home


 * MICDS Literacy Skills Acquired and Demonstrated by Graduation**

In conjunction with the 1:1 tablet program, MICDS categorized emerging literacies and 21st century skills as given below. Students will document acquisition of these skills in a portfolio.

Basic Literacy Basic Literacy covers teaching the foundational skills students need to become lifelong learners, cultivating [|Habits of Mind] and developing [|Gardner’s disciplined minds]. It does not necessarily prescribe a canon of content beyond that which is necessary to allow students to acquire the skills needed to communicate and read; to develop numeracy, scientific, and economic literacy; and to be proficient manipulating electronic devices.

Information Literacy In a world where information is being created at an exponentially increasing rate, students need to learn how to manage it - to evaluate its integrity, to respect it as property, to detect the bias inherent in much of it, and to create with it. Students should become discriminate consumers, creative producers, and scholarly researchers. They have a wealth of information at their fingertips must learn to access it and construct meaning from it. We cannot teach them what they need to know for jobs and processes that aren’t yet a reality. We can only prepare them to learn how to first ask the right questions and then to construct the right answers.

Visual Media Literacy Just look around you - the recent election, the case for global warming or energy alternatives, the move to green - everywhere we are bombarded by messages ranging from subtle to overwhelmingly persuasive. All need to be viewed with a critical eye that seeks to discern truth and bias, innuendo and allusion, and fact from fiction. In the reverse, how can I select an image, series of images, video, or music that will appropriately convey my message? This expands our responsibility from teaching students to understand and produce the types of documents the printing press made public to a compulsory obligation to teach student to understand and produce the wide range of communication formats that the computer makes possible.

Intercultural LIteracy Students need to understand, appreciate, and respect differences in perspectives that are based on culture. They can develop this to some extent in humanities courses that expose them through art, history, and literature to other cultures. They will not become literate without exposure to other people and technology certainly affords us the opportunity to make synchronous and asynchronous connections.

Digital Citizenship Ethical Use Literacy Our immediate spheres of influence are much wider now and potentially transcend what were once cultural barriers. The six degrees of separation is more rapidly unveiled. The ability to collectively interact, create, publish, connect, organize, and promote has never been greater. Students must understand what the appropriate barriers are for personal safety and global collaboration. They must understand what the implications of their digital footprint might be, regardless of whether or not they wore the shoe that created the footprint. They must nurture their online identity.

Network LIteracy In today’s networked world, students and teachers have the ability to create a learning network. They understand this power when framed in the context of a social network, largely because of the impact facebook has had in teen culture. It is our job to show them the power of networking for learning and to leverage that same power in our own professional learning. It is this literacy that requires a certain proficiency in all the other literacies as it situates learning in a global, interconnected web that understands that the intelligence of many, when properly engaged and directed, can be harnessed to do incredible things.