March Update

Thank you to all who have stopped by to visit the Salty Chip, or decidedly committed to getting in and exchanging some ideas. We have been averaging about 50 new participants joining per week. My preservice students have contributed their activities as they embark on their final practicum. Because they had the opportunity to view presentations of the units that have been shared in the Salty Chip from their colleagues, they are quite excited about the opportunity to get in and rework them and continue to adapt them via a Multiliteracies’ approach.

In the upcoming months, I will be working in schools in Southwestern Ontario to develop and capture multiliteracies-in-use in preparation for a chapter I am preparing for inclusion in the next edition of Bainbridge & Heydon’s Constructing Meaning: Balancing Elementary Language Arts. I will be sharing those materials in the Salty Chip as well. If you have rich examples of materials from your classroom that you would like me to consider, please contact me (khibbert@uwo.ca).

In addition, I have been corresponding with a number of interested faculty at other Faculties of Education across Canada and elsewhere in the world about doing some work together with our students in ways that help us learn to reconceptualize our practices to foster a multiliteracies approach in our classroom. If this is something you are interested in considering as you plan for 2010-11, please let me know.

Thanks to all for your patience as we worked through our beta period. I have applied for further funding to enable the community to continue to adapt to our users’ needs as we work it out together. I really appreciate all of the notes of enthusiastic support I have received from our ‘early adopters’, and am excited to see this grow and develop over time.