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S⁵: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System

I just finished reading Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II: Do They Really Think Differently?, a follow-up to the article that I mentioned the other day. While I don’t agree with everything he says, Mr. Prensky makes some interesting arguments about the nature of student learning. Whether you agree with him or not, he has an interesting perspective.

I was looking through my Bloglines and came across a link in Seb Paquet’s del.icio.us bookmarks. It was a link to the Howtoons site. I haven’t had a great deal of time to check it out, but it looks pretty cool. From the main page:

Howtoons are one-page cartoons showing 5-to-15 year-old kids “How To” build things. Each illustrated episode is a stand-alone fun adventure accessible to all, including the pre-literate. Our Howtoons are designed to encourage children to be active participants in discovering the world through Play-that-Matters — fun, creative, and inventive — and to rely a lot less on mass-consumable entertainment.

I think this would be great to get students to do some independent investigative work in the sciences. I can see some of my students using this site.

I was just reading Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants by Marc Prensky and it got me to thinking a bit about some of my favourite old Warner Bros. cartoons. In particular, it made me think of Wile E. Coyote sitting in a pile of rubble with a huge boulder plummeting towards him. I can picture him huddling under the tiny umbrella (that he produces from places unknown), as though that will somehow protect him from what is coming.

At times, education feels the same way. I find that we often hold out hope that things will go back to the way they were a few years ago, huddling under the little umbrella of past experience. We feel that we need to make the kids fit into the model of what we are most comfortable doing. If we don’t look out from under the umbrella, we can’t see that change may be headed our way. If we can’t see change (boulder) coming, it won’t happen, right?

Unfortunately, the boulder always seems to obliterate the poor coyote. I used to find myself wondering, “Why doesn’t he just get out of the way? Doesn’t he realize that the umbrella really won’t do him any good?” After reading this article, I start to see why he doesn’t get out of the way – it’s because that’s the only way he knows.

It is very difficult to change our ways and to see the possibility that there is another way of doing things. For my own practice, and for my children’s education, I hope that we can find new ways to avoid that boulder.

While these Journal Links are aimed mainly at teachers of English as a second language, there are still resources here for other language teachers. As an FSL/Science teacher, I can certainly see the possibility of adapting these resources for my own classroom use. In particular, I was interested in articles on Blog Assisted Language Learning (BALL) and Facilitating the acquisition of science concepts in L2. The latter would have been especially useful in the FSL course that I took this past summer.