teaching literacy.: Archive

Some predictions for the future of education include every student carrying a hand-held digital learning device, teachers encouraging Tweeting and texting, and the teaching of lessons by computer games.

That version of the future is in full display at the Colorado Convention Center for the annual meeting of the International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE.

Jun 30, 2010

#digital literacy.

“Don’t look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.” —— Mark Twain

Jun 30, 2010158 notes

“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.
Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” —— William Faulkner

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#alphabet.

“Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.” —Frank Darabont (via libraryland)

Jun 30, 201012 notes

peasized:

10 years later and No Child Left Behind gets it’s overhaul with Common Core Standards, which are worth taking a peek at. They’re up for K-12, with specific goals for different areas of instruction. 13 states are on board with the new Math and English standards that will hopefully better direct curriculum and educators, as well as better prepare students for college or a career field. ISBE prefaced their decision to change with the following, which I think shows their efforts to really look at where critical thinking skills begin, beyond basic skills learning:

Math and English-language arts standards were developed first because they provide a foundation upon which students build skill sets in other areas of learning.

What I like most about Common Core is how specific the English standards become, for example, one of the 9th & 10th grade standards is to be able to cite textual evidence, as well as use inferring details, to help defend an analysis. In comparison to the Wisconsin standards I’ve been working with that suggest such things as “produce clear pieces of writing for a variety of audiences”.

It’s arguable that standards will still cripple good teaching, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind, these are simply benchmarks for where students should be at a certain point in their educational careers, how students arrive at those skills is left to the teacher.

Will more standards mean more tests? No. For states that choose to adopt these common standards, having one set of standards will make it easier for states to pool information and resources to develop a shared set of high-quality tests to better evaluate student progress. The goal is not to have more tests, but to have smarter and better tests that help students, parents, and teachers.

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“She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.” —The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (via victoriajean) (via somethingworthy)

“Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.” —Anita Brookner (via libraryland)

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“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.” —Charles Peguy (via libraryland)

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“so the novelist is always working with at least three languages. there is the author’s own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character’s presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language that fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging.” —james wood, how fiction works. (via paperbackgirl)

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