Give and Take

Because we are about to launch into our action research about blogging soon, I've been thinking some more about sharing.  As Silvia Tolisano writes on her blog, we are investigating the benefits of blogging on three different levels, for the teacher, for the student and for the curriculum.  The idea behind this action research is that we are all giving of our knowledge and experience, our time, our lessons, our comments and reflections but we are all going to take something out of it as well that hopefully will make us better educators and learners.  We  are setting ourselves high expectations and we are hoping that when the expectations in our community of bloggers is high, that our students will live up to these expectations.  To get the full learning benefits of this process we will need to give as much as we take.

Today I went and tool at look at the National Council of Teachers of English website where there is a definition of 21st century literacies.  There it states that "literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of  particular groups.  As society and technology changes, so does literacy.  Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the 21st century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies." I think that 5 of the 6 literacies outlined  by NCTE are particularly relevant to our Quad Blogging action research with primary students:

• develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• create, critique, analyze and evaluate multi-media texts
• attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

With just 4 more weeks to go before we start, I'm exciting and counting the days!