Week+9

Literacy is Not Enough - Ian Jukes

This article highlights five main fluencies which students need to have in order to be successful, they are:

 Schools and teachers need to adapt to this reality and shape the skills necessary for students to become successful learners.
 * 1) ** Solution ** – getting students involved in the problem solving and evaluating it
 * 2) ** Information ** – using metacognitive skills
 * 3) ** Creativity ** – using images and designs to create meaning
 * 4) ** Media ** – decoding the significance in digital media to recognize what is biased and valid
 * 5) ** Collaboration ** – using a virtual environment for team work

The main thrust of this article seems to be that technology is necessary to engage our students' learning potential, and that current educational practices seem to limit different kinds of fluency, especially creative fluency. By embracing the engaging world of technology we are playing to our students mode and setting spark to their creative potential.

We discussed **Photoshop** today as well...

Bruce let us know that Photoshop Elements is useful for a number of uses: e.g. to crop and resize images, insert a layer from another photo, decrease the contrast to use the image as a background, place a frame around an image to make it look more stylish, produce a slideshow of a series of images, remove details from an image, produce a title page, and sort numerous images by theme and date. These functions would help not only the student, but the teacher to organize and present information. Using photoshop could be a very interesting way to manipulate certain images for discussion or instructional motivation.


 * Wordle**... students can make amazing word clouds to illustrate their ideas... here's an example: