Maybe it’s because I don’t feel old enough YET or because I
can’t quite grasp how young these kids really are. Sometimes, or more often than just sometimes,
I feel that the old-fashioned way of reading books and writing works much
better than the “new literacy” ways.
Although I know and understand that everyone learns differently and
especially different generations learn much differently, I just can’t quite
fully acknowledge the fact that these kids are much different than I am. Maybe I should take a couple of minutes
everyday to tell myself I’m old in order
for me to really realize that these kids need different learning strategies
that what I was offered when I was younger.
As an
educator, I realize that I need to respect the idea of “connected learning”
much seriously because it is true. I
know and believe that students learn and participate better when they learn
things in the context that is more familiar to them. So then, agreeably, the kids of this
generation will connect and participate better when they are being introduced
to lessons through various, creative means of communication, such as many possible
technological means or fast-paced, fun activities.
Passively
understanding due to a bit of a fear of technology replacing traditional means,
I had to take some time to fully accept the fact that I have to conform to the
new literacy educational strategies until I encountered the quote by Jenkins:
“It’s
not about technology replacing books; it’s about the informational affordances
and cultural practices which
have taken shape around the computer and other interactive technologies.”
The concepts and themes will stay the same. It’s just the way they will be transported
will be a little bit different. We are
to teach the concepts—big or small—,and it’s the students who will figure out a
way to apply those concepts to their lives or to their storage of
knowledge. So, what we can do is to find
the way our students learn the best and incorporate that into our
teaching/delivery.
Whether
they present their final draft in a traditional double-spaced, Times New Roman
font or they present theirs in an animated, moving paper filled with audio
sounds, graphic creatures, or what have you, it doesn’t matter because we are
to assess whether students understood certain concepts well enough to apply
them in their writings. Well, there will
be many other criteria on which we need to assess our students, but my point is
that we can overlook what may seem to be too innovative or funky to our own
generation because what is different between our generation and the students’
generation is just that “informational affordances and cultural practices which
have taken shape around the computer and other interactive technologies.”
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