Digital Literacies - What Does #StopKONY Mean For Our Students
You’ve probably heard about the viral campaign to stop Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. The video has been watched approximately 40 million times since it’s release on Monday. If not it’s here:
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
This swept through our school today, all the pupils were talking about it, most had watched it. That’s 11-16 year olds watching a 30 minute documentary about an African war criminal in their own time. Quite unique!
I’m sure that getting celebrity tweeters such as Rihanna on board will have had a lot to do with the viral success of this with young people. It’s a fascinating insight into the power of social media, and celebrity to influence the hearts and minds of our young learners.
Something of a backlash has been taking place online today against the group behind the project, their accounts have been scrutinised and their methods criticised.
The guardian has a nice summary, and also an interesting video with London schoolchildren.
Ethan Zuckerman has a long but well reasoned think piece about the whole affair.
As I left school, I’d not seen the video and wasn’t quite sure of the whole story. But the pupils were already talking about taking action.
It’s taken me a couple of hours to digest many sides of the story, and argument. I’m still unsure as to whether we should encourage our students to show their voice for this cause, or caution them away from it.
I doubt our learners are spending so much time looking at this from all angles. This is a crucial digital literacy skill, and a golden opportunity for us all to engage with students about casting a skilled critical eye over everything they read, watch or hear.
One thing is clear, it’s a brave new connected world and we have significant challenges ahead of us to equip our students with the skills they’ll need to flourish in it. It’s also a world with the tools to do great good, our students can all have a louder voice than we ever imagined.
WCYDWT? Pinterest Style
Sometimes a couple of ideas come together to form a little flash of inspiration. I’ve had a Pinterest account for a while but not really used it personally or thought of using it in education. A blog post from Mark Warner got me thinking though. Pinterest is a social site that encourages users to create a virtual pinboard of images and videos taken from across the web.
I’ve been a great admirer of Dan Meyer’s efforts to drag Maths teaching into the 21st Century and the real world. He’s been campaigning with ingenuity against typical textbook Maths problems. Particularly their over abstraction and removal of any space for thinking creatively about problems and making links between the real world and the maths thats being taught.
Dan’s TedX Talk is essential viewing:
His latest post sums up a lot of these thoughts well:
Original image ripe for mathematical questioning and modeling.
Mathematical abstraction.
Textbook example cutting out the important process above.
Dan’s work in this area started with his What Can You Do With This? (WCYDWT) series. A photo or video provided on his blog for readers to suggest Mathematical teaching ideas, inspirations, questions. He’s more recently been churning out 3 Act Tasks. These start with a piece of media (normally video) ripe for mathematical abstraction and modeling and some expected lines of questioning from students (Act 1). Act 2 involves some carefully crafted questions and perhaps an additional layer of information to enable investigation. Act 3 provides a solution. Have a look through them, there’s some great stuff there.
So put these two bloggers ideas together and what do we have? A Pinterest board of Mathematical inspiration:
Pinterest Mathematics Inspiration
I hope this can be a great way to crowd source some rich mathematical resources. If we can build this into a library of visually arresting media surrounded by great questions and potential problems and solutions I’ll be delighted.
If you’d like a Pinterest invite then please let me know in the comments, equally if you’d like to be added as a contributor to the board then I’d be delighted to oblige.
Secondly, never make any comment about your work, about your employer, about teaching issues in general.
Jim Docherty, assistant secretary of the SSTA, getting it all wrong.
Please don’t listen to him. Speak your mind, share your ideas. And like I always tell my pupils, think before you post. Common sense not scare-mongering.
Which reminds me I have a policy to write for staff to include this. Does anyone have any good exemplars? I’d like to keep it simple as we did with our Learner’s AUP.
Source: BBC
Assistant Headteacher from Manchester, UK. This is a space for my thoughts on education, technology and more. Has for now taken over from my old blog at www.mrstucke.com
