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Dyslexic Remix in the Digital Age

Found this site on line and wanted to share:
http://mariewustner.weebly.com/education-remix.html

“Creativity is as important in education as Literacy!” (Sir Ken Robinson, 2006)

The current educational system is in need of serious reform as it is inherently exclusive instead of inclusive. Public school system of today were designed during the industrial revolution and still resembles the factory. Consequently individuals who do not fit into the particular mold that educational institutions create are cast aside as defective. This is unacceptable and irresponsible. If we expect all of our citizens to pay taxes towards an education then we need to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to thrive in this environment. I believe that introducing Media Language and Remix Documentary to a curriculum of students with dyslexia would allow these students to compete competently in the world of academia. By using digital technology and remix culture dyslexic students may be able to learn and express themselves in language based on images, sounds, and movement - a more appropriate learning environment for visual thinkers.

Learning Disabled students change in learning styles.

In his article, Growing Up Digital: How the Web Changes Work, Education, and the Ways People Learn, John Seely Brown (2002) uses ecology as a metaphor to describe an environment for learning. Brown says, “An ecology is basically an open, complex adaptive system comprising elements that are dynamic and interdependent. One of the things that make an ecology so powerful and adaptable to new contexts is its diversity.”
Brown further describes a learning ecology as, “a collection of overlapping communities of interest (virtual), cross-pollinating with each other, constantly evolving, and largely self-organizing.”New Web 2.0 technologies and websites, such as a blog, Wiki or YouTube, make new demands on learning and they provide new support to learning, even as they also dismantle some of the learning supports upon which education has depended in the past. If we agree that there are changes occurring across the learning ecology and that new conceptualizations are required to use these emerging technologies, then some care should be taken to think deeply about the impacts of Web 2.0 on the processes and practices of pedagogy.
The above quotations taken from John Seely Brown (2002) holds true in some of today’s classrooms with older teachers. As a co-teacher in a regular classroom, I am consistently trying to change the view of fellow teachers in how they deal with many of my learning disabled students and the change in their learning styles. The Web2.0 site http://goanimate.com/ can be used to teach Learning Disabled students to write all genre of essay writing. Many students enjoy expressing themselves if they can create a product at the same time. In using goanimate.com, students use the site to create and tell a story using characters supplied or purchased on the web site. I have seen many of my students become so engrossed in creating their story that they at times do not want to leave the classroom. This Web2.0 site lets the students see their writing come to life in the form of a live cartoon which can be anywhere from a few minutes to ten minutes. Not only does this site capture the attention of Attention Deficit Disorder students, many of whom have attention problems, but it brings out their creative side and shows their peers that they are able to develop a great product in the classroom.
Teachers can also use this site to teach a lesson to the visual students in the classroom. Students will be more willing to watch a cartoon that is teaching a lesson over and over again, than hear the voice of the teacher repeating the topic over and over. As a teacher, we have to learn to move away from the uses of only pen and paper as a way for students to express mastery of any topic.

Learning Online

Chunk 1: Introduction
What does “doing it right” entail?
1. “Doing it right” means that online learning materials must be designed properly, with the learners and learning in focus, and that adequate support must be provided.
Describe some of the benefits of online learning.
1. For learners, online learning knows no time zones, and location and distance are not an issue.
2. In asynchronous online learning, students can access the online materials at anytime, while synchronous online learning allows for real time interaction between students and the instructor.
3. Use the Internet to access up-to-date and relevant learning materials, and can communicate with experts.
4. For the instructor, tutoring can be done at anytime and from anywhere. Online materials can be updated, and learners are able to see the changes at once. When learners are able to access materials on the Internet, it is easier for instructors to direct them to appropriate information based on their needs.
The development of effective online learning materials should be based on what?
Learners learn best when they can contextualize what they learn for immediate application and to acquire personal meaning.
Three schools of thought can in fact be used as taxonomy for learning. Behaviorists’ strategies can be used to teach the “what” (facts), cognitive strategies can be used to teach the “how” (processes and principles), and constructivist strategies can be used to teach the “why” (higher level thinking that promotes personal meaning and situated and contextual learning).



Chunk 2: Behaviorist and Cognitive School of Learning
What are the four implications for online learning from the Behaviorist perspective?
Implications for Online Learning
1. Learners should be told the explicit outcomes of the learning so
that they can set expectations and can judge for themselves
whether or not they have achieved the outcome of the online
lesson.
2. Learners must be tested to determine whether or not they have
achieved the learning outcome. Online testing or other forms of
testing and assessment should be integrated into the learning
sequence to check the learner’s achievement level and to provide
appropriate feedback.
3. Learning materials must be sequenced appropriately to promote
learning. The sequencing could take the form of simple to
complex, known to unknown, and knowledge to application.
4. Learners must be provided with feedback so that they can monitor
how they are doing and take corrective action if required.
How should information be organized to facilitate processing?
Online learning strategies must present the materials and use strategies to enable students to process the materials efficiently. Since working memory has limited capacity, information should be organized or chunked in pieces of appropriate size to facilitate processing. According to Miller (1956), because humans have limited short-term memory capacity, information should be grouped into meaningful sequences.

What are the four implications for online learning from the Cognitivist perspective?
• Strategies should be used to allow learners to perceive and attend to the information so that it can be transferred to working memory.
• Strategies should be used to allow learners to retrieve existing information from long-term memory to help make sense of the new information.
• Information should be chunked to prevent overload during processing in working memory
• Other strategies that promote deep processing should be used to help transfer information to long-term storage.