DON´T YOU SHARE THE SAME IDEAS?

The Real Goals of Education



When I watch kids walk into the building on their first day of school, I think about what I want them to be like when they walk out on their last day. I also think about what I want them to be like on the day I bump into them in the supermarket 10 or 20 years later. Over the course of three decades watching kids walk into my schools, I have decided that I want them to

• be lifelong learners


• be passionate


• be ready to take risks


• be able to problem-solve and think critically


• be able to look at things differently


• be able to work independently and with others


• be creative


• care and want to give back to their community


• persevere


• have integrity and self-respect


• have moral courage


• be able to use the world around them well


• speak well,write well,read well, and work well with numbers


• truly enjoy their life and their work

To me, these are the real goals of education.
Taken from " The Big Picture" Education is Everybody´s Business by Dennis Littky ,Published by ASCD , 2004

WRITING

When we encourage young children to think of themeselves as writers, their achievement soars.

"When we invite students to make something with writing instead of just asking them to write, they go about their work differently.As long as let students define what is achievable on their own terms, almost anything is possible.When we give young students an open-endd and ongoing invitation to make books, they build identities as writers around their daily work of composing texts".

A central goal of the writer is to create an effect in someone else's mind.
From Educational Leadership ASCD magazine, article by Katie Wood Ray " When kids make books".

Using multiple technologies to teach writing

New digital technologies play a major role in teaching writing for the 21st century. By Kathleen Blake Yancey ASCD , Educational leadership.

The process of writing and teaching writing is in the midst of a "tectonic change". The change is in the new technological tools writers use, and in how these tools affect composition and the relationship between writer and audience. As they have for hundreds of years, student writers still compose with pencil and paper. But in Addition, writers now compose through new media like e-mail, listservs, messenger and other creative software packages. Writers use digital technologies to write many new kinds of texts, such as web logs, hypertexts, and electronic portfolios.

Helping writers develop competence in a variety of technologies is a key part of teaching writing in this century.

Developing Dynamic Units for EFL

In foreign language situations, it can be challenging to find real-life communicative contexts in which to use the target language.When teaching English as a Foreign Language ( EFL) at any level, the classroom has to be a place in which language is not only taught but also used meaningfully. If language is being used meaningfully in the classroom, it is not taught only in isolated chunks or by breaking the language into its grammatical or semantic components. Instead, language is being used within a context that either mirrors real world discourse or possibly uses subject matter content, such as science, math,business,law,etc., depending on age of the learners and their purpose for studying English. Using theme-based language instruction, which is one type of content-based instruction, can be helpful for various age groups and proficiency levels. Brinton ( 2003) supports the use of this approach when the purpose for EFL students is language acquisition. According to Brinton " The thematic content stretches over several weeks of instruction, providing rich input for lessons that are either language-based or skills-based. In this environment, students can successfully acquire language." For EFL teachers, developing thematic units around their required curriculum can be a way to build a larger context in which to teach language that spans a group of lessons and can provide more opportunities for communicating in English.

By Joan Kang Shin (lecturer for the U.S Department of State), Forum Magazine Volume 45 Number 2, 2007