One tool that I've found engaging with students is ToonDoo, a free online website that allows students to create their own cartoon strips, and save/share them on the ToonDoo website. One project with 5th/6th grade students introduced mindfulness practices, and asked them to relate their own experiences to the topic using the Toondoo website. This was engaging and also allowed me to create a database of cartoon strips around students experience with mindfulness practices. As the program spread to an additional school this semester, I was able to share other students insights around the practices through the easy-entry cartoon strips. This made the sometimes serious topic of mindfulness more approachable and fun to explore. The Toondoo website allows for quite a bit design features to create your own cartoon strip. It's free and allows you to save your work, including tags to your work also allows for an easy search to access the creations. Within the site you are able to modify most elements, you can select the number of storyboard boxes, cartoon character to use, including facial expressions, postures, and size. Once the charters are inputed into the boxes, you can add dialog and commentary boxes, symbols, and objects. This also allows for some practice around visual literacy, how to express ideas visually for maximum effect. Students enjoyed this tool, and were able to create some great cartoon strips. I would rank this website 5 out of 5.
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The EnGauge 21st Century skills article provide a great framework for creating digital-age literacy. Though I found this article very outdated, the foundational period around 2000 did provide a focus on how the use of technology would influence education. I specifically liked how 21st century learning included digital-age literacy, inventive thinking, effective communication, and high productivity.
Of these insights, digital-age literacy is the starting point for teaching digital literacy. Since I work with high school students, I don't focus on the primary skills of using a keyboard, learning the basics around computer use, etc. I do assume most students are digital natives in this way, but I do not think this is a privileged or naive mindset, rather it reflects my experience with my students and goal to begin within the zone of proximal development. I would focus on digital-age literacy to really serve the whole student interaction with technology. EnGauge explores digital literacy through the following domains:
I'm exploring the impact of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) on emotionally charged topics for students, but really my audience are educators, with the job to teach the whole child. As Baggio points out, the trilogy of the mind: affective, cognitive, and conative are all filtered through the affective interface. This makes SEL a particular importance, especially since many of the students I serve deal with poverty, violence, addiction, and other challenges on a daily basis. I would like to draw powerful conclusions to provide a rationale for teachers to take SEL seriously, as a way to improve student wellbeing and academics.
To create resources for teachers, I will start with Baggio's insights around andogogy, or how to teach to adults; the key to this is application and utility. Why is it so important for teachers to learning this additional skill set? How will trauma/SEL awareness be useful? I think there is clear evidence around this in terms of Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), and it's correlation to adult outcomes. This is the only reason why I teach and do my nonprofit work, to equip students to escape the adverse experience many of them face. Next, I would interweave Dervins ideas around circling the experience, which echoes Baggio, as the situation and gap are only surmountable if there is a use to the learning, how will this be helpful? Finally, Clark is especially important to the instructional system design, where there is a constant evaluation of needs, task analysis, learning objectives, informed assessment, development, try-out/revision, and finally implementation. I see that I often jump between these steps, but to make my strongest argument for this important topic, I will maximize my strategy. Making digital citizenship personal, making it applicable for students is important, and also inhibited by the lack of consequential thinking experienced by High School students. I would focus on a few key areas around relationship and communication: managing your digital footprint, developing empathy in spite of passive aggressive tendencies, and mindfulness around the illusion of zero consequences. In managing their own digital footprints, I would focus on their dreams, what they hope to accomplish and how they reflect that in their real life communication and persona. This would be contrasted with the myth in digital communication that there are no consequence. Students would be asked to note that they have different personas they operate in the real work and online. The goal is to recognize these difference, why they arise, and what the effect would be if their online actions where done in real life. The learning gap here is to notice that passive aggressive communication online exasperates the teenage tendency to not recognize consequences. Evoking critical thought around the topic may allow students to access more agency for themselves. This would also be connected to creating a digital footprint that benefits your college and career goals; more colleges are reviewing digital footprints to see if students have the maturity to contribute to a positive campus culture making it relevant. For teens there is an inability to see consequences for actions, this is due to immaturity of frontal cortex development, but this void can be bridged in many ways. Promoting empathy in real life and digitally, may help make connections to cause and effect. Basically, revealing that actions taken online, can have a long lasting, and impactful effects, students could be asked to reflect on situations where they were the actor and receiver in negative digital citizenship. Finally, I would focus on mindfulness around the illusion of zero consequences to digital citizenship. Accessing the Rings of Responsibility may help to see how actions online can affect real life. I would begin with a case study, then move to a real world example that the students have experienced. Specifically, examples they have experienced within digital communication that they can recognize a failures, and have a chance to self-reflect on better/different strategies. This would also allow for a component of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to emerge. Digital citizenship is rooted in SEL, with the goals of awareness around action, responsibility and nonviolent/effective communication. This is an important SEL growth area, as digital citizenship has the potential to be the primary persona experienced in the current, and certainly future generations. Link to Digital Citizenship Lesson Plan: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4SSJsllVWmhZE9UVDEwLXdvZ1U/view?usp=sharing I enjoyed and found the Dervin article validating to a post-modern view of the world that has developed throughout my life. The discontinuity she brings to light is actually the starting point in my constructivist approach to teaching. In the article, I believe she is explaining the process of making sense of information, and the principle that each persons perspective guides how the information is approached, addressed, valued, and applied.
Relating this information to my area of focus in social emotional learning (SEL), I feel that a post-modern view is helpful to see why the discontinuity occurs, also allowing me to see the struggle and discomfort students face when their view is discontinuous with the status quo understanding. This diversity of perspective is a great treasure of our society, as a teacher I want to learn from my students as they reveal when sense-making is discontinuous. If I've established enough rapport with my students they will show me this vulnerability, which allows me to adapt, reframe, and approach the gap from a different direction. Baggio's input into constructivism reveals how students' motivation, bias, beliefs, and understanding all contribute to how they will make sense of the information. I also found it insightful to contrast pegagogy with androgogy, the later being strategies for adults, taking into consideration that adults will want to know the "why", and how it can be applied. The idea that we are blank slates according to Paiget, doesn't match my own experience in learning and teaching; instead information is acquired when it is accepted, when the information gap is manageable, and tools are offered to facilitate sense-making. In sharing this, I think of some of my more stubborn colleagues over the years, who become so attached to their way of understanding that any lack of sense-making is seen as the students' fault. What a cop out! How about learning about the thought processes of students and adapting to them?! Sociology reveals that the indexicality of meaning requires that no one perspective be unshakable to others; unfalsifiability makes any perspective inherently flawed. How arrogant for someone to think that the exact time, place, family, SES, education, motivations, etc. have created their sense-making to be objectively true; I may be off the post-modern spectrum with this thought, but our beliefs are certainly not validated as true because they are ours. This is commentary on the nature of epistemology, it is a justified belief through the intersectionality of various disciplines, but it is not an objective truth, it requires continued flexibility. Validity comes with utility, not allegiance to past understanding. We may come to a similar conclusion, but keeping the imaginative and innovative flexibility within teaching brings more agency in our students. I propose this even though I taught various high school math subject. This department is often seen as binary, either right or wrong, but the path to discovering the solution for X can be found through countless methods, math in it's highest form is creative. The sequential path of Blooms taxonomy doesn't allow the novice access to this level, but that doesn't mean that creativity is left out. As a student I always enjoyed addressing a geometry proof in unconventional ways; it was always incredibly motivating to discover postulates through experiment. The great part about math is you can know if the solution is right or wrong; it's one of the few things in life you can know for certain, but even in that, the path to solve varies, and is abstracted by students in infinite ways. Positive risk-taking needs to be inserted into math instruction to make room for creativity. To teach these concepts to a high school student would require addressing the fact that young people have not acquired their full brain capacity, their abstraction level will likely still be developing, their ability to objectively monitor and identify their sense-making process may also be limited. Part of my work in nonprofits, allows me to face a similar challenge, how to speak about abstract concepts like mindfulness, in concrete ways. Making it approachable and motivating to bridge the gap. Baggio suggests that visual impressions are the most powerful way to communicate information. In addition, the constructivist approach requires motivation and utility to be addressed; adding scenarios could support sense-making around sense-making. To instill a lasting understanding, I would also use help-chains, were the strategy for solving the problem (gap) is dissected and the use is emphasized. I think this understanding is essential for teachers, we are artists of young minds, responsible for understanding needs to bridge the gaps to sense-making. This is what makes my work in education satisfying; I seek to bridge the gap between the abstract and the concrete, hoping that our shared representation will benefit larger societal goals. |
AuthorAs a teacher and community advocate I strive to remedy the challenges of adverse childhood experiences (ACE), poverty and violence. I'm intrigued by the motivation that is cultivated by different supportive and discouraging learning environment, and how overcoming the achievement gap can transform our society. Archives
July 2017
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