We describe a collaborative project in which university researchers, teachers and Grade 4–5 English language learners (ELLs) investigated the sociohistorical contexts and practices in which the ELLs participate, through a ‘community scan’. Many observers have argued that schools and teachers have such minimal knowledge of the outside- school lives of their multilingual and multicultural students that they are unable to build upon the ‘funds of knowledge’ that students and other members of their communities have. In particular, a large body of recent literature argues that school literacy education should be linked to literacies that children develop in their homes and communities. We present here a study centred on a public school located in a Canadian Punjabi-Sikh community. For our scan we collected census and other demographic representations of the community, as well as media reports and academic literature concerned with Punjabi-Sikh immigration. In addition, our scan included interviews with teachers, principals, parents and community leaders. Students’ investigations and representations of the community and of out-of-school multiliteracies were also collected. The authors argue that such information is crucial in the development of pedagogy that values and promotes the reworking of the practices, images, texts and symbols that children already use.
The site poses problems in lateral or logical thinking, from easy to hard, with both hints and answers. Great party conversation and something kids will like.
how-to videos or, more commonly, audio/slideshows; useful rhetorically for both technical writing and instructional video learning; web2.0 sharing of video that is perhaps instructionally more useful than YouTube.
It's a query that garnered 135 comments and added film titles within ten days. It lets me think MetaFilter might be fun for students, to craft media-related questions that would get lots of responses, simple queries like this one.
Geography courses, both present and past, with exercises, links, bibliography. Also see Urban Studies and American Indian Studies. Understanding place as cultural should inform both fiction and non-fiction film.
very evocative discussion guides for students doing exercises in and thinking about a wide variety of physical and cultural spaces; writers can gets lots of ideas from this course and its notes
how to create hotspots with popup notes on Flickr. Very useful for image analysis and assignment requiring students to comment on social aspects or formal aspects of image; or to formally critique them.