February 2011
| Volume 68 | Number 5
Teaching Screenagers
Marge Scherer
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Larry D. Rosen
Children and teens today are immersed in technology. Just as we don't think about the existence of air, they don't think about technology and media. Individualized mobile devices have given them the expectation that if they conceive of something, they will be able to make it happen. Yet schools still expect these members of the iGeneration to "unitask," writes Rosen—listening to teacher lectures, completing worksheets, and writing with pen and paper. Bringing technology into education will not only get the iGeneration more involved in learning, but also put teachers in their most effective role, as facilitators of meaning-making.
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Marge Scherer
In this EL interview, Karen Cator, the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education, talks about ways to realize the potential of technology to transform education. She discusses what students need: their own digital devices for classroom use, the ability to use the information they access, the skills to communicate and collaborate online, and the understanding of what it means to be a digital citizen. To make the new national vision for technology in schools come to fruition, broadband must be available everywhere, and every educator must be a highly connected one, she notes.
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Will Richardson
Students need opportunities throughout the curriculum to follow their passions and publish quality work for global audiences to interact with. Social media afford the opportunity for students to contribute to the world in meaningful ways, do real work for real audiences for real purposes, find great teachers and collaborators from around the world, and become great teachers in their own right. This article addresses information literacy, technology, youth culture, and learning.
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Mark Bauerlein
High school students' lack of experience and practice with reading complex texts is a primary cause of their difficulties with college-level reading. Filling the syllabus with digital texts does little to address this deficiency. Complex texts demand three dispositions from readers: a willingness to probe works characterized by dense meanings, the ability to engage in a train of uninterrupted thought, and a receptivity to reflect on thoughts deeper than one's own. Schools should preserve a crucial place for unwired, unplugged, and unconnected learning. Teachers can boost students' college readiness by putting more complex texts in the curriculum.
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Julie Coiro and Jay Fogleman
By concentrating on key learning goals and performance-based skills, teachers can design tasks and learner supports that make students' online work worthwhile. This article discusses the three kinds of web-based learning environments: web-based informational reading systems, web-based interactive learning systems, and web-based instructional learning systems. By understanding the purpose of the website and what it offers in terms of multimodality, interactivity, and levels of instructional support, teachers can enhance student learning online. This article addresses educational resources, lesson plans, and learning.
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Liz Kolb
Even teachers who did not grow up in the digital generation themselves have come to accept the mobile phone as a ubiquitous presence in the everyday lives of their students. Kolb discusses the potential benefits of using cell phones as tools to enhance instruction, and describes seven types of creative learning activities that teachers can use.
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Pete Davidson, Alison Enzinna, Casey Gannon, Samoris Hall, Corinne Hayward, Ogechi Irondi, Ashley Magnifico, Terence Perry and Michael Virag
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Sameer Hinduja and Justin W. Patchin
Although bullying has always been part of students' lives, teenagers can now use technology to expand the reach of their peer harassment in a way previous generations could not, through cyberbullying. Hinduja and Patchin, school consultants and creators of an online clearinghouse on cyberbullying, define it as "willful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices." They describe how emotionally devastating it can be to the mental health of teens. Because teens are connected to communication technologies 24/7, cyberbullying can occur around the clock and across all geographic boundaries. It's widespread; the authors recently found that 20 percent of a large sample of 11- to 18-year-olds they surveyed admitted to being bullied online, and a similar percentage admitted to picking on a peer online. The authors describe steps high schools and middle schools should take to prevent cyberbullying. Schools should educate their communities about the phenomenon and develop a proactive plan that includes clear communication about what behaviors constitute online bullying and what consequences will follow. They suggest steps teachers should take to respond to cyberbullying incidents, and how to respond to more serious cases that require a formal response from the school and possible legal action.
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Matt Federoff, Troy Hicks, Anthony Mangiacapre, Erin Reilly, Ryan Imbriale, Eric Sheninger, Dan Meyer and Eric Langhorst
Educational Leadership asked some leading technology educators, If you were transported back to school today, what kind of technology would most engage you? In response, they described the benefits of interactive whiteboards, teacher-created websites, wikis, cell phones, story creation tools, Skype, and more.
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Amy Overbay, Melinda Mollette and Ellen S. Vasu
As schools and administrators across the country develop and implement new technology initiatives to help reach the new generation of digital learners, many will experience common challenges. The authors, evaluators with the Friday Institute for Educational Technology, describe important lessons learned about technology planning and the implementation of technology initiatives in schools, based mainly on evaluations of how North Carolina schools carried out the IMPACT model. They offer administrators and teachers five lessons on how to address the challenges involved with implementing technology initiatives in a school or district.
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Lemoyne S. Dunn
More and more teachers are creating websites for their classes; however, not all websites are equal. Lemoyne S. Dunn describes five different categories that class websites might fall into. Sites in the first level provide basic, unchanging information, such as the teacher' contact information and a course syllabus. The fifth level includes sites on which students create and discuss content related to the course. When creating a class website, Dunn says that teachers need to consider the purpose of the site, the time available for updating, and student access to computers.
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Nick Kremer
Nick Kremer was a skeptic about online education. He didn't think students learned or interacted much in online classes, and he was concerned about cheating and the lack of online access for some students. But he also thought that the online format would be a good way to offer a summer creative writing class that budgetary and curricular restraints prevented his school from offering during the school year. In this article, Kremer explained how he overcame his own objections to online classes as he designed and taught this new course.
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Jane Margolis, Joanna Goode and David Bernier
Broadening computer science learning to include more students is a crucial item on the United States' education agenda, these authors say. Although policymakers advocate more computer science expertise, computer science offerings in high schools are few—and actually shrinking. In addition, poorly resourced schools with a high percentage of economically disadvantaged students are even less likely to offer computer science, and few minorities and females sign up for such courses, adding an equity dimension to the problem. Margolis and her colleagues, authors of Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, describe a partnership they developed between the University of California at Los Angeles and officials in the Los Angeles School District. This partnership has increased the number of computer science courses in the district's schools and dramatically upped the number of Latino, black, and female learners taking AP Computer Science. They describe a yearlong introductory computer science course they developed, using pedagogy designed to attract diverse learners, and a professional development program they offer teachers in L.A. schools.
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Marc Isseks
Although it is essential to incorporate new technologies into the classroom, says Isseks, one trend has negatively affected instruction—the misuse of PowerPoint presentations. The author describes how poorly designed PowerPoint presentations reduce complex thoughts to bullet points and reduce the act of learning to transferring text from slide to student notebook. Teachers need to learn how to make better use of technology to deepen student understanding and help students develop such skills as critical thinking, problem-solving, perseverance, and creativity.
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Bryan Goodwin
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Robert J. Marzano
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William M. Ferriter
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Joanne Rooney
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Meg Simpson
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Jason Ohler
Schools have an important role to play in helping students balance the individual empowerment of digital technology with a sense of personal community, and global responsibility. The author asserts that the extreme freedom and anonymity that students experience in cyberspace has made it essential that schools provide strong character education programs. He lists resources that can help schools create values frameworks and character education curriculums that encompass digital realities.
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Mary Beth Hertz and Gerald W. Aungst
The future is here, Hertz and Aungst claim, and with it comes a demand for new essential skills. Like the hero of the early 1990s science fiction novel Ender's Game, students must now manage information independently of teachers' designs. They must also think creatively, collaborate, invent new models that remix existing information, and problem solve in unfamiliar learning situations. Technology—used thoughtfully in schools and with a generous portion of student freedom in how to use it—can help schools give kids these skills. The authors describe how three high school learning environments—Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia; the Integrated Studies Program in Camden County, New Jersey; and the Van Meter School District in Iowa—use one-on-one laptop initiatives and project-based learning to do so.
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Anthony J. Scimone
The author argues for using computer labs to teach writing in middle school—with a computer for each student and a teacher circulating through the lab to provide real-time composition instruction as students write on the screen. In too many middle schools, writing instruction is provided apart from students' preferred composing tool—the computer; students write in class with paper and pencil, a situation far from ideal for coaching writing on the spot. Computer labs hold potential to transform writing instruction. On-screen writing is subject to instant teacher intervention, teachers can sit with students and encourage them to read text aloud, instructors can conference effectively with more students, and they can teach grammar and research skills in context. Scimone laments that secondary schools have been slow to seize this technology for teaching writing. He recommends that at least a third of all class days in English language arts should take place in a computer lab.
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Meredith Stewart
Students often view schoolwork as a series of discrete assignments that lack coherence. Digital portfolios can alter this perception. By having students post their work throughout the year on blogs or wikis, they can easily review their work and, at the end of the year, assemble selected pieces into a portfolio. These collections of work enable students to see both their progress over time and areas that are still challenging for them. Digital portfolios ease the process of collecting student work, can include multimedia, and can be viewed and commented on by people outside the classroom. This article addresses self-assessment, language arts, technology, and cognitive processes.
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Johanna Mustacchi
Incorporating technology into school in a way that engaged middle schoolers' minds can't just be about having cell phones or ipods ensconced in the classroom. Teachers must embrace the notion of the teenager as cocreator of her or her cyber-connected and highly visual world. Mustacchi, a media literacy teacher, describes how she tapped into her 7th graders' thirst to create by having students design public service announcements focused on sustainability. She first sharpened students' skills by asking them to analyze classic commercials and public service announcement campaigns as a lead-in to making their own 30-second public service announcements. Mustacchi shares suggestions for engineering a high-quality video project with middle schoolers and showing screenagers the power of the screen to get out a message. Topics covered include environmental education, pop culture, and project-based learning.
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Naomi Thiers
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Inservice Guest Blogger
http://ascd.typepad.com/blog/educational_leadership/
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EL Group
http://groups.ascd.org/groups/detail/121798/educational-leadership
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