One laptop per child coming to the U.S.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/today/esntoday092507.htm

Huge buy one get one sale blowout!

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Blog Prompt for Week of September 24

Dear Teachers, I apologize for this late posting! My deadline is Sunday, I know. Yours is Tuesday. So I’ll keep the focus pointed and the task limited.

Do focus on the Gee chapter in Alvermann. Gee’s analysis of what he calls “the great disruption,” the New Capitalism, and Millennial youth is of great interest to us as teachers. As you may know, in the past year, this campus has spent some time and money focusing on teaching Millennial students. I participated in one such workshop last June with Garder Campbell and Charles Dziuban, and yesterday Amanda and Steve shared in another initiative fueled by the campus’ commitment to teaching Millennials.

Gee introduces the notion of “shape-shifting portfolio” people in this chapter. Young, Dillon and Moje extend this discussion in Ch. 8. His discussion concludes with a provocative analysis of the limits of public schooling’s ability to provide adequate opportunity for millennial youth to develop “creativity, deep thinking” and “whole people [ness]” : “In the end, (this reference is to the consequences of what he calls the “current neoliberal hegemony” on learners’ life chances) we get the Tale of Two Millennial Cities. . . a tale not of race, nor of class in traditional terms, but of ‘kinds of people’–those with and without Portfolios, those with small and big Portfolios, Shape-Shifters and non Shape-Shifters.”

Most of you are near the end (or halfway there!) of your English Education graduate program at SUNY.

How would you reassess the ways in which you are constructing the how and the what of your future (and current) students’ shape-shifting portfolios?

In other words, what are your goals for supporting your students’ portfolio (in the Gee sense) building? What is it coming to mean to you that students develop “shape-shifting portfolios?” How do they look to you? How do they look different from what students (and teachers) might see as the aim of the conventional language arts classroom?

What is changing or has changed about the ways in which you see English Language Arts classes as supporting adolescents seeing themselves in “entrepreneurial terms. . . . that is as free agents in charge of their own selves as if those selves were projects or businesses” (Gee).

How is your own “career” representative of Gee’s emphasis on shape-shifting portfolio people?

And where have we heard some of these same arguments before in other readings this semester? KES

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