The Release of New ELA & Math Standards

The new standards for English language arts (ELA) and mathematics were announced last week:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is a joint effort by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) in partnership with Achieve, ACT and the College Board. Governors and state commissioners of education from across the country committed to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12.

I had a glance at the ELA standards which are further divided into categories of reading, writing, and speaking & listening. In general, I feel the standards are specific, practical, and well written, from a pedagogical standpoint, trying to promote more scientific/logical thinking and argument skills in language arts. I cited the following standards which seemed interesting and “controversial” to me and began with some questions:

Reading:

Support or challenge assertions about the text by citing evidence in the text explicitly and accurately.

Q: What evidence is determined to be “explicit and accurate”?

Discern the most important ideas, events, or information, and summarize them accurately and concisely.

Q: What content in a fiction book is determined to be the “most important ideas”? Is it test-oriented content? How can the “standard content” be set for every book/reading?

Writing:

Use technology as a tool to produce, edit, and distribute writing.

Q: What types of technology will be included? The traditional WORD or ways of online publishing?

Speaking & Listening

Make strategic use of multimedia elements and visual displays of data to gain audience attention and enhance understanding.

Feedback on the standards is welcome until October 21st.

DE Announces Student Video Contest

To get students invested in their education, President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have announced a new video contest, asking students to "inspire" them with their stories. Advocates for educational technology say the contest is a great way to reach the digital generation and help students develop key 21st-century skills.

Check here for more details.

Leveraging Online Professional Development

The recent issue of the Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook: Leveraging Online Professional Development is now available on Education Week. This issue looks at the potential of digital technology to enhance teacher learning options and increase collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

Here are some interesting highlights:

• MetLife Inc.'s 25th annual survey of educators found that the proportion of teachers saying they are “very satisfied” with their careers increased from 40 percent in 1984 to 62 percent in 2008, while more teachers today (66 percent) feel respected by society than their counterparts did back then (47 percent).
  
• the percentage of teachers agreeing that they can earn a “decent salary” has nearly doubled since 1984, to 66 percent, and far more teachers today (75 percent, compared with 45 percent in 1984) say they would recommend a career in teaching to a young person.
• two-thirds of today’s teachers affirm that they were well prepared for the profession, compared with 46 percent in 1984.
  Some other survey results:
• Have you ever taken an online course for degree or professional credit?

Recommended Teacher Groups on Ning:
Classroom 2.0
The English Companion Ning
3-D Fieldtrips

A Recent MIT Report on Tech-integrated Instruction

A recent report (Klopfer, Osterwil, Groff, & Haas, 2009) issued by the Educational Arcade at MIT presents very interesting (teaching) examples regarding the utilization of video games, social networking, and simulations in classroom. The full report can be viewed here which includes:

• the background and affordances of Simulations, Digital Games, and Social Networking;

• the cognitive implications of these technologies;

• specific challenges with using these tools in the classroom, as well as strategies for overcoming these challenges in order to achieve successful learning experiences; and

• the future of these technologies and their impact and learning and teaching.

Here are a few highlights:

Video Games

(e.g., Civilization, World of Warcraft, Lure of the Labyrinth)

In addition to developing new cognitive abilities, it solves traditional classroom teaching challenges:

• the skill of negotiation
• solve problems collaboratively
• be mindful of their actions/impact on others
• “Games don’t teach the content… it teaches [students] the conceptual knowledge and sets the environment for you to teach what you want.” (p. 8)

Simulation

(e.g., StarLogo TNG)

The report mentions an interesting 3D programming software oriented at K-12 students. StarLogo TNG is an open-ended tool that allows the user to create simulations, developed by MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program. As a 3D modeling and simulation software, StarLogo TNG is a user-friendly programming language represented by colored blocks that fit together like puzzle pieces.

Social Networking

• The heart of social networking technologies -- social cognition.
• “almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom” (Jenkins et al., 2006, p. 19).

Digital Storytelling Update

Digital Storytelling Webinars

Free Digital Storytelling Webinars will be offered by TechSoup as follows:

Event Schedule:
9/30: Event Day 1 – TechSoup forums event discussions and expert webinars

10/1: Event Day 2 – TechSoup forums event discussions and “How to Create a Digital Story” webinar

10/1: Digital Storytelling Challenge kickoff webinar

10/1-10/16: Digital Storytelling Challenge submission period.

10/19-10/20: Challenge submissions judging

10/21: Winners announced and movie screening party in the virtual world of Second Life and live from San Francisco at the TechSoup headquarters

Storybird is “collaborative storytelling for family and friends.” From further investigation, I found some interesting features. In addition to a number of extraordinary online story books, Storybird helps you create a tale with an intuitive book-like interface and a selection of artwork, which are high-quality images from some of the most talented but less well-known children’s illustrators today, like Irisz Agocs and Victoria Usova. The whole story creating process only involves picture selection and text making, which is suitable to younger children to start a trial of digital storytelling.

Based on previous exploration of this topic, I have created the following "glog" to map low-cost tools which can be used in classroom:

21st-Century Literacy Teaching: Multimodal Texts and Meaning Making

The recent reading of Hall (2003) and Hammerberg (2001) let me think about the requirements and challenges of literacy teaching in the 21^st century.

While Hall (2003) from the perspective of teaching focuses on reviewing elements of effective teaching and perceptions held by effective literacy teachers, Hammerberg (2001) weaves three perspectives (i.e., the changing relationships between texts and images brought by media changes, the changing children’s literature, and the teaching of writing) together to discuss how to include multiple perspectives into the teaching of multiple texts with children. From Hall’s (2003) review, echoed with the Hallidayan Theory – “meaning is the driving force in literacy growth” (p. 320), effective literacy teaching should embrace: (1) reading as the priority of teaching (with all literacy activities connected to reading); (2) small group differentiated teaching (with an appropriate common evaluation system); (3) a culturally responsive curriculum; and (4) literacy skills applied to everyday life with authentic meaning making. The above requirements for effectiveness pose challenges for our teachers today. First, the first national study of elementary classrooms after NCLB tells us that unbalanced classroom instructional times have been observed in thousands of elementary classrooms in the U.S.: English literacy takes up a big amount of the instructional time while math and science take much smaller percentages. How to balance the instructional content/time across subjects and better weave reading into daily science and math instruction is something that needs to be considered by teachers. Second, differentiated teaching might be easily realized in a classroom with less than 25 students and a teacher aid. However, in many less privileged classrooms, such as some schools in Harlem with class sizes of 30-40 and most classrooms in China with common class sizes of 40-50, the strategy of differentiated teaching might need to be adjusted, from individuals to small groups, with a carefully crafted evaluation system. Finally, the culturally responsive approach and the increasing diverse student population further pushes teachers to reach out to families, knowing more about students’ family and ethnic cultures, which further poses lingual and cultural challenges for teachers today. Furthermore, Hall (2003) gives interesting summarization of effective teachers’ perceptions: (1) high expectation for students; (2) continuity of theory and practice in classroom teaching; (3) strong self assurance/confidence; and (4) optimistic view towards students’ growth. Some of the perceptions seem to be not only about believes, but also about personalities.

Hammerberg (2001) initiates the discussion of new formats of children’ literature brought by changing media. For example, some unconventional books discussed by Hammerberg embed children’s kinesthetic involvement and extra meaning making in book reading. I would love to read Black and White and Meanwhile when I get a chance. The media changes bring technologies (e.g., web, mobile, animation, etc.) and new interfaces of reading, including “handheld hypertext” (p. 208). Children’s literature in the 21^st century will give them more ways of interpreting texts, more ways of seeking for meanings, more ways of looking at authentic texts, as well more ways of communication and self expression. They learn reading and writing in social, cultural, media contexts together with instinct cognitive processes. The teaching of writing with younger children, according to Hammerberg (2001), should consider children’s multiple perspectives and voices, through specific approaches such as shared writing and interactive writing, help them on “the technique of filtering many voices into a planned and systematic product” (p. 212).

From 2001 to the current year of 2009, there have been further changes/innovations in children’s literature. School students today are familiar with computers and mobile devices. They have access to multiple reading resources, including comic books, video/mobile games, and animated online/video stories. While consciously noticing the changing literature, we need to catch up with the digital age, be open to new possibilities, and cater to students’ 21-century literacy needs.

Future Publishing: E-Book Builder Trials

I have been trying several e-book building tools at the EdLab this week, including formal online publishing tools and informal personalized tools.

I want to pull them out here to initiate some comparisons.

MagCloud -- The above four-page trial magazine was created via MagCloud, incorporating partial material from the TC Assets Project. It is actually an online magazine converter, via directly uploading your PDF documents to the website. The PDFs must be created according to certain page formats it requires (e.g., templates in Adobe InDesign). It costs nothing to publish a magazine on the website. It only charges for printing and delivery. It is a nice website to publish and promote a magazine. Potential readers/buyers can see a preview of the magazine on the website.

formatpixel -- It is a formal online publishing tool which enables users to design the book online from scratch compared with MagCloud. However, it only offers 512k to free users, so I am not able to further try it out after uploading two pictures.

Sophie -- As said in a previous post, it is a promising tool for publishing multimedia book, with the function of embedding audio and video files. Originally developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, the development of Sophie has been continued by University of Southern California which owns an avant-garde digital academic journal named VECTORS. Sophie currently is used by Carnegie-Mellon University’s ETC Press and the Computers and Composition Digital Press at Utah State University. Sophie is not easy to use during my trial, because it is a relatively complex and professional tool which needs the devotion of time to get familiar with, like the Adobe design series. It is a free open software and Sophie 2.0 will be issued in mid-October! Currently, I am exploring how it can be embedded online.

SmileBox -- It is a popular tool suitable for informal personalized publishing. Its products include photo albums, crapbooks, calendars, and e-cards, with hundreds of templates. A lot of schools use it with lower graders to design school-life books with simple pictures and texts. This software is also completely free and can be posted online.

ComicLife -- It is also a popular tool, with users such as teachers and students. Compared with SmileBox, it is more like a book builder and it involves more design work without temples provided. Its focus is comic book. See here if interested in knowing more about what a comic book via ComicLife might look like. This tool is not free. It offers a one-month free trial.

Adobe InDesign -- This is probably the most commonly used book design tool known to the publishing field. Its functions are definitely more refined than any of the above tools. MagCloud, formatpixel, and Sophie all have the online publishing function. It seems to me so far that a book/magazine designed via InDesign can only be published via MagCloud.

About the Writing of Qualitative Dissertation Proposal

Kilbourn's (2006) publication on Teachers College Record helps me better organize my understandings of the writing of a dissertation proposal. As a graduate student interested in English literacy, I am relatively familiar with various teaching methods and writing styles in English. However, I need to be conscious of the style of academic writing: straightforward, succinct, and coherent. Qualitative dissertation requires very high-quality writing skills, which is the main reason I want to keep my written inquiry going here. This blog site will witness my reflective writing journey. It will also record my on-going growth in understanding the education field in the U.S., the teaching and learning in English literacy, as well as my "joyous and tortured" journey of doctoral dissertation.

President Obama's Speech to Students

The white house has released president obama's prepared remarks that he will deliver to school children today.

Overall it seems very much in line with Obama's campaign speeches and recent statements on education, in which he urges individual responsibility and innovation. But there are a few interesting points which should be pointed out here, like the reference to media and culture artifacts:

"I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox."

and

"Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class."

He also tells his expectation for the children, including thinking skills and fields they need to fight for in the future:

"You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy."

He weaves his personal story into the address to make it more vivid, trying to deliver his messages in an illuminating way. I think it is a great opportunity for schools to share his speech with teachers and students on different formal or informal forums (e.g., Twitter, classroom blog, wiki, etc.) to engage discussions, and to decide what need to be further improved in their educational concepts, rationales, and practices.

My colleague at the EdLab passed me the following 4th grader's video response to the speech, which is quite interesting:

Latest New Yorker Issue

Enlightened by today's EdLab seminar on digital publishing and Prof. Siegel's class about Teaching Literacy in the Early Years, I explored the digital (beta) edition of the latest The New Yorker. Currently, the online registration is free and every newly-registered online viewer is given four issues (the latest September issue and the next three to come) for free, as one of the magazine's promotion strategies.

The magazine's web version also offers multimedia content supplementary to its hard copies. For example, the following is additional multimedia content of the current issue:

Audio: The Texas execution that may change the death penalty debate.
Video: David Grann discusses the flaws of the Cameron Todd Willingham investigation.


The cover presents a compelling cartoon image about a child teaching a class of grandpas and grandmas "new literacy". How many words on the blackboard do you know? The types of literacy in the contemporary world just keeps updating. Teaching of literacy shifts from the elder generation to its younger counterpart. What's the next step? The blackboard in the image looks traditional, but a lot of public schools in New York are installed with SmartBoard. Would it be possible that in the near future our younger children are going to produce a multimedia story on their own and show us what meanings they want to convey?

As teachers and educators, let's just turn our lifelong learning on, communicating with avant gardes in our field and constantly learning from peers and also from our students.