Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

I am sitting at the Montgomery County IU listening to Will. What excites me is his enthusiam. The stuff I’ve been jumping up and down about for nearly two years is coming out of Will’s mouth, far more articulately, of course. And no one is complaining about what to do about filters. Or “but we can’t . . .” Very cool. This stuff is bound to spread in our county.

Will’s message:

It is not technology; it is life. It is pencil. This is not a technology conversation; it’s a learning conversation. Four-walled classrooms do not prepare students for the world they are going to face. We need to reenvision education. “We need a 2020 vision for education.” (See Karl Fisch’s vision in this video addressing the class of 2020–the kindergarden that started this school year.)

“We need to teach students how to learn, how to find the content they need when they need it.”
We are talking about how our classrooms can change, how learning can change.
Will asks, “Are we teaching kids to read and write in hypertext environments?”
How do we teach our kids to function in these new environments? Where are learners turning to for best practices on MySpace?

New stuff I am learning:
Will described the power of the Flat Classroom Project, Vicki Davis’s Computer Science class in Georgia and Julie Lindsay’s 11th grade class at the International School Dhaka. I can wait to go back and share ways to get our learners to discuss Friedman’s “flatteners” with our students.

I am (right now) playing with Flock, a browser that facilitates social networking. My latest Flickr photos now decorate the top of my homepage. I am bringing my feeds into Flock and I think I can avoid Bloglines and save time in a one-stop-shopping approach.

Welcome to Flock, the safe, spyware free web browser that makes it easier to connect with your friends. With Flock it’s a snap to upload, comment, and discover new pics. Read all the news you care about, in one place. Blog freely. Get search results as soon as you start typing in the search box, and much more. Here are a few of the cool things you can do with your new browser.

And I am excited about using PageFlakes as a strategy for collecting my favorite Web stuff and for using with students as they collect content in multiple formats for major projects. I just wish there was a way for us to add subscription content as we add flakes. Althought the research tells us that users value seamlessness, it seems that we now how two mutually exclusive information landscapes. Learners have to make a conscious choice to search them both.

Darn. I thought I would post some pics of the event, but my camera isn’t charged and my email appears down. I’ll post the cell phone pics later.

eSchoolNews today reported on ETS’ recently released report on its ITC Literacy Assessment. The report, which distinguishes tech literacy from information literacy, will probably not come as a surprise for many of us in education or in the library universe. 6300 students from 63 institutions around the country were tested using authentic, scenario-based assessment items. Happily, the results of the assessment led ETS to conclude that students typically have the ability to:

•The ability to identify trustworthy and useful information;
•The ability to manage overabundant information; and
•The ability to communicate information effectively

The eSchoolNews article also described some uglier results:

The study found that 52 percent of those tested could correctly judge the objectivity of a web site, and 65 percent could correctly judge that web site’s authoritativeness. But only 40 percent of students entered multiple search terms when researching a topic, and only 44 percent properly identified a statement that captured the demands of the assignment.

So, what can we do?

Last week, I was blown away by comments from our students home for the Thanksgiving break. They came in (quietly) to thank me for lessons they used to yawn about. For forcing them to brainstorm searches, and to annotate, and to document. For fussing about the information choices they made. They would never have thanked me last year.

What I’ve discovered is that this stuff really isn’t that hard. When teachers care about and assess the quality of student documentation and information choices, learners spend more time searching carefully and selecting thoughtfully. By merely forcing students to annotate their sources, we inspire metacogitive action around student sources and allow teachers to peek in on the decision-making process.

How do you inspire ICT literacies?

Findings from ETS’s report
http://www.ets.org/ictliteracy/prelimfindings.html

ICT Literacy Assessment
http://www.ets.org/ictliteracy

Don’t forget to nominate those edublogs you read and love for the third annual Edublogs Awards! Nominations remain open till November 30th.

So much was cool and new this year as social networking became far more mainstream in the classroom. Recognize your fellow edubloggers!
The categories are:

This year there are ten categories:

• Best audio and/or visual blog
• Best group blog
• Best individual blog
• Most influential post, resource or presentation
• Best library/librarian blog
• Best newcomer
• Best research paper on social software within learning and teaching
• Best teacher blog
• Best undergraduate blog
• Best wiki use