Digital Literacy’s

I found this article to be very forward thinking and aligned with the qualities of UDL (Universal Design for Learning). The article details a veteran teacher who had for years based her instruction on having her students analyze and create traditional literature pieces, to now focusing on digital media and production. Her goals were to

- Allow students to build their own understandings.

- Allow students to collaborate in meaningful ways.

- Include audiences and consequences.

- Encourage critical and creative through a high degree of rigor.

I feel that this article expressed organized way of showing what a lot of teachers want to do as well as what a lot of teachers are doing. The section of the article that discussed encouraging critical and creative thinking through a high degree of rigor, made me think of my own class. Latter on this year I will be attempting to have my students work in groups to formulate their own documentary film on what they learned this year. They have already done a brief digital video entitled “ELA-TV” where they analyzed the short story “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros.

My students were fairly critical with them selves and me and thought it was a little cheesy and not as meaningful as it could have been. However the tech teacher and I thought that it was a good start to more digital inquiry in the future. Being that we are both looping with these students next year we have decided to make two larger goals one being digital citizenship where we attempt to teach our students how to use the web responsibly, and two introduce at least one new application, software, etc. etc. each month.

The section that discussed how she allowed students to collaborate in meaningful ways included a student setting up a Pod-cast that discussed a personal experience in her life. I recall going to a school last year that had formulated an after school program that provided students with opportunities to tell their stories on the radio called “Radio Rookies” . In some ways it was suppose to be modeled after the NPR show “This American Life”. The program is looking to begin to create more Pod-casts and making Radio Rookies accessible to a larger audience. Similar to what they discussed in the article the process is meant to be emotionally supportive as well as technologically stimulating.