05.01.07

If the kids can’t spell, teach them

Posted in Uncategorized at 9:16 am by Sarah

“There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza”. “Then fix it dear Henry!” I sang that to myself last week listening to the intellectual hand wringing over the emergence of text speak in second level exam papers. If the kids can’t spell, then teach them dear Henry. The trick is finding a way to teach students who have been born into a world so radically different from ours that their brains have actually been rewired.

The gap between the establishment and what’s called the Net Generation isn’t just about pop music or clothes. Teachers face students raised in an online world using skills from childhood which we only acquired as adults. US writer and inventor Marc Prensky argues that because they’ve been using everything from mobile phones to the Internet since birth, their neural pathways have physically altered. The “Net Gen” students process information in a completely different way to us and old teaching methods just don’t work anymore.

Prensky describes a Digital World where the children are the natives and we are the immigrants. Think about the wave of European immigrants into America in the 1900’s. The children spoke English while the parents still spoke Yiddish, Italian or German at home. As a Digital Immigrant, you might learn the language of the new world, but you will never lose your accent. For instance, you might use email, but you still print out documents from the Internet so you can read them comfortably.

For the Digital Immigrants, the Internet is Web1.0 – a source of information which we access and read like a library. For your children – the Natives – it’s Web 2.0 which relies on user particpation. The Natives read and write on the Internet flowing smoothly between texting, blogging, instant messaging and gaming. We look on, vaguely horrified and push text books in front of them, but it’s not going to work. It’s not that they can’t learn : they just do it differently. If you want students to spell properly, you have to learn new ways to teach them.

We could start by acknowledging the skills they do have instead of slamming them for the ones they don’t.

The Sunday Tribune’s Richard Delevan neatly summarised these skills at a recent Irish Internet Association event. The Digital Natives are Searchers, Rankers, Authors and Gamers. You could add multitasking to the list too. **

A Junior Cert student may not know a certain piece of information, but they can find it instantly on the Internet. The same student is well used to rating the information they find. If you surf through your teenager’s Bebo or Myspace pages, you’ll see that everything, photographs, products, music and movies are rated by other readers. They are automatically applying judgement and discretion to what they see and read. Then they write about it. They might be writing short and terse answers that displease examiners, but they have become masters at communicating ideas and arguments in few words. Business people spend years learning how to communicate succinctly.

School-goers play a lot of video games which turns strategy into instinct. Finally, they can do all these things at the same time without affecting the quality of their work. If your teenager is watching telly while texting and instant messaging, believe it or not, they are doing all three competently.

On the downside they can’t spell and have the attention span of goldfish. So how do you teach them? Educators in the US have devised amazing techniques that integrate the technology of the Digital World into classroom teaching methods. Prensky argues that gaming is the quickest and obvious way to train a student or employee. He’s worked with academics to devise video games that teach everything from geography to history. Spelling and grammar could be incorporated into a game very easily provided it’s sophisticated and designed by gamers and students themselves. Intuitively you can appreciate that learning how to punctuate in an online video game is going to engage a Digital Native more effectively than handing back essays with correction marks in red ink.

Teacher Darren Kuropatwa developed a fantastic method called “Distributed Teaching and Learning” which uses blogs : web journals – to teach. Each day one student in his class is appointed the “Scribe”. It’s their job to write up that day’s lesson on the class blog in a way that would be useful to any student who missed the class. The Scribe is briefed “Ask yourself: “Is this good enough for our textbook? Would a graphic or other example(s) help illustrate what we learned?” And remember, you have a global audience, impress them.”.

Kuropatwa says “This simple idea has lead to some incredible student work. Early scribe posts tend to be entirely text based. As the class progresses, successive scribes begin to try to outdo each other and their scribe posts begin to incorporate text, images and colour used in meaningful ways. When scribes reach this level of excellence they are inducted into The Scribe Post Hall Of Fame.”

The gaming instinct for competition takes over and students devote themselves to producing their best work. Kuropatwa has managed to co-opt the Digital Native love of social interaction, collaborative working and rating instincts into the classroom. One of his students says “When I write my scribe posts, I try to make it as so my classmates go, “ohh!” and “yeah that’s it right on.” That is my first priority because I want everyone in the class to do well, “we’re all in it together” (at least that’s how I feel anyway). During class, if it’s my turn to scribe, I feel pressure that if I don’t do well in helping my peers I’ll let everyone down. So in class, I open both my eyes and ears wider than normal, and my pencil taking notes on just about everything related to the topic.”

What I love about this method is that it engages students without dumbing down or pandering to their short attention spans. The biggest problem I see today is not poor spelling but shallow thinking. There is no fair way to assess students other than through uniform exams like the Junior and Leaving Certificates. But it’s impossible to design exams without encouraging even the most able students to churn out text book information without actually learning how to think for themselves. An “A” student might well be able to spell perfectly but couldn’t think independently to save their lives.

Some teaching methods rely heavily on discussion in which everyone’s opinion is valid, even if they are talking total rubbish. The class blog over rides this tendency by exploiting the natural laws of the Internet. The immigrants have much to teach the citizens of the digital world, but first they have to learn the native language

**A wonderful example of the generation gap: the ST version of this article appeared with the word “assessors” substituted for rankers. They may have preferred the word but didn’t know that ranking and/or rating are the accepted terms. The credit to Richard also bit the dust which I felt bad about because his presentation to the IIA was fantastic. Sorry Richard!

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