critical literacy

When I recently was writing about the new national curriculum in History, I came across a rather interesting disagreement with regards to indigenous history in the media, where totally opposing views were equally portrayed. Historians like Keith Windschuttle were claiming a less cruel and intent behaviour towards the indigenous population in the past, backing up his arguments with various details and data and another acclaimed historian, Robert Manne who was opposing Windschuttle’s views with equally researched material to mention one such public disagreement. These diverse and opposing interpretations of Australian history mainstreamed through media and the web can be both confusing and uncomfortable, and it brings me to the discussion we had this week about the importance of critical literacy when dealing with information on the net and how difficult it sometimes can be to make a judgement on the facts without substantial background knowledge. Naturally, few primary school children will drag through any of these historians' research papers or articles, but it highlights an issue. Moving away from the obvious misleading hoax on the web, we can still get such diverse information presented as facts, from reputable authors, from reputable publications or web pages. You clearly have to monitor, prepare the students, and do the homework before asking students to do their research on the web.

digital story telling and voki's

After having played around with Movie Maker for the first time in my life, I have realised that it isn't quite as hard as I first imagined. If I can do it, I am sure any upper primary school student can do it too. It would be an engaging way to tell a story, requiring a similar thought process to writing a story. It might engage the student who may not see literacy as their strongest side, teaching them the ideas behind a text and for them to express it in the shape of the digital story. It is time consuming at first though and to have a whole class fiddle around with it would require extensive access to computers. Of course you could divide the work up in teams where certain students do certain jobs, filming, interviewing and putting it together, where each students could work in the areas that suits them.

Creating voki's can also be quite fun and at times useful with the limitations of photographing students in schools today. It is quite a slow process to make one and might be best left as a carrot once other work has been completed. It could be incorporated in arts and would make a great presentation or assembly item.

txtspk

I think there is enough exposure to text or net speak in the world around us to not have to spend an abundance of time on teaching it in the classroom. Before we can start to change and personalise our language and create text or net speak in an efficient and poignant way, we need to master our written and spoken language.

For the weaker literacy students, would text speak really be a detriment to learning our correct conventions? or could it perhaps be the entry point to learning more?

At the same time, by allowing text speak to be flowing into our classrooms without control we may run the risk of spending more time than necessary on the subject. After all, at the end of the day, we want our students to be comfortable and confident in using the correct conventions of our language in order to lead a fulfilling life, not being limited to making friends through the net or sms.

It is a very current subject that would appeal to most young adolescents (would they not at least have to have a mobile?), more as an entertaining and engaging issue than a need to actually learn how to master it. When it creeps into an area where it does not belong, it is important to make the students aware of the audience and perhaps give opportunities to express their wishes to use text speak in other discussions.

Get a Voki now!