Preparing For The Storm

Hi all, welcome to issue #246 of Digitally Literate.

This week I hosted the NCTE Twitter chat with Robyn Seglem on Literacy in Digital Times. You can read the archive of this chat here.

I also helped post the following:

• Trauma informed teaching during COVID-19: What the virus has taken from us and how we get it back – Kathleen Pennyway on how to center students’ needs, and help them deal with traumas such as violence, home instability, and poverty.
• Beyond teachers as healers: Teachers, students, and reciprocal care in traumatic times – Elizabeth Dutro on the need to consider trauma in our classrooms as teachers, students, and families face the emotional, financial, and physical devastations and anxieties of COVID-19.
• Finding your literacy sweet spot – Salena Davis on how we can help students with these literacy challenges as they navigate their own trauma.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe if you would like this newsletter to show up in your inbox. Feel free to reach out and let me know what you think of this work at hello@digitallyliterate.net.

Getting Started With Trauma-Informed Practices

When teachers use strategies tailored to children who have experienced trauma, all students reap the emotional and academic benefits.

The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course

Cathy Davidson detailing the key mindset as we begin to think about learning environments in the fall.

We need to be human first, professor second. We need to design as humans for humans in a global crisis. We need to design our courses with the awareness of pain, dislocation, uncertainty, and trauma now central to all our lives. It’s a lot to ask. It is the one and only essential as we design our courses for this disrupted fall.

Values-Centered Instructional Planning

Robin DeRosa on the need to be guided by a consistent, mission-aligned framework as we move from coping to planning for the fall and beyond.

What is missing from most of the remote teaching contingency planning is a framework for helping the people inside institutions understand and make decisions about pedagogy from inside the pandemic’s evolving reality. Pedagogy is not an ancillary or optional part of conversations about remote teaching. Pedagogy is the category that describes how we teach. For that reason, whether we foreground it or not, pedagogy is a key part of how our learners understand and assess their experience at our institutions during this crisis.

The Risks – Know Them – Avoid Them

As you begin to make plans to go back out in public…or ease social distancing…please read this.

This is especially helpful for those that sit on taskforces developing plans to move to F2F in the fall.

The storm we can’t see

A look at the coming/current economic fallout.

Universities are forfeiting room and board fees, lucrative spring sports seasons and the elective surgeries at teaching hospitals that balance their budgets. Many — if not all — colleges and universities will probably have to nix the fall semester. Across the country, it’s easy to imagine that the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities might require a $200 billion bailout just to finish out the calendar year.

Approaches to Open Education and Social Justice Research

Sarah Lambert and Laura Czerniewicz guest edited a special themed issue on open education and social justice.

While open education has traditionally been about increasing access, it has become clear that removing barriers is complex and that “participatory parity” as the aim of socially just education needs a nuanced examination.

25 Strategies to Engage Students on Your Next Zoom Meeting

These strategies are not meant to take the place of deeper learning. That kind of learning is generally better when done with a mix of asynchronous and synchronous conversations and discussions.

These are not Zoom-specific…it’s just what most of you are using. 🙂

Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.

Fred Rogers

Digitally Literate is a weekly review of the news, notes, tips, and tricks from the week that resonated with me.

When Will This Be Over? Sesame Workshop’s Tips For Parenting During A Pandemic can help.

Connect at hello@digitallyliterate.net or on the social network of your choice.