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Business as Usual in a Media-Rich, Socially-Engaged School
by Elizabeth Helfant

Angela Maiers site has been one of my favorites for some time now. She frequently discusses the habitudes that students need to have in order to be successful in life and she insists that we, as teachers, must be CLOs (Chief Learning Officers) of our classrooms. Her Habitudes were recently added to Change This’s list of manifestos.

Habitudes in the Classroom – Teaching the Habits and Attitudes Our Students Need in the 21st Century

It’s the 10th slide that should be an imperative for all teachers. “We must be the learner that we wish our students to become.” Given that the statement comes at the end of the manifesto, it implicitly embodies the concept of modernized learning as described in the manifesto and especially on the previous slide:

Simply put, in our world, there is only one constant: Change. And that’s why the adaptable

•        Respond favorably to change

•        Handle complexity

•        Critically and creatively solve problems

•        Be willing to take risks

Persistent adaptability allows students to respond rather than react, reflect rather than remember, and evolve rather than atrophy.

I have encouraged teachers at my school to be CLOs of their classroom and to model modernized learning and embrace it in their classroom. In order to do that, they have to understand the skills students today need and they have to identify and use the tools (and the tools are constantly changing and evolving) that are available to them. They have to engage in networked learning and they have to update their definition of literacy. As a faculty we talk more about literacy, skills, and assessment than ever before, often generating more questions than answers and that’s a good thing. Leading with questions is an essential element in learning. First ask good questions, then know how to find the answers, bonus points for using a network to get answers or refine ideas. Its what we want our students to do so it is what we should be doing. The CLOs at my school are doing just that. Many twitter, many participate in learning nings around their discipline, many collaborate with others on google docs, all used  wikis to participate in implementing the new strategic plan, many follow blogs with google reader, and some, including our hear of Upper School,  maintain their own blog.

The most recent post on English teacher Lynn Mittler’s blog addressed her understanding of changes to literacy and the response needed in the classroom and was worthy of inclusion rather than just linking. In her post  The Visual Literacy Imperative ,  Lynn wrote:

I’m not going to lie, I like Youtube. When my brain is fried, but I’m not quite ready to go to bed, there is nothing better that some video of a cat chasing a flashlight into a wall or a dog spinning around imitating the sound of the blender. Truly the world is a better place. With the arrival of the video function on the iPod Nano and the rise in popularity of the Flip camera, I can only hope that there will be more videos of squirrels drunk on fermented pumpkins.

But the proliferation of video has me keenly interested in how this affects our students’ view of the world. We already knew they demand more stimulation of their senses than previous generations, that they see the world in splashes of color and now clearly they see it constantly in motion. As an English teacher, how do I continue to engage learners with what must seem the most mundane of media: the printed word? Maybe even more importantly, how do I help these students understand the millions of images they are being bombarded with hourly?

First of all, I think we have to acknowledge that it is here to stay. Whether it is a simple project making a video of a scene from Shakespeare or shooting a video for the SAT Vocab contest, this is something these students like to do and it sticks in their brains. But now it is also incumbent upon us to help them understand what they are seeing. The iPod Nano comes with video effects from Thermal to Sepia to Motion Blur. In my mind, there is no difference between determining the result of an effect applied to a video and understanding the goal of an author when using a specific tone in his work. While they think it is easier to determine this visually, it is simply because they have more practice and exposure to visual media rather that words on a page. If they read as much as they watched television, surfed the net and went to movies, we would have rhetorical geniuses.

There is no doubt that we feel the pressure to add more and more to our classes everyday, and believe it or not, I am now advocating one more addition. We need to teach students visual literacy. To help them understand how they are being manipulated by images, but also how they can take control of those images to tell their own stories. Just as Mike Masnik wrote on Techdirt that technology has not been the end to writing, but has bolstered it, video will not be the end to books. Students will always need some place to look for ideas whether it is to react to them or mimic them. Books will thrive hand in hand with the visual age: It is our job to help students see that this is truly a perfect match.

Lynn reflected on Visual and Media Literacy in her post. She accurately acknowledges the need to add it to the curriculum and, if you visited her class, you would see that she does so. In fact, you’d notice that many teachers have gotten more aware and more intentional in utilizing media and in teaching responsible use and filtering mechanisms to students. It is important to evaluate information in all formats and increasingly we are using what we call the TOECAP model to evaluate visual and textual information. Students must be advised to make sure that information of all types is:

Trustworthy
Objective
(have) Enough information
Current
Accurate
(have) the appropriate Purpose

By definition a toecap is “A reinforced covering of leather or metal for the toe of a shoe or boot” and is often protective in nature. Our TOECAP process is our protection against misinformation.

While accepting the use of multimedia information and getting intentional about its application and the set of skills students need to really understand, manipulate and evaluate it, there is also a movement to the creative use and inclusion of social media tools. When you access multimedia on the web, you can’t help but be drawn into the social, networked aspect of it. Students use multimedia outside of school with apparent ease but not necessarily with wisdom. When we take advantage of social media/networking  tools in the classroom, we can engage students and take a moment to teach responsible and appropriate interaction on the web, to teach networking and digital citizenship. However, teachers can only do that if they continue to operate as CLOs and use the tools themselves. As a result of their personal use, many of my teachers have found classroom uses. Below is a list of activities you would have seen in classes this past week:

• World History II classes played Karl FIsch ‘s updated Did You Know video was part of class. Students watched and then compared today’s knowledge Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. They were then asked to continue the discussion on the class Ning.

• The Cold War Elective spent time creating a facebook for cold war personalities. They began to interact and set up profiles in for a variety of important cold war personalities. In October this class will be doing another role play activity as they will twitter the Cuban Missile Crisis in real time. 
• A 9th grade English teacher and his class twitter updates, tips, and extra credit questions.
• A sophomore English class used Edmodo to allow Holden Caulfield and his friends to twitter. 
• Chemistry classes began following up on the consumerism integrated unit that started the year. Students are researching an element and then trying to brand it and sell it. They are annotating their research with diigo, building their brand on a wiki, and will ultimately create a visual add using tools of their choice. When finished, a google form will be used to vote for the “best” element.
  
• In geometry students used geogebra to create their own coat of arms form their initials and some mathematical transformation. The framing of the coat of arms project included a discussion of ways to express your identity and how a profile is also a way of creating a digital coat of arms. They also responded to a post on social media , computer, and iPhone use on the class blog. Their responses are interesting. Next week they will use their cell phones to post images of angles in life to a flickr account as part of a lesson on geometry vocabulary.
•  History classes are using diigo to annotate current events that relate to topics they are studying in the classroom. This is part of a school wide goal to utilize nonfiction more in an effort to demonstrate relevance and to increase our discussions of media bias and perspective in journalism and blogging. One teacher noted that “they are actually referring to articles during class making diigo the best tool ever.”
• US History classes have used xTimelines for several years but have made a transition to dipity for our timelines because of the ease with which it handles multimedia. US history students are being assessed this year using an electronic portfolio that includes all their web 2.0 creation and their individual writings. Its an experiment in shifting assessment from testing to learning.
• All departments began to work on a 10 day pandemic plan in the event that we would need to close because of illness. Everyone agreed the work we gave students would have to be engaging  and differentiated for ability and interest if we wanted them to do it. It was rather amazing to listen to faculty throw out ideas for courses and the types of current media that they wanted to use so students might want to do the work. All courses are making use of youtube video, current event articles and DIigo, and WImba or DImDIm classrooms.  While far from complete, many are underway and are underscoring the ease with which technology can truly make learning anytime, anywhere.
• All English classes used Wordnik in vocabulary exercises. Students enjoy seeing the uses of the vocabulary words in news stories and on twitter.
  

Mitchel Resnick, director of the MIT Lifelong Kindergarten writes in his article Closing the Fluency Gap:

Even as people everywhere gain access to digital technologies, there is a real risk that only a small handful will be able to use the technologies fluently. In short: the “access gap”will shrink, but a serious “fluency gap” could remain.

His views are supported by Stanford’s Harold Rheingold who argues that the digital divide has not centered around digital access but around having the knowledge and skills to employ digital tools.

21st century media literacies from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Chief Learning Officers are charged with making sure the divide doesn’t fall between teachers and students. CLOs engage with the tools and develop the skills and literacies that maintain their fluency in learning so they can be the best “teacher” they can be for their students.  More than ever the Chinese proverb “Learning is like rowing upstream:  not to advance is to drop back” holds true.  The good news is that CLOs are a lot like the coxswain and their students are the crew. The forward progress is accomplished by the combined learning efforts of all.

Have you earned the status of Chief Learning Officer? If not, it’s time and its fun. Next blog post, we’ll look at the myriad of tools that CLOs and their team can use to row against the powerful current that is change.

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.