The major issues that teachers, parents, and students must confront in Literacy 2.0.
CHALLENGES + OPPURTUNITIES
Like all great things in life, the Literacy 2.0 ecosystem comes with challenges; But with challenges come exciting opportunities for growth. ​
Here are three ways that the ecosystem Literacy 2.0 can challenge us:
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How can we build the fearlessness within our students that we strive for in a literacy 2.0 ecosystem?
How can students develop better interpersonal skills while being asked to spend more time interacting online?
How can we best teach our students to be critical when analyzing information found online?
How can we best guide our students to become productive citizens who use social media as a professional tool, but discourage the powerful misconception of unobtainable perfection that society often portrays?
By providing exercises and simulated experiences, we transform our challenges into opportunities.
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Fearlessness is not always inherent. We will build this by encouraging that they find relevance within classroom content. We can start to do this by asking the students questions about their interests and getting to know what motivates them. Is there something we are missing about their passions in life that could shoot this student off into the IDEA stars? It's my plan to find out.
Once we help the students find relevance within the content, my plan is simple: To listen. I will listen to their personal curiosities, talents, interests, favorite subjects, etcetera, and then I will accommodate my lessons to include multiple methods of expression that pertain to the interests I hear about. This, along with their ability to make their own choices, will give students a feeling of relevance and motivation to succeed. With those feelings, we build confidence, and then inevitably, we build fearlessness.
With a Literacy 2.0 ecosystem, we will always give students the opportunity to become literate in more ways than one. Most of the projects I will assign will have a real-world, face-to-face aspect to them. No matter what the online project, we develop interpersonal skills simultaneously.
One example would be to launch a student-run blog/vlog that can be researched for, written, and filmed in the library media center. Another example would be to group the students by favorite book genres. Those students are then asked to conceptualize a "genrefied" blog. We can also come together face-to-face to peer-edit the blogs. This gives students more chance to connect.
To move our students forward in becoming critical analyzers of online information, there are several exercises we could use as a tool.
One would be to simulate writing a breaking news story that will go to press in one hour. Together, we must quickly determine which sources are real, which are fabricated, and which are needed to support a strong story.
We could also play 'Fake News Bingo' or 'Fake It Til You Make It,' which is a game show to see who is quickest at identifying qualities that allude to fabricated information.
Being a young person on social media, students are bombarded by inadvertent advertisements in their daily lives. Often they depict personas that are able to maintain and unattainable level of perfection. It is the new wave of advertising. By focusing for a lesson on defining "perfect" online personas as simply the new wave of advertising, we can help our students have a healthy mentality as they navigate the social media realm.
As a lesson in the library, I can ask questions that students don't ask themselves such as, "What is this person selling here? Is it a product? Is it a certain lifestyle? Is this reality? What challenges do you think this person has when they maintain their persona? While it is healthy to set goals, should we measure our own success and value based off an advertisement?"
Another example of an exercise would be to give the students a piece of paper with two blank squares. In one square, ask the students to draw a perfect online persona similar to what they see every day. In the second square, draw the harsh reality or an imagined price of depicting perfection. These can be exaggerated and cartoony or they can be realistic and serious. An example might be a person sweating from hiking up a mountain on a weekday while everyone else is at work. The second box might show them in front of a picture of a mountaintop view in their office cubicle, spritzing themselves with water while holding up their cellphone.
We can then come together to critically discuss what we are meant to believe on social media, why this is type of advertisement is the new norm, and why it is important to be able to identify these influential advertisements. Students can break the stigma that they need to live up to unrealistic expectations, and gain perspective and confidence in their own strengths and the value they can bring to the real world.