Educating a Community

Last night, Greg Mortenson came to Trinity University to speak about his work in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the subject of his book Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. Today he came to our school to speak to our students.

One of the most thought-provoking ideas he shared was the African proverb, “Educate a boy, and you educate an individual. Educate a girl, and you educate a community.”

The students were very inspired by the Pennies for Peace project started by Mortenson’s daughter Amira, and the Peace Jam club is going to organize a Pennies for Peace drive starting next week.

First Day of School

Another school year is beginning and I’ve returned to The International School of the Americas.

I’m so happy to have the opportunity to share my new learning about web 2.0 technologies—and the exciting potential they offer us as readers, writers, thinkers, communicators, educators, and learners—with a community whose mission and vision and purpose I believe in.

I began my career here, teaching 9th- and 12th-grade English at ISA for eight years, and I’ve come back as the Internship and Service Learning Coordinator where I have the joyful job of helping students connect with service learning opportunities and navigate their career-exploration internship experiences.

Shift Happens @ ISA

This past week at our ISA Faculty Retreat, we watched and discussed the ubiquitous “Shift Happens” video. I was worried that everyone would have seen it already, but it turned out to be a great jumping-off point for our conversation about integrating Web 2.0 tools into our teaching and learning at ISA. Here’s the video just in case someone reading this hasn’t seen it yet, enjoy!

 

We also read and responded to “The Shift to 21st-Century Literacies” from the November 2007 issue of NCTE’s Council Chronicle. I’ve been using this article in my methods classes for pre-service English language arts and reading teachers, and I think it achieves a good balance of research, theory, and concrete examples.

I definitely recommend reading the article in its entirity, but the pull quotes will give you a good taste:

“As technology continues to evolve, always moving toward the more sophisticated, our literacy capacities must also grow more sophisticated.”
~Kylene Beers

“Because the technology is always changing, and because the tools are always changing, it’s a hugely challenging time to be a teacher.”
~Sara Kajder

“Out-of-school [and workplace] literacies are becoming more and more divergent from in-school literacies.”
~William Kist

“There’s a fallacy that kids aren’t reading and writing anymore.  They are, but they just are reading and writing differently than what we’ve traditionally done in schools.”
~David Bruce

Next week, we are planning to spend some time working with ISTE‘s new National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers as well as the ones for Students!