DVD Commentaries and Oral Literacy

I'm feeling sick today as a great wave of pestilence sweeps across our merry school. I would have taken a sick day off last week, but you know how it is ... programming requirements - gotta get to meetings, a sports / dance carnival. Hey grin and bear it baby! And that was before we all swagged it out by a campfire overnight in another school's grounds. Sometimes, you know, even when we're feeling down - living and working out in The APY Lands has its real upsides.

Anyway feeling poorly as I was this morning I lingered over that coffee and was casting my eyes through The Weekend Australian when I came across an article about alternative homebrewed DVD commentaries that appeared in Lawrie Zion's DVD Letterbox column on the 9th of September, 2006. In the article (see below) Zion refers to MMM Commentaries, an Aussie site. It occured to me what an excellent opportunity this could provide for an alternative literacy outlet - students creating their own commentary of a movie (perhaps based on their shared class reading of a text) or providing a commentary to any genre movie / documentary or whatever based on their study (for example they could take on the role of 'scholar' and explain some technical detail - or tell you why its wrong). It would certainly provide a refreshing alternative to the traditional 'my book report' format. And I think in my context, it would give students who are essentially ESL / EFL, an opportunity to construct a higher order text when they don't (mostly) have the necessary independent reading and writing skills to construct an equivalent written text. More information on Alternative DVD commentaries can be found here in a 2002 article and of course here, on Wikipedia.

Be the sound of a tech savy teacher (there is no sound)

Graham Wegener's Teaching Generation Z blog reflects on The Blue Skunk Blog's perspective on Hiring a tech savvy teacher. In particular I was taken with the question:

How should a tech-savvy teacher create lesson plans? What is the mix of off-the-shelf apps, teacher-created projects/apps and traditional media (books etc.)? I've always thought the first sign of a technologically literate teacher is one who knows when to use technology and when not to use technology. A good teacher will use a variety of instructional strategies depending on the needs of the individual learner and the skill to be mastered.

It was just earlier today that I was faced with the imortance of this point; knowing when to use technology. Namely that tech savvy teaching doesn't just mean that you use computers. At the end of the day computers / the internet can be a potentially wide-band medium for us to convey our message with (just as a pen and paper can be narrow band). I think that potentially, the sound of a tech-savy teacher is going to be the sound of someone making the links between formal literacy lessons, various classroom discussions, pen and paper / chalk and talk learning activities. All of these things need to come along (and sometimes it may seem like these things come kicking and screaming) when one enters the tech-savy ICT zone.

I think that all too often we see teachers entering the computer room as if that room were a place apart, another realm on the far side of a great divide. And routinely we see lessons undertaken as if all that had been planned and learned in the past was now, somehow, irrelevant (i.e. that's old technology). It's not any great point, but it has to be recognised that ICT is everywhere - it isn't a mode in other words like old word processing programs used to operate (1st I'm in type mode, then I'm in preview mode, now I'm in print mode after I've been in spelling mode). ICT is essentially modeless - or it should be - and we should recognise that, ideally, technology is not a divide in our lives, rather it is everywhere. I'm sure that a lot of teachers get put off the idea of teaching ICT / or teaching in a tech savy manner because they do not realise this very point. And so they still go to the computer room and think 'computer mode'.