Edina Digital Age Learning

Today several staff members from Edina attended a workshop at the Zurah Shrine Center , with Jabari Mahiri , on Teaching Diverse and Digital Youth. Topics included: The Culture and Discipline of Achievement Several clips were shown to demonstrate how teachers can successfully engage cultural differences to increase student achievement. Teachers need: Disciplinary knowledge, Cultural Knowledge and perspectives, Technological Knowledge and Skills, which funnels in to our Pedagogical Knowledge and Practices. He said that our traditional sense of what Disciplinary knowledge is, is changing as we explore transformative digital tools. Dewey was right! In 1938 he talked about using the experiences of our students, which Mahiri noted is changing in our diverse society. There is a cultural foundation of "being an American" that is the foundation we must start from... He showed images of advertisements with people of color on the periphery of the image, which indicates marginalization...

From Jackie Roehl, Area Leader for Language Arts at Edina High School and author of a GREAT blog on National Urban Alliance Thinking Maps English 10 is continuing the practice of having each student create a blog. This year English 10 students will use their blogs to write about the various texts that they are reading for pleasure. The English 10 team has entered into a partnership with U of M Professors Richard Beach and Cynthia Lewis who will be assigning nearly 60 graduate students to read and comment on the Edina English 10 student blogs. The English 10 team is also submitting a research grant proposal to David Hyerle , the inventor of Thinking Maps , to analyze the student blog entries to study the impact of Thinking Maps on writing, reading, and relationships. If American Literature teachers want to have students establish a blog this year, students should still have last year’s English 10 blog online and could simply add entries to that blog. That continued blog could become...