Sifting through the Curriculum Frameworks

In starting to consider ways of integrating technology to support expressive communication in the elementary classroom, I dove (OK, waded) in to the Massachusetts English Language Arts Curriculum Frameworks. The Frameworks, which outline the skills that students in Massachusetts schools should learn, are organized into four main strands: Language, Reading and Literature, Composition, and Media. Within these strands are 27 General Standards (broad ideas) which are further subdivided into 337 Learning Standards.

I chose to limit my reading of the Frameworks to those learning goals targeted to grades 6 and younger, which brought the total number of Learning Standards to 191 - still a lot, but a bit more manageable! From here, I narrowed my focus to those goals that related to students' expressive communication skills: speaking, writing, and visual presentation. I tried to be somewhat liberal in deciding which standards applied. Even some seemingly receptive skills such as reading included expressive components, such as identifying or analyzing text elements. 

To get a glimpse of those standards, I decided to run it through the website wordle.net. This is a really cool and simple way to get a visual representation of text. It creates a "cloud" of all of the words in a selected passage (omitting commonly used words like the or a). The more frequently a word appears in the passage, the larger it is in the cloud. Here is the cloud that I created using my selected learning standards:

The most commonly appearing verbs here are use (which I combined with the word using, resulting in a larger sample), identify, write, and analyze. Other terms that stand out are text, language, information, and ideas. At a quick glance, it seems like application and critical thinking are pretty important components of the expressive communication standards. 

Obviously, English Language Arts standards aren't the only place that contain expressive communication components, but I felt that it was a logical starting off point. Other content areas provide wonderful applications of these skills, and can utilize technology to enhance that communication throughout the classroom.