A thorough, convincing and useful exploration for modern educators.
A guide for teachers looking to incorporate digital literacy, multimodal communication and the Common Core State Standards into their work.
Purdy and McClure (The New Digital Scholar, 2013) have collected essays by dozens of experienced educators that address Common Core implementation and the most effective ways to meet students’ needs by using digital forms of communication. The book focuses primarily on teaching the humanities, particularly reading and writing—or rather, information consumption and production. Several chapters stress the importance of incorporating standards across multiple formats, from print to digital text to video to infographics. The book is full of concrete methods that the authors have used in their own classrooms—such as Google Docs to write a collaborative poem, a geotagged map of neighborhood graffiti as part of a unit on Frankenstein, or an audiovisual “remix.” The chapters cite specific online tools, such as Weebly and Storify, but the emphasis is less on how to use particular tools than on the reasoning behind a particular educational strategy. Appendices include sample lesson plans and evaluation rubrics, and the book also includes links to a substantial amount of online material. The book’s primary audience is knowledgeable teachers in public schools, so readers without an education background may find some of the pedagogical theory a bit dense. However, each chapter focuses on implementing specific techniques and meeting clearly defined goals. Both supporters and opponents of Common Core will likely find value in this book; although it doesn’t address the standards’ broader controversies, it does acknowledge potential shortcomings that digital tools and digital literacy might address.
A thorough, convincing and useful exploration for modern educators.Pub Date: July 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1573874953
Page Count: 568
Publisher: Information Today Inc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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