectively. Transforming education is not an easy process. I strongly believe that before transforming our schools and our curriculum, we need to transform ourselves as educators and know the reasons why there is a need for such a transformation as well as how to do it.

Technology Literacy

Our students should develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology as active and successful participants of the 21s century global society. This will allow us to personalize learning effectively and fully immerse them in content that is interactive, relevant and authentic, making learning fun, and improving student motivation and engagement. The important point to keep in mind is the fact that tech integration is not about technology, it is about learning. Otherwise, adding technology to our curriculum, without changing the way we teach, will take us nowhere.

"The real problem is not adding technology to the current organization of the  classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning"

Image source: Langwitches on Flickr

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE TECH INTEGRATION:

• Use technology for discovery, accessing opportunity, documenting and sharing learning, showcasing achievements and reviewing/reflecting on learning. If used correctly, technology can give every student a voice and help make student thinking and understanding visible, enabling them to communicate and collaborate with others in and out of the classroom to find solutions to problems, to construct knowledge, to create content, to share their learning or to get and give feedback. The aim is to enable the students have the control over their learning by making choices about what to learn and how to learn it at their own pace by using higher order thinking skills and practicing effective communication and collaboration skills. In such a learning environment, the teacher is the coach rather than the expert and the authority in the classroom. Instead of focusing on delivering knowledge, the teacher provides scaffolding to help students develop higher order thinking skills and deeper understanding.

• In our tech and information-infused, rapidly changing world, teachers are not expected to have all the answers. The teacher is a learner, too; so, don’t be afraid of using technology if you feel that your students are better at it than you are. Instead, empower them by making them the tech leaders of your class. Let your students be in the driver seat and make sure that your relationship with your learners is based on trust and openness rather than power and control.

• Technology will give you endless opportunities to personalize learning. Address and respect your learners’ gifts and struggles appropriately by utilizing technology to ensure that each learner feels a part of your learning community. Give them freedom to discover and develop their own passions and interests to boost their engagement.

• Make sure that learning doesn’t only come from books but from experience as well. Since you cannot be an expert at everything, let your students connect to experts all over the world to find the answers they are looking for or to learn new things. Imagine how excited your students will be if they get connected with the author of the book they are reading or someone from NASA if they are learning about space. You can also take them to virtual field trips and bring the world into your classroom.

• Using technology in the classroom may sometimes mean making mistakes and failing. Instead of avoiding using tech in your classroom because of that, use it to show your students that making mistakes and failing are important parts of learningtechnology and can be used as an opportunity to grow on the way to success.

• Help your students become creators rather than consumers of technology. Make sure that your students know creation literacy skills so that they can effectively create information.  Provide them with opportunities to self-publish and share their work.

• As learners learn best when they create, share, and teach others, have your students use screencasting tools to create meaningful learning experiences. Model your students by screencasting yourself to flip parts of your curriculum.

• Technology will also help you make formative assessment a routine in your classroom to support learning. Make sure that there is ongoing formative assessment in your classroom as a seamless part of the classroom culture. There are great tech tools that will help you do this. You can use backchanneling tools to get immediate feedback, ask your students to create video projects, or podcasts to review the lesson, use digital exit tickets or QR codes for reflection activities  and give them feedback on their work. Teachers whose students don’t have or are not allowed to use electronic devices in the classroom can use Plickers.

Here you can see an end-of-the-year reflection assignment prepared for our 11th graders who took an IELTS preparation course. This was a two-hour elective chosen by some of our students who were preparing for the IELTS exam. Because it was a mixed-ability class, we designed a class blog to cater the needs of different types of learners with different levels of English. By clicking the links under the Useful Links tab, students were able to choose the tasks according to their needs and do them at their own pace. Some students were going to take TOEFL or SAT instead of IELTS, so we added links for them as well. As this was an elective course, students who didn’t take this course but were going to take IELTS had access to the blog as well. Without the help of technology, it would have been impossible for us to do all these in such a practical way both for the teacher and the students.

• So, how are you going to integrate all these skills into your literacy curriculum? Teach-Learn-Lead is a digital edu-library where you can find a wealth of resources for your PLN. Please keep it on your desktop or Dropbox because you will refer to it a lot if you are planning to update your curriculum. This valuable resource was curated by my Twitter friend, Dean J. Fusto. Even though we have never met personally, we have stayed connected via social media and have learned many things from each other via sharing.

• Before you start designing your new curriculum, you can analyze NCTE’s framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment,  Curriculum 21, Education 2020 Wiki, ISTE standards, and ISTE Standards Implementation Wiki as a starting point. You may also check the questions in this post.

• For effective tech integration, WebTools4U2Use Wiki, 21 Things 4 Teachers, 101 Free Tech tools for Teachers, Apps for Education40 Free Mobile Apps, and Hidden Gems may be helpful. You can also find many useful resources if you visit Edutopia.  Shelly Terrell’s website is a treasure for teachers. You can also visit websites like Curriculum21 Clearinghouse and Graphite to find teacher reviewed apps, games, and websites.

• Using Google Apps for Education is a practical way to share resources with your students. They are great for classroom and school-wide collaboration. You can find what other things you can do with Google Classroom in this blog post and how you can use it in this comprehensive guide.

• Please note that all these tools have been listed for you to choose the ones to support your curricular goals and learning objectives. Otherwise, there is no point in using them. Make sure that your digital curriculum includes tech that improves the learning process. After all, digital literacy is more about enhancing learning than using tech tools. In this blog post a first grade teacher writes about how technology has transformed her teaching.

• Having proficiency and fluency in using tech tools not only means knowing how to use them but also when and why to use each tool to achieve the desired outcome. Therefore, instead of telling your students which tool to use for a specific task, give them a list of tools to choose from. For this purpose, you can use curation tools like Pinterest,  Scoop.it, Symbaloo, List.ly, and Edshelf. You can also share websites like Web Tools for Kids and wikis like Cool Tools for Schools with your students. Let them find, evaluate and use apps that match with the work they are doing and take risks and try new things with them.

As Heidi Hayes Jacobs says, “As times change, so must our curriculum. Start small by learning one new tool a month or making one curriculum upgrade a month. Your students will love you for it, but even better than that you will be sending them out of your class with tools they need to be successful RIGHT NOW – not in the future!”

EMBRACE-THE-MIGHTY

HOW TO INTEGRATE THE NEW LITERACIES INTO OUR CURRICULUM – PART 1

In his book, The Global Achievement Gap, Tony Wagner, an expert at Harvard University Innovation Lab and who formerly worked as a high school teacher, principal, and university professor in teacher education, writes about the gap between what schools are teaching and testing and the new survival skills all students need to succeed as workers, learners and citizens in today’s global knowledge economy. While writing his book, Wagner interviewed business leaders about their expectations. I included some of their remarks here for you to check whether you are teaching these skills to your students:

“The idea that a company’s senior leaders have all the answers and can solve problems by themselves has gone completely by the wayside…The person who’s close to the work has to have strong analytical skills. You have to be rigorous: test your assumptions, don’t take things at face value. The challenge is this: How do you do things that haven’t been done before, where you have to rethink or think anew?”
      —Ellen Kumata, Consultant to Fortune 200 Companies

“My greatest concern is young people’s lack of leadership skills. Kids just out of school have an amazing lack of preparedness in general leadership skills and collaborative skills. They lack the ability to influence.”
       —Mike Summers, Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell

“Teamwork is no longer just about working with others in your building. Technology has allowed for virtual teams. We have teams working on major infrastructure projects that are all over the country. On other projects, you’re working with people all around the world on solving a software problem. Every week they’re on a variety of conference calls; they’re doing Web casts; they’re doing net meetings.”
         —Christie Pedra, CEO of Siemens

  “Anyone who works at BOC Edwards today has to think, be flexible, change, and use a variety of tools to solve new problems. I’ve been here four years, and we’ve done fundamental reorganization every year because of changes in the business…I can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability and learning skills are more important than technical skills.”
          —Clay Parker, President of Chemical Management Division of BOC Edwards

   “For our production and crafts staff, we need self-directed people…who can find creative solutions to some very tough, challenging problems.”
           —Mark Maddox, Human Resources Manager at Unilever Foods North America

“We are routinely surprised at the difficulty some young people have in communicating: verbal skills, written skills, presentation skills. They have difficulty being clear and concise; it’s hard for them to create focus, energy, and passion around the points they want to make. If you’re talking to an exec, the first thing you’ll get asked if you haven’t made it perfectly clear in the first 60 seconds of your presentation is, ‘What do you want me to take away from this meeting?’ They don’t know how to answer that question.”
           —Mike Summers, Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell

There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren’t prepared to process the information effectively, it almost freezes them in their steps.”
           —Mike Summers, Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell

Our old idea is that work is defined by employers and that employees have to do whatever the employer wants…but actually, you would like him to come up with an interpretation that you like—he’s adding something personal—a creative element.”
            —Michael Jung, Senior Consultant at McKinsey and Company

In another book, Five Minds for the Future, psychologist, author, and Harvard professor Howard Gardner writes about the kinds of minds (the competencies which young people and the society need in the twenty first century) that will be critical to success in a 21st century landscape of accelerating change and information overload. According to Gardner, without these five minds we risk being overwhelmed by information, unable to succeed in the workplace, and incapable of the judgment needed to thrive both personally and professionally in today’s relentlessly changing world.

Both authors are trying to show us which skills are required to prepare our students for the challenges of today’s world in which cultures, economies, and people are connected. In line with their ideas, according to a report published by Pearson, these are the new skills the world is looking for:

8-skills-the-worlds-is-looking-forIMAGE SOURCE: Beyond the Learning Curve via PEARSON

It is obvious that in addition to traditional literacy skills, more sophisticated literacy skills are required for our students to fully participate and function in our global community. As George Couros says, ‘If the world is asking for people to be innovative and to think differently, schools can no longer shape the students to think all the same.’ Instead, schools should be places where students learn to think critically and creatively about information and communication. Our students should be competent users of digital technologies to locate resources, process information, communicate ideas, and build cross-cultural collaborations. All this means a big shift in learning . Consequently, the roles of teachers and the way they teach should change greatly.

In his post, 14 Trends We Should Be Thinking About, Will Richardson writes about how the 14 trends in Mary Meeker ‘s 2015 report should be considered as eye openers for those of us thinking about the K-12 world of learning as they suggest that our curriculum and practice is out of date. The connected world has brought up a new culture of learning. We should embrace these new learning contexts in our work to prepare our students for their own learning journeys and update our curriculum accordingly. In the following three posts, I’ll try to show how we can integrate the three new literacies – digital, media, and global literacy – into our traditional literacy curriculum to create schools that work not only for us, teachers but for our students, too as Eric Sheninger says in his TEDx 2014 talk:

What do you think? Are you happy with your present curriculum or do you think it is worth going out of your comfort zone to create a different learning journey for your students? Please let me know.

THE STORY OF A TWITTER CHAT: REINVENTING WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY

Yesterday, I joineed #satchatwc on Twitter moderated by acclaimed blogger Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher, who is also the author of Reinventing Writing: The 9 Tools That Are Changing Writing, Teaching, and Learning Forever.  This is a must-read book by all English teachers who want to learn more about the key shifts in writing instruction necessary to move their students forward in today’s world utilizing digital tools. Personally, I can say that it helped me a lot to update the way I teach writing. Her slideshare and her blog post about her book will give you a better picture why it must be on your bookshelf. In the video below you can listen to Vicki giving tips on how to reinvent writing.

As you can imagine, yesterday’s #satchatwc was based on Reinventing Writing. Vicki kindly started by helping the new participants how to join the chat. Here is her video to join and follow a twitter chat with any hashtag showing you how to use the free Hootsuite and free Twubs services.

She then posted 6 questions for the participants:

Finally, the discussion started. Wow, I was amazed by the enthusiasm of the teachers, the quality and the rapid flow of the discussion. I don’t believe that I have learned so many things in such a short time. All teachers agreed on the fact that writing electronically is an essential part of the 21st century education, adding that students’ motivation for writing has increased with the integration of tech tools. Moreover, technology makes collaborative writing much easier.

Students need to understand how to hyperlink, create infographics, select graphics, curate video as part of writing. A well rounded writer is experienced with many tools and selects the best one for the creative task at hand. One teacher recommended using ThingLink.com  as it allows students to use pics and annotation, as well as links and video.

Moreover, students need a community of writers and an audience as they make a huge difference in engagement & excitement. Digital brochures, posters, Prezis, multimedia help kids reach their audience. Many teachers agreed that students are more engaged and motivated when they are writing for an authentic audience.

Some teachers suggested asking students for ideas to write about as it is also important & empowering for them, adding that that the more authentic the task is, the more engaged the students are. They said it is important to teach writing for life that extends far beyond graduation as a reflective & life practice! They focused on the concept of teaching students to share their voice rather than teaching writing. In that respect, blogging and other social media tools and platforms introduce a whole new level of relevance to kids’ writing to build passion, purpose, and fun. Tweeting is also good writing practice as it forces the habit of concise expression and connects students to the world.

Nearly all teachers agreed that writing doesn’t have to be the old 5 paragraph essay all the time because students should understand different styles of writing for different purposes. They should be exposed to mentor texts and real world writing that is not essay writing! The more students are interacting, talking & storytelling, the richer their written words will be! Consequently, writing should be a daily habit enabling them to be creative and express their thoughts.

Many teachers said that writing should be integrated across content areas each day, emphasizing the benefits of urging students to produce more curricular pieces of personal interest in ELA classes. They agreed on providing high quality literacy instruction with reading and writing happening daily in the classroom as reading & writing across the curriculum is a powerful way to improve literacy across the curriculum. Therefore, it is a must to design a curriculum where writing is integrated, not taught in the isolation of the ELA block.

While discussing creative writing, a teacher suggested a wonderful website, Write About, a website offering visual writing ideas for students at all ages and different interests  to spark their curiosity and imagination. I will definitely use it with my students together with Noisli which plays ambient sounds to create a mood for creative writing.

Twitter chats are great for learning, exchanging and sharing ideas. After all, as Steven Anderson says:

 

HOW DO WE INTEGRATE TECHNOLOGY IN MY SCHOOL? PART 2- STUDENTS AS EFFECTIVE DIGITAL CITIZENS IN A GLOBALLY CONNECTED WORLD…

In our teach-infused world today, educating our students about being responsible and ethical online will not only keep them safe but also allow them to enjoy and utilize all the opportunities available online. Digital citizenship helps them learn to use technology responsibly and safely. Students need to understand their rights as content creators and respect the rights of others. They need to be aware of the privacy issues, the risks of online interaction, as well as their rights, roles, and responsibilities in a digital world.

To empower our students as responsible digital citizens functioning effectively, ethically, and safely in the digital world, we decided to design a K-12 digital citizenship curriculum for our school and integrate digital citizenship resources into our program.  You can see all the resources we have checked so far in the slides below. With the help of the digital citizenship curriculum, we want our students to answer the questions such as who they want to be online, which ethical rules guide their interactions and the content they create.

One of the reasons why we blog with our students almost at all levels is to enable them to practice digital citizenship rather than learning about it from external sources. Here, you can see the digital citizenship page of my class blog. While reading all the posts on the blogging guidelines and the digital citizenship pages, my students posted their opinion on the important concepts they had learnt and their questions on TodaysMeet. They then started doing the comic strips project they had been assigned. The aim of this project was to see how much they understood from what they had read. You can see the comic strips my ESL students created on the home page of our blog. Later in the year, they are going to make their own videos on plagiarism , watch this TED talk by Juan Enriquez, have a class discussion, and write a blog post about it.  This talk is a great way to teach  students about the significance of their digital footprint.

As their digital citizenship project, we asked our grade 10 students to prepare a digital poster on a tool like Glogster or a presentation on tools like Prezi or Buncee or a flyer on a tool like Smore for middle school students. Grade 9 students played the the Digizen game after watching the movie Let’s Fight it Together and wrote a blog post about the movie. They also created their own digizen to express their online values and wishes. Digizen also has good resources you can use with your younger students to teach social networking.

We chose a game-based approach to teach digital citizenship to our primary and middle school students. Common Sense Media, Carnegie Cyber AcademyPlanet Nutshell, Media Smarts, and ThinkUKnow have great games for students at different age groups. Wild Web Woods is an online internet safety game for young learners by the Council of Europe available in 27 languages. After playing the games in these websites, students wrote game reviews and created their own digital safety rules using the information they learned.

How do you teach digital citizenship at your school? I look forward to your feedback.

 

BREAK THE BARRIERS – USE SOCIAL MEDIA AS A LEARNING TOOL! PART 2-WIKIS AND SKYPE FOR COLLABORATIVE AND GLOBAL LEARNING

Social media can help students create shared projects and one way you can do it is through wikis. Wikis are shared web spaces everyone who is a member can add content or edit content that has already been added. They are easy to use and great for collaborative learning.

Wikis can be used for project-based learning,  collaborative writing, professional development,  curriculum developmentlanguage learning, and more.

When Wikipedia was introduced, people realized how powerful collaborative content can be. Soon, wikis became valuable tools for educators.  The greatest strength of wikis is the world-wide collaboration they provide. That’s why they are widely used in global projects.

Wikispaces provide wikis free of charge to educators. Teachers can easily set up multiple accounts for the group they are going to work with and students can work on wikis 24/7 without going into the trouble of finding a common meeting time and place.

If you want to create a wiki for your students, you may start by reading the tutorials and the handouts prepared by Wikispaces Classroom. Teacher Tips for Wiki ProjectsDefining Wiki Goodness,  and Exploring Wikis in Action by Bill Ferriter are useful guides for the teachers who are going to use wikis for the first time. You can also share The Characteristics of quality Wiki Pages,  Wiki Tasks for Students Groups, and Wiki Scoring Checklist with your students to use as checklists. Finally, you can use this Wiki Rubric as a model to prepare your own rubric.

Wikis  are one way to make education interactive and collaborative and to stimulate interest in learning. Another fun way to enhance global cooperation in the classroom is Skype. We all seem to agree that the globalized world today needs globally competent students/ who are able to understand and thrive in the contemporary society where cultures, economies and people are continuously connected. Therefore, making meaningful connections with the larger world should be a part of our program while we are integrating 21st century skills into the traditional classroom curriculum as brilliantly explained in the slides by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano:

If you haven’t tried Skype in the classroom before, The Comprehensive Guide to Using Skype in the Classroom, The Complete Guide to the Use of Skype in Education, Dos and Don’ts for Skype in the Classroom and the videos below will help you connect your classroom with the world.

How to create a profile and find a teacher by Skype in the classroom on Vimeo.

Mystery Skype – the global guessing game – is another popular and interesting way to connect with the classrooms all over the world to enhance global cooperation and learning. Med Kharbach from Educational Technology and Mobile Learning prepared an excellent guide for teachers to connect with the outside world that will help them use it effectively in class.

Our students should know more about the world beyond their immediate environment, recognize perspectives of others as well as their own, communicate ideas effectively with diverse audiences and video calls are one way to do this among the many other possibilities social media provides us.

BREAK THE BARRIERS – USE SOCIAL MEDIA AS A LEARNING TOOL! PART 1–CLASSROOM BLOGS

Social media is a great tool not only to build up our PLN but to transform learning to increase student engagement and empowerment as well. 21st century learners will not respond if you go on teaching with the traditional methods. Even though you have great teaching skills, you cannot be effective without being relevant to them. Look at the world they live in! It is being driven by technology at an amazing rate as you can see in the animated infographic from Pennystockslab below. Please follow this link to start the animation.

 

Our students live right in the middle of this tech infused, connected world. Consequently, they want to be actively involved in the learning process by connecting, collaborating and creating.  If we don’t embrace this connected culture and integrate it into our classroom practice, then there will be a big gap between their real-life and in-class practices and they will find the learning experience totally irrelevant. Therefore, more and more teachers are trying to leverage social tools to facilitate learner engagement and to encourage the learning process.

Unfortunately, because many administrators, teachers and parents worry about safety issues, they are against using online social media platforms at school. Even though it is banned at some schools, many students are using these outside of the classroom, anyway. Therefore, online safety is an important issue that has to be taught by integrating digital citizenship resources into our curriculum, including the ones on appropriate use of social media. However, I don’t think the students will be able to internalize them and understand the importance of online presence if they aren’t allowed to practice them by using the social media networks in class.

Some educators think that using social media networks in the classroom causes distraction and cannot be considered as serious learning. I wish they could give it a try and see how the students respond to it.  As long as they are carefully planned, implemented, and supported by systematic PD that empowers the teachers to use social media in a way that is best for student learning, these learning environments –inside and outside the classroom –  offer a window to the real world, enabling each student to express themselves creatively and become actively engaged in their own learning. This way social media becomes a constructive tool to use with students to enhance learning.

The graphic below shows the tools teachers use to be networked and connected. In this first post on using social media in the classroom, I decided to write on blogging with students as it is my favorite one.

SOURCE: Edu Toolkit via Flickr

I love blogging with students as it gives them the opportunity to communicate their learning and their voice to a larger audience. Students are much more engaged and try harder than usual when they are producing work to share with people other than their teachers using mediums and tools they are familiar with. At our year-end polls, many students marked blogging as the activity they enjoyed most during the academic year.

By blogging, students who are not tech savvy become familiar with technology – a skill they will need a lot in the future. Moreover, it helps them understand the importance of a positive online presence. It is also a good way for the introverts to express themselves. As an English teacher, I can say that blogging is a great way for the students to improve their language skills. They can write book reviews, journal entries, answer the questions and respond to the pictures, videos or articles they themselves or their teachers have posted on the blog. They can also reflect on their own and their peers’ work and post their work (videos, glogs, Wordles, etc.) on their blogs. This way, they can receive feedback from people other than their teachers and they love it. Language Arts teachers can use blog posts and comments as an authentic way to teach a variety of literacy conventions and to enforce literacy concepts. It is a great way to make learning happen ‘on the spot’. Make sure to give your students the option of free choice posts together with the classwork-related ones. All this work, not only improves their English but their creativity, critical thinking and collaboration skills as well.

 I don’t mean that blogging is great only for language learning. Students benefit from blogging in different courses in different ways and it should be practiced in all courses. For more info on the benefits of blogging in all courses this post on the benefits of educational blogging by Kathleen Morris will give you a better picture. Teachers blogging with their students should check her website, which is full of great resources and ideas.

Before you start setting up your blog, it is a good idea to examine other teachers’ and students’ blogs and share some of them with your students. Here, you can find 40 examples of class and school blogs. You can also have a look at the blogroll on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog to see his class blogs and visit Mrs. Yollis’ classroom blog where you can find fabulous blogging resources for teachers. This link will take you to 57 wonderful student blogs that you can share with your students. For more ideas, primary teachers can read the post by Linda Yollis on hows-and-whys behind blogging in the primary grades and high school teachers can read this post by Nicholas Provenzano, who thinks giving students the chance to write creatively about any topic is a must in a world where kids are constantly told what to write and when to write it. 5 Reasons Your Students Should Blog by George Couros is a must-read post for all teachers whether they are blogging with their students or not.

STEPS TO STARTING A CLASS BLOG

  • Set your guidelines and discuss them with your students and your school community before you start blogging. Publish your guidelines on your blog, send home a copy and display them in your classroom.
  • Before they start commenting on each other’s posts, show your students a post written by you following the same guidelines and ask them to comment on your post. Give your students feedback on their comments.
  • Provide your students with as many exemplary student blog posts or blogs as possible. Talk to your students about what makes a good blog post both at the start of the blogging process and in the middle of it. Design a rubric (preferably with your students) for your blog and share it with your students before they start blogging. The example here may help you prepare your rubric. Use the rubric to give feedback to your students but don’t grade it.
  • Blogging is a great platform for students to learn about managing and participating in global learning communities. At my school, we cooperate with the teachers in the tech department to teach our students online tools they can embed into their pages and video creation. We often teach one tool at a time and wait until our students get competent using it before we introduce the next tool.

You may also find this infographic helpful as a visual guide on why and how to blog. It was created by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano who has great resources and ideas on blogging.

SOURCE: Langwitches via Flickr

How do you engage your students through blogs? Please share your stories in the comments section below.

HOW TO EXPAND YOUR PLN USING SOCIAL MEDIA

Today, social media offers us endless opportunities to expand our Personal Learning Networks and you don’t have to be at home or in the office to be able to do this. You can find about the newest and best developments in education and stay in tune with the latest trends by using your smartphone when you are at the beach, by the pool or even at the airport while you are waiting for your plane. There are many handy web tools and social media platforms that will help you grow your PLN:

  • TWITTER: I personally think it is the best resource for your PLN. I can say that I have learned more from Twitter than all the conferences I have attended.  Joining Twitter enables you to connect with educators all around the world 24/7. It is a great way to connect, share, discover, discuss, and learn about the latest trends in education. This animation by explania is for complete beginners:


 

Twitter allows you to make your point only in 140 characters but many people include links to blog posts, articles or resources in their tweets. By following hashtags, you can join live Twitter chats on a variety of education topics. Hashtags are a way to sort tweets by topic. As a beginner, you can start by using the hashtag, #nt2t. Then, you can try other popular hashtags like #edchat.

Some people find Twitter confusing. However, once you start using it, you will see that it isn’t confusing at all. You will soon realize its amazing power in contributing to your PD. The video below explains why all teachers should use Twitter:

You can find almost everything you want to learn about Twitter on Cybrary Man’s Twitter page and The Twitteraholic’s Ultimate Guide to tweets, hashtags, and all things Twitter by Sue Waters. Both of them are great resources for beginners. Teachers and administrators who are already using Twitter can check Twitter as a Professional Development Tool by Teacher’s Tech Lounge.

    • FACEBOOK: Facebook is the social network with the largest number of users, but like many people, I don’t use it for my PLN very often. I mostly use it to connect with my friends. The reason why I post educational articles on Facebook is because I want to share them with my colleagues who are not using Twitter at all or who are not using it actively for PD.  In the video below, Julie Smith explains the different uses of Facebook and Twitter:

If you want to use Facebook for your PLN, you can check out the Facebook in Education page.

  • PINTEREST: There are other popular bookmarking tools like Diigo, but as a “visual” social bookmarking tool, Pinterest is my favorite one. You can group your pins under different virtual boards that you share publicly or keep private for yourself. You can create pinboards to share only with your colleagues, students or parents on Pinterest. You can also browse pinboards created by other people. It is a great way to curate information for people with different learning needs.
  •  GOOGLE PLUS / HANGOUTS: Google+ is the fastest growing new social network which offers some great ways to connect and learn with other educators. Besides following friends and colleagues, you can also follow the educational communities. After creating your profile page, you can group the people you are following in different circles. What I like best about Google+ is the feature that allows you to set up hangouts (free group video chats). Check out The Guide to Keeping up with Google and this cheat sheet to get started.
  • BLOGS: Blogging is another social medium that helped me build up my PLN. I have learned many things by reading the posts on Edutopia, Teachthought, Mindshift, Edudemic, Educational Technology and Mobile Learning and many other blogs. Blogging also enables you to exchange ideas and share opinions with other teachers all around the world and find out about current practices happening in their classrooms, some of which you can adapt and use in your classroom. It is also a good way to reflect on what is happening in your classroom or at your school.
  • WIKIS: wiki is a space on the Web where you can share work and ideas, pictures and links, videos and media — and anything else you can think of. Wikis are collaborative websites enabling all registered users to contribute to the content. You can view and even join some exemplary wikis: Virtual Cafe, Minecraft WikiGenius Hour, UDL Tech Toolkit, Digital ID, ICT Magic.
  • PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING COMMUNITIES FOR EDUCATORS: You can join professional networking communities such as The Educator’s PLN, Classroom 2.0, English Companion Ning, and Edweb to connect with educators all around the world, to join groups and discussions about best practices and problems in education, to share blogs, videos, and  documents. You can also join the webinars these communities offer.

Teachers who want to engage more in personal learning networks to perform and achieve better can check the Teacher Guides by Med Kharbach from Educational Technology and Mobile Learning and The Teacher’s Guides to Technology and Learning by Edudemic. But before reading any of the resources in this post, I recommend you read the blog post on Edutopia Why I am Still Banging My Head Against the Whiteboard by Julie Warren. We are doing the most important job in the world by preparing young minds and hearts for the future. Instead of relying on PD sessions predetermined by others, through the use of social media we can self-direct our PD according to our own unique needs to establish and foster learning environments that will empower all learners. Social media is a great opportunity for us to connect with other educators and experts all around the world to collaborate and learn anywhere, anytime. Please use it!

IMAGE CREDIT: Krissy Venosdale Venspired.com

SUMMER IS THE PERFECT TIME TO DEVELOP YOUR PLN

We all love summer as we can relax and catch up on many things we can’t do during the school year. If you haven’t set up your personal learning network (PLN) so far, it may be the perfect time to do that.

We are living in times when as educators, we should be continually growing and changing. We now know that our students don’t benefit from one-size-fits-all education and we have to transform it. In order to meet the needs of all learners, we have to replace teacher-centered, textbook-based classrooms with learning environments where deeper learning* occurs. The expectations of the 21st century workplaces have also changed. We live in a world where abundant information, some of which is subject to change in time, is accessible everywhere you can find an internet connection. What is valid nowadays is not the information itself, but the skills to process the information effectively and use it to create meaning. Moreover, workplaces need workers who can think critically and creatively to find innovative solutions to challenging problems, who can effectively communicate and collaborate with other workers in local or global teams. Therefore, their education should involve all these skills.

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IMAGE CREDIT: Krissy Venosdale www.venspired.com

With the help of the new technologies we can help our students internalize all the skills that 21st century education requires instead of having them memorize information for an exam as passive recipients of content and forget everything the next day. Of course it is not easy to make all these radical changes in the way we teach. First, we should learn about the modern pedagogies that will enable our students to be effective communicators, collaborators, thinkers, inquirers, makers, creators and lifelong learners and create learning spaces and environments to address the needs of all learners. We should also learn to integrate the new technologies to be able to reach our learning goals.

Luckily, we are living in a networked society, which enables us to learn from the resources available online, and most importantly from each other. As Med Kharbach says, Educators from different stripes of society find in them new promising ways to connect with others in the other end of the world. What was before strictly limited to local environment is now open-ended and restricted only by users’ choice. Educational affinity spaces, virtual platforms, and communities of practice have mushroomed everywhere online and any teacher from anywhere in the world can join in the conversation and participate in the knowledge building taking place inside these learning hubs. There has never been such abundance of opportunities for teachers’ professional development as it is now. In this context, being a connected educator in the 21st century means being part of a universal community of teachers ready to help you as well as learn from you. No one is as smart as all of us.”

SOURCE: @DocbobLA

HOW TO START AND IMPROVE YOUR PLN?

 If you haven’t set up your PLN yet, the infographic below may be helpful:

How-To-Build-Your-Professional-Learning-Community-infographic

SOURCE: http://elearninginfographics.com

There are also many resources available online for teachers who want to improve their PLNs. Education is now in a period of tremendous change that requires all of us to stay current with the trends and learning environments. Therefore, learning to create and manage a personal learning network is a necessary skill and an essential tool for teachers in the 21st century. After all, we should model our students as lifelong learners just as we expect it from them. We need to lead by example.

As an English teacher, I would like to finish this post by recommending some online PD websites for English teachers. My Scoopit on Cool Web Tools for ESL, EFL, ELL and MFL learners, which is available on my blog, may also be helpful to teachers who are looking for tech tools. If you know more PD websites for English teachers, please let me know. Have a great summerJ

Pearson Elt 21st Century Learning Series for teachers http://www.pearsonelt.com/21stcenturylearning

Cambridge English Teacher http://www.cambridgeenglishteacher.org/

The Best Places for ESL/EFL/ELL Teachers to Get Online Professional Development by Larry Ferlazzo: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2012/06/03/the-best-places-for-esleflell-teachers-to-get-online-professional-development/

Professional resources for LA Teachers by Web English Teacher http://www.webenglishteacher.com/profres.html

Teacher Development by British Council http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teacher-development

English Teaching Forum http://americanenglish.state.gov/english-teaching-forum

ELT Teacher Trainer by John Hughes http://elteachertrainer.com/

Professional Learning for Connected Educators by Powerful Learning Practice http://plpnetwork.com/author/shelley-wright/

100 talks, sessions & interviews on Harrogate IATEFL 2014 Online by British Council http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2014/sessions/index

TeacherCast University by Jeffrey Bradbury: http://tcu.teachercast.net/

25 Excellent Professional Development Tools for Teachers by Med Kharbach http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/01/23-excellent-professional-development.html

* The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. “Deeper Learning Defined.” April 2013.

HOW DO WE INTEGRATE TECHNOLOGY IN MY SCHOOL? PART I – IN MY SCHOOL TECHNOLOGY IS THE TOOL, NOT THE FOCUS

After my blog posts on technology, several colleagues asked me how we integrate technology into our curriculum at my school. In this post, I will try to give some examples. I curated lists and information about different Web tools language teachers can use in their classes on Scoopit. There are hundreds of Web tools that teachers can use here but it doesn’t mean that they have to use all of them. I always remind my colleagues to consider the following questions before they try any of them in class:

1-    Is it going to contribute to improve the language skills of my students?

2-    Is it going to contribute to improve the 21st Century skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity?

3-    Is it going to contribute to improve their metacognition and reflective skills?

4-    Is it going to provide them with the skills they need to survive in an increasingly interconnected and digital world?

SOURCE: MED KHARBACH EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY AND MOBILE LEARNING

In our increasingly interconnected and digital world, using technology is inevitable but our learning goals and pedagogy should determine the technology that we are going to use in the classroom. We should be active participants in a model where technology is the tool, not the focus. The entire focus should be on learning and the new pedagogy.

 In the introduction of his book English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, Linworth Publishing 2010, Larry Ferlazzo says, as language teachers we should help our students:

  • Learn a new language of how to engage in the world and with each other.
  • Use their own traditions and stories to re-imagine themselves and their dreams.
  • Tap into their own intrinsic motivation and embark on a journey of action, discovery, and learning.
  • Develop the confidence to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them, try new things, and develop a discipline of self-reflection.

While we are trying to accomplish all these, we should carefully choose the tools that will help us achieve our goals and prepare our students for the future.

SOURCE: EDTECH REVIEW

 As for the examples about how we are integrating technology at my school, I would like to start with my Learnist board that I curated for the 12th grade persuasive essay unit. When one of my colleagues had to stay in hospital for 3 months, I took over his classes in the middle of the school year. Because I didn’t know the students well, I prepared a Learnist board for them on Persuasive Writing with videos, texts and interactives for different types of learners with different levels of English. In the first lesson, we discussed why it is important for the students to master persuasive style and writing and determined our learning goals. I asked the students to choose and watch/read the ones that were appropriate for their levels and needs at home. In the next lesson, we analyzed a sample persuasive essay on the Smartboard and the students told me how it matched with the information they learned at home. At the end of the lesson, I asked them to read/watch some more texts/videos at home as they were going to have a quiz on persuasive writing the following day.

The results of the quiz gave me clues about my students’ weak points. Some needed to work more on the persuasive style, while others needed to work on the organization of the essay, and so on. So, I grouped them according to their weak points and gave them essays that needed to be improved. Students were free to refer to the curated materials on Learnist while they were rewriting the essays to improve them. At the end of the task, each group presented the essays they improved to the class explaining what changes they had made and why. During each presentation, they received oral feedback from me and their peers. At that point, since I got to know them and their weak points and needs, I recommended each student to read/watch some specific materials on Learnist at home and asked all of them to write a journal entry in their reflection journals on what they have learned about persuasive style and writing.

After the presentations, I showed them the rubric I prepared for this task on the Smartboard, telling them that I was flexible with it and asked them to make suggestions to finalize it. Some students were really surprised and didn’t want to participate as they were not used to the idea of preparing the evaluation criteria with the teacher, but others with more open mindsets were willing to participate. We went over the rubric together, made some changes on it depending on the students’ suggestions and determined our evaluation criteria together. Then, the students chose one of the topics out of the ones that I gave them and started brainstorming and planning their essays. After that, they started writing their first drafts. The next steps were peer and self-review and editing. You can see the samples of peer and self-review forms on Learnist. As the last step, they wrote their final drafts and completed the evaluation forms for self-reflection. During the entire process, they received oral and written feedback from me and their peers at each step and were free to use their tablets or smartphones in the classroom to refer to the materials on Learnist and to use online dictionaries and other vocabulary tools. As a post-writing vocabulary activity, the students were given four choices and asked to do one of them.

Using 8 new words that you have learned in this task:

1-    Complete a vocabulary journal (Hard copy – for students who aren’t comfortable with technology)

2-    Go to Quizlet or Vocabulary Ahead, or a similar vocabulary tool to prepare 8 flashcards and a vocabulary quiz.

3-    Go to Quizlet or Vocabulary Ahead, or a similar vocabulary tool to make 1-2-minute vocabulary video for each word.

4-    Create a visual using Snappy Words, Graph Words, or a similar vocabulary tool.

During this activity, I reminded my students that they should be actively involved in and take the responsibility of their own learning process from determining the learning goals to determining the success criteria and reflecting on their learning to see where they are in the learning process and what steps they should take to reach their next goal. I noticed that because they are studying in a system where achievement is closely related to success on standardized tests, students were easily demotivated when they made mistakes. They had a fear of failure. I tried to explain them that we can’t learn anything or improve without making mistakes; so, they shouldn’t be afraid of making mistakes.

SOURCE: WHAT ED SAID via TOONDOO

Students at all levels love digital storytelling as it gives them the opportunity to share knowledge and to express themselves freely and creatively in mediums they are familiar with and they think are cool. Our 4th grade students were asked to create their own stories using Voicethread after they studied Our Community unit. You can see two samples by following the links below:

https://voicethread.com/share/5197982/

https://voicethread.com/share/5115539/

We have a Prep class between 8th and 9th grades for students who don’t know enough English to be able to follow the high school program. The Prezis below have been created by two of our Prep students for the horror story task given right after the Halloween.

We believe that blogs are great tools to promote learning and improve the writing skills of our students. We have class blogs at all levels in middle school and in Prep. One of our purposes is to enable our students to connect to the wider world, share their work with a real audience and receive comments and feedback. This is a class blog for our 5th grade students who came to our school and started learning English for the first time this year.

We also encourage our students to participate in global collaborative projects to develop cultural understanding and global awareness by interacting with learners of other cultures. Here you can see the first posts of our 6th grade students participating in the International Cookbook Project on Edmodo which is about to start very soon.

We strongly believe in the benefits of game-based learning. Games are effective learning tools and an important aspect of our students’ learning adventures. We have a portal of online resources for our students and in one section there are games for students from K-9. Here you can see the grade 3 and grade 6 Games pages.

How do you integrate tech into your school curriculum? I would love to hear your comments and feedback.

INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY CREATIVELY TO TRANSFORM LEARNING

Technology has enabled us to access to more content and information than ever before. Therefore,  the instructional paradigm shift today requires us to focus on the human expressive capability rather than knowledge. We can transform learning by creating and sharing knowledge in many ways. In the past, consuming and producing words through reading and writing and, to a lesser extent, listening and speaking were enough while teaching literacy. Students were using these skills often to show that they knew or memorized the information. Today, what students make, design, invent is much more important than what they know. Digital expression is the new literacy and creativity is the new fluency.

By Jason Elsom

With the introduction of the inexpensive, easy-to-use, and widely available technology tools, digital literacy – including sound, graphics, and moving images – has become popular. Integrating digital literacy, art, oral literacy and writing into a single narrative or “media collage,” such as a Web page, a video, an e-portfolio or a blog is crucial for personal, academic and workplace success in our age.

SOURCE: Flickr (Created by Langwitches)

The reason why digital storytelling has become so popular is because students love expressing themselves using different forms of media. Through e-portfolios, blogs, slide presentations, animations and visually differentiated text, students can demonstrate learning in ways that require them to analyze, synthesize, evaluate and apply what they know about a particular content domain. What motivates students more is the fact that their work will be shared and assessed not only by their classmates and teachers but by a global audience as well. Many students are excited about this and they say they try a lot harder for the global audience. Via social networking students interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts or others employing a variety of digital environments and media. Using social media in the classroom will surely increase student engagement as it is a real life experience. Through collaborative global projects students will develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures and contribute to project teams to produce original works or solve problems, all of which are essential 21st century skills.