For teachers for whom nerd isn't their first language-Step One: Define

One of the blogs I read regularly is from 21st Century Fluency. It is a collection of articles they have gathered from their research on education and the digital generation as well as their own thoughts and ideas on how to best teach a new generation of students.

This article, via Edudemic, does something I haven't seen out there: a rubic for slecting digital content. There is so much out there and if nerd isn't your first language and you don't have time to explore everything, finding content can be overwhelming. The infographic is extremely helpful.

Over the next few days, I am going to process this for myself. If ya'll wnt to join me...cool beans. First, the article:

The Committed Sardine--Teacher's Guide to Choosing Digital Content

Step one is DEFINE

• Instructional Use-do you want it to help you teach or help student's practice?
• Teacher Engagement-how skilled are you as a digital citizen?
• Student Population-how skilled are your students as digital citizens?

Instructional Use:
Sometimes a new tool, Google Earth, for example is a just toy to play with or another map to show the students. And that is alright if that was your goal. But Google Earth can do more than just that and its up to me as a teacher to decide how I want to use it.
I like the distinction between instruction and practice. I use Google Earth in my class but I've never used it as part of an assignment...hmmm...I have no real reason why other than I had never really thought of using beyond instruction.

Teacher Engagement:
I'm still wrapping my brain on this one, to be honest. An article from the creators of the rubic outlined in Edudemic is here. My first run at it is that it asks the question: how much the teacher wants to control the content or let the content provider control what the students see and the work they are assigned. I've started thinking about it in the same way we think about textbooks; is the book and its worksheets/tests/supplimentary materials THE Source or is it one of several sources you Franeknstein together to create a lesson. I'm a Dr. Frankenstein so I would want content I can tinker with and use in my way.

Student Population:
This one kinda surprised me. I assume my students have better digital skills than me and the writer's point is that that is a bad assumption to make. How do you assess how well a student navigates the intraweb thingy? I need to work on this.