Elevene leser for lite engelsk. De trenger mengdelesing, og de trenger å utvikle teknikker for å variere lesemåter etter formål og teksttype.

Brøyn, s. 72 i Bedre Skole

På 10. trinn i år har jeg opprettet en Nyhetsgruppe på Facebook hvor jeg hver uke legger ut en artikkel som elevene skal diskutere på veggen. Elevene er forsiktig positive til at jeg som lærer beveger meg inn på deres enemerker, men diskusjonene ser allikevel ut til å utfolde seg ufortrødent og uten min direkte inntreden utover deling av artiklene.

Etter tre uker gjør jeg meg følgende tanker:

• elevene leser engelskspråklige artikler med ulike vanskelighetsgrader
• elevene må forholde seg til nyhetsbildet i den engelskspråklige verden
• elevene må uttrykke meninger og inntrykk innenfor ulike temaer
• elevene må benytte seg av en argumenterende form på engelsk

Med Brøyns artikkel i bakhodet tenker jeg at dette i alle fall er en supplerende metode å benytte for å få opp lesefrekvensen blant elevene utenfor klasserommet. Det betyr allikevel ikke at en skal slutte med lesing og opplæring av lesestrategier i klasserommet – tvert derimot – men en arena som Facebook gir muligheten for å praktisere disse ferdighetene i et autentisk miljø.

Førsteamanuensis Glenn Ole Hellekjær har laget en liste med ord som norske elever bør kunne etter endt videregående:

Prøve selv med Quizlet.

Her følger lenke til eksamensmappa i digital kompetanse. Jeg har valgt å lage en digital utgave, en enkel nettside med forside, arbeidsmappe og refleksjonstekst. Sistnevnte ligger også som PDF til nedlastning på nettsiden.

Digital kompetanse. Førsteamanuensis Ingrid Helleve stiller gode spørsmål i Aftenposten nylig om hvorvidt det er læreren eller datamaskinen som skal styre klasserommet. Det instrumentelle feilgrepet med fokus på å fylle klasserom med elevpcer og interaktive tavler har fått forrang fremfor å inkludere lærerne og øke deres digitale kompetanse. Dette fordrer at lærerne utviser endringsvillighet og en åpen og kritisk holdning til den iboende læringseffekten som faktisk eksisterer i digitale verktøy og nettbasert læring.

Lærende sosiale nettverk. Nettsamfunnet Del og Bruk passerte nylig 5000 medlemmer (lærere, elever, lærerstudenter, forskere – og nå også utdanningsministeren (!)) og er et digitalt bevis på hvordan lærere ønsker å utveksle og diskutere gode døme på digitale undervisningsopplegg. Ovenfra-og-ned-holdningen er byttet ut med en nedenfra-og-opp-holdning hvor endringen kommer fra den engasjerte og nysgjerrige lærer. At læreren er den fremste premissleverandøren for god læring er opplagt.

Skolen er under press. “Vi kan bare google det,” sier elevene. På tross av informasjonsflommen så kreves det fortsatt lærere som kan formidle og hjelpe elevene i å øke både sin kritiske digitale såvel som analoge kompetanse. Læreren trenger ikke beherske ethvert nytt presentasjonsverktøy som lanseres, men må inneha den profesjonalitet og kritiske dømmekraft til å utvikle samt vurdere elevenes digitale ferdigheter. Kombinert med kreativ innovasjon ved å skape digitalt innhold, søke nye perspektiver gjennom sosiale medier på tvers av landegrenser kan den reflekterte lærer utgjøre en viktig forskjell for elevene som vil ha stor betydning i en spennende fremtid på nett og i RL.

Klipp-og-lim. Ferdigheter innen opphavsrett, kildekrikk, personvern, nettkultur og netikette er avgjørende for at elever, som tenker at ‘all tilgjengelig informasjon på nett er mitt til å bruke’, skal kunne oppøve en kritisk sans og evne til å operere selvstendig og med andre i sin kunnskapstilegnelse. Oppgavedesign, undervisning og vurderingspraksis krever nytenkning. Hvis eleven synes skolen er kjedelig er det kanskje lærerens problem og utfordring?

Den nysgjerrige lærer. Helleve fremhever det faktum at lærerne som selv skal utføre undervisningen i liten grad blir tatt med i debatten. Jeg er av den oppfatning av at lærerne selv må ta initiativet til å øke sin digitaldidaktiske kompetanse. Ved å ta i bruk med kritisk blikk blogger, sosiale medier, samskrivingsverktøy og delingsnettverk på nett utvider læreren sin digitale kompetanse. Allikevel er det presserende å huske at digital kompetanse samtidig handler om lærerens evne til å kritisk vurdere når elevene ikke trenger å benytte pcen, men å samhandle ansikt til ansikt. Det skjer faktisk god læring da også.

Jeg har vært to dager på NKUL denne uka, og fått med meg to interessante presentasjoner blant ellers mye kjent. Det er allikevel påfallende at de fleste sesjoner faller i kategorien en-til-mange kommunikasjon og ikke en mer dialogisk form som seg hør og bør kanskje på en IKT-konferranse? Det mest spennende med NKUL er menneskene en treffer der, menneskene bak Twitterprofiler og aktive brukere på Del&Bruk – og ikke minst den kommunikasjonen som skjer mellom presentasjoner og sesjoner i analog form og den digitale varianten på nett under parallellsesjoner med eksempelvis samskriving i Etherpad hvor en finner referat fra de fleste sesjonene.

Det mest interessante innlegget synes jeg Øyvind Solstad hadde, tidligere NRK-medarbeider i NRKBeta, og nå kommunikasjonsrådgiver i privat næringsliv. En ting var budskapet hans om de sosiale medier og hastigheten utviklingen kommer med, men selve presentasjonsformen hans var minst like spennende. Solstad bruker nesten kun visuelle hjelpemidler i form av bilder og illustrasjoner som utvider hans fortellinger og forklaringer – og det er nettopp i samspillet mellom det narrative og det visuelle at læring oppstår. Gjennom tvitring og tips fra Solstad på hans egen blogg kom jeg over masterstudent Nina Lysbakkens eminente og visuelle film om hennes masterprosjekt “Visuell læring”. Her er det mange spennende tanker om fremtidens skole og ikke minst hva læring bør og kan være.

Visuell læring from Nina Lysbakken on Vimeo.

Dette må jo være en variant av tilpasset opplæring?
Hva tenker dere?

(Denne posten er dobbeltpostet fra Masterbloggen min.)

Italian officer reading his daily newspaper on a vaporetto in the laguna of Venice.

With the abundance of information overflowing the web and our daily digital lives it is a gust of fresh air when you come across something simple and clever as Daily paper.li which generates a daily newspaper based upon your Twitterstream (or Facebookstream).

Scanning and skimming the web for information is an important skill, and should be taught as a reading skill. I am trying to find ways of teaching about social bookmarking, social notetaking, RSS-feeds and general digital organisation, but I’m struggling to find effective ways. I think services like paper.li will be one of many ways of generating relevant content in the sea of information created.

The Internet can be a complex and spiderweb-like place to find relevant and reliable information.

Searching for information becomes increasingly an omnipresent activity for students and teachers alike. But how much do we actually know about how search functions? When I asked my students about what search engines they use they all laughed a bit and said “Google, of course…” They did know about other search engines like Kvasir, Bing and Yahoo, but they didn’t use them as Google “is better”. They added that sometimes they go directly to Wikipedia for search as well. A colleague of mine said that in his experience only 1/10 of students use the Internet for other things than consuming information. Considering this, isn’t search a skill on par with a reading strategy?

Read more here.

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas Carr

Lego bricks invite to creating connections between separated entities.

This past week has given me lots of food for thought. The last week of lectures and seminars has included ethical dilemmas, text analysis, narrative analysis methods, hypertextual storytelling, efferent and aesthetic reading strategies, assessment practices along with inspiring, challenging and difficult discussions. A dilemma materializes during a week like this. A sense of meaningful learning, ideas emerging and connections made. However, the sneaking feeling of frustration lurks behind. How can I make sense of it all? How can I use this to improve my teaching? How am I able to pursue all the fascinating roads of essay topics? I might share the frustration of Nicholas Carr in his essay, but I think I see a sense in the chaotic, interrupted nature of the avalanche of information flows which are abundant both in an analogue and a digital form.

I am trying to find a connection, and slowly I think I am reaching new insights and new knowledge. I have lots of ideas for this blogpost, but I think I will focus on George Siemens’ theories of connectivism. Drawing upon past theories of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism he presents an interesting theory for the digital age. In my opinion I find that even though we have all this technology available, we also have a nauseating array of possibilities to work together as individuals. Social media and networks are nothing without the people using it.

I realise that there are so many connections to be made between the various media and messages sent and received on both a connotational and denotational level. One of the most important realisations is that we act more as bridges than stand alone ramparts. With all our shortcomings and insufficiencies we need each other, and by helping, challenging, questioning, reasoning and interact together we are able to experience fulfillment and acquisition of new knowledge and skills.

Siemens lists significant trends in learning:

• Many learners will move into a variety of different, possible unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime.
• Technology is altering (rewriting) our brains.
• The organization and the individual are both learning organisms.
• Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed).

From this I deduce the following insights:

• Learning happens all the time – both formally and informally.
• Learning is a human condition.
• Technology and especially social media and networks known as web 3.0. act as valuable tools for our learning.

Knowledge is no longer (has it ever been?) acquired linearly. Knowledge comes as a result of experience (objectivism), thinking (pragmatism) and reflection (interpretivism) - and the ability to synthesize and recognize connections and patterns is a valuable skill. (Siemens, p.2). In connectivism chaos plays an important role. Nigel Calder’s definition of chaos as ‘a cryptic form of order’ seems appropriate, but chaos needs learning strategies, didactical leadership and an ability to synthezise, deduce, cooperate as well as structering and organizing information flows. Barabasi states that “nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world” (2002, p. 106 cited in Simens’ article), and the phrase pheromone trails, or digital pheromones (excellent podcast by Rodd Lucier exploring the idea) tantalizes me. The biological act of animal interaction in ant population transferred to the digital age, where we engage in multiple interactional transfers online free from geographical boundries is an uplifting one. What might appear as a meaningless utterance on Twitter might play a bigger role in another conversation and new insights might be found. We act as bridges for each other.

Ideally we can transfer the connectivity theories to the classroom. We tend to compartmentalize our knowledge in school in subjects, although we attempt to work cross-curricularly. However, new emerging technologies based upon semantic intelligence call for more of a universal transferral competence which needs to be part of a digital competence.

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

George Siemens

Actionable knowledge might be a useful term here to make sense of the chaos (sic). The learner needs to act and find what Ken Robinson calls The Element (a good read) – a place where the learner is able to use his/hers abilities to the fullest and be in a state of flow and thus make connections within networks of learning. Hopefully, I myself, am on the way to sort some ideas, and make some new and make a connection. Are you?

Nevertheless, I want to use Van Leeuwen’s concepts of functional importance and elaboration and expansion. However, it is challenging to distinguish the different modalities’ functional importance and relational role in the montagé as Løvland points out.

There are three modalities in the text: the first is text, Whitman poem, and the second is my two photos, while the third is my vote.

• textual
• visual
• auditatative

Extensions and depth

A given item of information can either elaborate or extend the information presented in other items of information. In the case of elaboration, it repeats or restates information for purposes of clarification. In the case of extension, it adds new information, linking it to the existing information in a particular way – for example, temporarily, or logically.

(van Leuwen, p. 222 Introducing Social Semiotics)

My choice on how I choose to use the poem leads to the emergence of a greater elaboration than an expansion. The reason for this is that the selection of photographs are committed to support the text to a larger extent than expand the meaning of the text. Examples are “free flight into the word less” and an open sky of the two stone pillars, or “night, sleep, death and light” in the darkness. Information links that arise here are attempts at expanding the text’s content. Regardless of this I find that the photos have functional gravity as they constitute the background of the entire montagé and are especially prominent. The interaction between the first photo and the second creates a transition between the light and the dark. I have deliberately sought a simple, minimalist expression during the course of working with this poetry montagé – from the white font on black background in the beginning to black text on gray background in the poem.

To the extent that the montagé has an expanding function can be related to the themes of the poem itself as well as my own interpretation of the poem as expressas as ideas of freedom quest, the static life and in death. But I do encounter a problem in my reflection on the multimodal aspect of the text as I then move towards my own interpretation of the poem. Naturally, this might perhaps be an inevitable consequence when one works with poetry?

Rhythm, tempo and layout

Rhythm provides cohesion in texts and communicative events that unfold over time.

(van Leuwen, p. 181 Introducing Social Semiotics)

In keeping with my intention to create a minimalist and easy installation I wanted to have peaceful transitions and effects, and get a sense of “airy” transitions rather than flashy gestures and effects. To highlight the text I wanted to read the poem after feedback from fellow students during the performance that it might establish more cohesion. I think this works well, but I could probably have worked longer with synchronity and tempo. As the montagé appears now the text is all too briefly on the screen before it disappears. This in turn led to me reading fairly quickly to keep up, but it works fine. I have also tried to have a conscious awareness of my own voice and tempo. I read quickly in some places (both as a consequence of the rapid rate, but also to create variation), as I read slowly and waiting for the last verse to just expand the text’s content.

When it comes to layout, I have deliberately chosen white text/black background or vice versa in order to focus on the text, while I wanted a simple and effective reading path by placing the different stanzas at various locations on the screen. The reading path follows the conventional direction in the West – from top-left corner to the right and back down. I mentioned in my presentation that I had thought of LP sleeve cover aesthetics, and also think that my use of black and white image and small text can support this inspiring association. U2′s Joshua Tree was mentioned, and Anton Corbijn photo cover art.

Final reflection

Working on a poetry montagé was useful in the sense that it creates some reflective thoughts about digital didactics in the work of multimodal texts that go beyond the technicalities. Terms such as expansion and elaboration, I find difficult because they do blend easily, while the functional weight can be easier to relate to. Cohesion between the different modal components, is probably equally open to subjective interpretation of the poem, but to be conscious about one chooses to extend or deepen when a worker (or assess student’s work) is certainly useful and interesting.

I used Mac’s Keynote and iMovie when I made my poetry montagé, but other presentation tools can easily be used. Powerpoint or Open Office are good choices.

How do you engage students to discover good reads, use digital tools, talk in front of their peers AND teach them some Japanese phrases? All in one day?

Today I had a very good day as a teacher. I had four lessons of English as I had to make up for two lessons I lost to P.E. last week, and I had planned to challenge the students with a literary task. As we are reading Lord of the Flies at the moment, and some students love it while others find it a bit tedious, I decided I wanted to take some of that criticism and frustration on board and created a literary challenge for the students where they had to produce a stunt presentation under time pressure.

Stunt Presentation
Every student had two lessons to prepare a stunt presentation on one of their favorite reads. They could choose the way they wanted to present it. Here are some ideas I gave them:

a reading
a glog
a blog entry
a powerpoint
a poster
a dramatization
a stand-up
a a photo story
a drawing
a diorama
a poem
a painting
a multimedia presentation
a song

After one and half hour of intense work among most of my students (some struggled with their creative inspiration) they were ready to present. Some students had made ordinary posters (among them Wolf Brother, while other had made Google Presentations (for easy sharing and swift transitions) or glogs. I have permission to display this one for instance on Before I die. One student even made a quiz using Google Forms. She had chosen the Harry Potter-series and explained them briefly before she went on to engage her fellow students in an interactive quiz on the Smartboard. Very popular indeed!

Learning Outcome
In terms of language all students got to use their oral skills in their presentation, but also their written English in presentations, posters, glogs or other products presented. They also had to use literary terminology when they had to convey to their fellow students why they liked their book of choice, and they also used their digital competence.

Students expressed afterwards that they enjoyed the four lessons as it was creative, fun and they learned about 20 other books they either hadn’t or heard about before the presentations.

One of the students presented a glog on the Young Warrior-series where the student taught students some Japanese phrases and then a glog on 13 reasons why which really challenged the students as the topic of the book is suicide. What is appropriate literature for teenagers? Luckily I have planned a topic later this semester on Teen Literature – that can get interesting.