tengrrl’s thoughts & news on teaching writing, literacy, and literature
March 15, 2006
Bill calls for study of media impact on youth—what starts out as a possibily useful study on children and their interaction with multimedia ends on a fairly predictable note: “Mooney said she doesn’t need federal legislation to remind her that television is bad for children. ‘I’m not waiting for better television or a new study,’ Mooney said. ‘Just turn off the TV.'”
March 14, 2006
This week’s Denver Post article “Technology Rewrites Rules for Reading” explores how students’ reading habits have been influenced by the various online reading that they do. More and more often, teachers, curriculum developers, and school literacy programs must search for strategies that will best meet students’ needs. The Ideas section from this week’s Inbox offers one way to solve the problem—ask students to explore and share their reading habits and their understanding of text in a digital world.
March 14, 2006
Microsoft to offer free parental Web monitoring—would it be cool if what this says were what it really means? I’d so love for Microsoft to monitor my parents for me. One less thing for me to do.
Really it’s just more in the how to ensure that kids avoid baddies. After all, reading and writing that kids want to do on their own is so dangerous.
March 14, 2006
BBC NEWS | Technology | Cyber bullies haunt young online—even in the UK, it seems, there is fear of online woes. The article ends with simple and obvious advice rather than any kind of complete exploration of how to empower and prepare students who use online resources.
I’m beginning to think that I’m going to have to write the article I want to read.
March 13, 2006
Chicago Tribune | Blogs taking a seat in, out of classrooms—basic info on blogs in the classroom. The piece explores the educational value of the tools, but I wish it would more specifically talk about the many horrors of the fearmongers. Ignoring the obvious arguments about security and safety lessens the impact of the pedagogical issues in the article.
March 13, 2006
Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous – New York Times—back in the day (a phrase which really only makes the writer look old), folks talked with wonderment of the great abilities of the Web to democratize publishing, given that even a dog can compose a Web site. This article is in many ways the modern revision of that old observation: anyone, it seems, can make a film nowadays.
As articles like this one make broad claims on anyone’s ability to be a filmmaker, we need to continue to interrogate how “anyone” is defined. What socio-economic groups are included and excluded? How is age represented? Who creates which kinds of resources? While “online auteurs hardly need to be famous,” there are still many other things an auteur needs to compose and share works online.
March 10, 2006
Students Remember More Ads Than News—Didn’t we know that kids paid attention to the ads back in the days of Schoolhouse Rock? The question that the article raises for me is what did the researchers ask them. Did they ask them questions that would tell us whether they were paying any attention to the other information on the channel? And as the Channel One CEO Judy Harris points out, the kids weren’t isolated. Did the researchers ask questions to determine other places that they were exposed to the products or services that were purchased?
Regardless the article raises important issues on how we pay attention to what students engage with and why. We need to think more about the literacy skills that students are choosing to engage and how we can harness that power in the classroom.
March 10, 2006
The FEMA Coloring Book: Funny, In a Stabbing Yourself in the Eyes Sort of Way – Wonkette—I don’t even know what to say about this, and I can’t look at it any longer to try to decide.
March 10, 2006
Cartoon Violence Thinks of the Children—This Wonkette piece reminded me of my tech analysis of New Yorker cartoons. There’s not much in the PowerPoint, but I asked students the same sorts of questions as they looked at how children interact with technologies in the cartoons. The same assignment could be done looking at gender, age, and race (though that will be a short study). I have a PowerPoint of the cartoons that I use, but since they’re copyrighted, I can’t post it. You could easily do the assignment with the book however: The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons.
March 10, 2006
UNESCO | Education – Grassroots Women Gaining a Voice
talks about ways that technology increases literacy . . . and not in the way we usually talk about it:
“The UNESCO teams introduced workload-lightening technologies such as water pumps that eliminated the need for women and girls to plod miles for water, millet grinding mills that replaced tedious hand grinding, and donkey carts that substituted for hauling heavy loads on their heads. Functional literacy activities conveyed health advice and tips on hygiene, such as how to filter swamp water, that dramatically lowered infant mortality.”