Week 1 - Wordle

Spring Semester 2017 - EDIT 782/783 - Week 1

My Wordle

This week's requirement was to read several texts about literacy and to distill keywords into a "Wordle" word cloud. My Wordle looks like this:

The most prominently featured words in this word cloud are "digital", "literacy", "reading" and "writing". When I compiled my notes and keywords into this cloud, I was pleased to see that "digital" and "literacy" came up most prominently. I think these tow words lie at the core of what 21st Century students need. Modern literacy includes the ability to read and write, as in past generations, but differs in that it includes many more new forms of fluency. Teachers often complain that their students do not read. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Students today are reading an enormous amount, but in ways that differ from their parents and grandparents. Students may learn from what they read in their assigned novels and textbooks, but they take in an exponentially larger amount of information through their social media feeds and smartphone media apps. These streams of information are digital, and often nonlinear. Whether teachers like it or not, students are soaking up immense amounts of content through podcasts, vines, photos, songs, snapchats, videos, webcomics, memes, blog posts, Instagram images, etc. Teachers who want to prepare their students for the real-world forms of information they will encounter when they leave school, must find a way to incorporate these media into their learning. This has the dual benefit of meeting students in digital "reading" environments that they're used to while mirroring types of content they're likely to find in the "real world".