My Wordle Unit 1 - www.wordle.net
The overwhelming technological changes we have been facing in the last decades imply for us teachers to have a great responsibility in raising a cultural sense in our students, to take care of one another since they are beginning their school lives. Nowadays, the prefix ‘inter’ is really showing its powerful meaning: inter-action, inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-net…
Developing critical thinking is definitely a good starting point if learners are meant to interact successfully in a future unknown society and world. Also, promoting the emotional, conversational/communicative, and physical skills –among others- that are already embedded in most educational contexts, combined with new technological trends that risky pioneers have just started to apply and use effectively and creatively, would serve as a solid basis for the upcoming worldwide citizens.
It is our duty to take part in this huge mission. We have to ‘empower’ ourselves before trying to make our students aware of the great technological resources available around them. Besides, we cannot leave emotional factors aside, such as eagerness, motivation, and self-confidence, among others. Therefore, developing our students’ natural curiosity to discover their own talents and strengths, promoting their capacity of adaptation to sudden changes, and building autonomy step by step, are basic processes learners have to go through.
According to Ianni (2005), ICT and TPD (Teacher professional development) are parallel processes. Our teaching must be based on “learner-centered instructional methods, such as project-oriented learning, problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning and collaborative learning, since the idea is to offer each student the possibility of covering his/her needs as a multi-tasker” (Ianni, 2005).
“The Eight Net Gen Norms”
“The Eight Net Generation Norms” imply great changes in our minds, capacity of understanding, interacting, and reflecting upon the real needs students have nowadays, and new ways of meeting them.
Sometimes, we blame technology because it facilitates students’ lives by providing them with the information, tools, ideas, every single detail at hand, that no effort seems to be needed. The challenge, then, is for us as teachers to train this generation, and make learners skillful in order to classify the huge amount of information they can freely access thanks to the social networking they are immersed in. Besides, students should be committed to be tolerant, collaborative, since it is their own sense of community that has empowered them with affective and academic skills gained through technology.
At last, the capacity of innovation, self-organization and collaboration these Net Geners do have enables them to cope with an ongoing world that will hopefully set a brighter horizon… And communicating in a language that is global only demonstrates that learning it is a must.
I truly believe that this challenge involves all of us as educators in general, but especially -of course-, as responsible for our own students' language learning process. We are here looking forward to meeting their needs, every day with a deeper sense of making our labor productive, reflective, collaborative, assertive… Letting students play the role of actors/actresses in such process is the goal. In sum, we must give our students opportunities to live an enriching life-long learning experience, which in fact, they have already started on their own.
“The relevance of multiliteracies”
The following is a sequence of processes to develop in our learners, which I believe are key in this complex but achievable duty as teachers. Besides, these processes embed the concepts and necessary inter-actions of the different literacies (visual, media, digital, critical literacies), aimed to develop skills and abilities for students to learn:
Identifying --> recognizing --> exploring --> interpreting --> connecting
--> contextualizing --> understanding --> analyzing --> critical thinking
(questioning/reasoning) -->interacting --> sharing --> communicating
--> negotiating --> reflecting --> evaluating --> criticizing --> proposing
-->creating
-->CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE
This task is not easy as I said before. However, through another complementary basic process, we could be ready to comply with this mission: Empowerment. I will cite a description and a real example from the USC Rossier School of Education, which despite its 100 years since its foundation, has always been in the cutting edge concerning meeting students’ needs and forming committed citizens ‘to strengthen urban education locally, nationally and globally.’ This information is given in the document The New Media Consortium (2005, p.6):
“This program prepares educators not only to become fully multimedia literate, but also to integrate these abilities with their instructional visions, objectives, strategies, and classroom practices.”
This means that the direct responsibility relies on us, as teachers of this digital generation, and we must embrace it with no fear, but with eagerness and positivism.
References
Bamford, A. (2003). The Visual Literacy White Paper. Adobe Systems. Retrieved from http://www.adobe.com/uk/education/pdf/adobe_visual_literacy_paper.pdf
Daley, E. (2003). Expanding the Concept of Literacy. Educause Review. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0322.pdf
Lima, C. (2006). A Brief Introduction to Critical Literacy in English Language Education. British Council Brazil. Retrieved from http://www.criticalliteracy.org.uk/images/cleltbooklet.pdf
Tapscott, D (2009) Grown Up Digital. How the Net Generation is Changing your World. MacGraw Hill.
The New Media Consortium (2005). A Global Imperative: The Report of the 21st Century Literacy Summit. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/Global_Imperative.pdf
