Page 54 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

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In School 21 in Stratford, London, learners articulate their understanding orally and the effect of this has been amazing as can be seen in the video that follows.78
Resource 19:
The role of oral language in building our ‘inner voice’
The flow-on effect of encouraging oracy is substantial in both intangible and tangible ways, by increasing our ‘outer voice’, our written vocabulary and our capacity to think. It always takes me by surprise that many of the words that I speak via thinking out aloud, at conferences and lectures, are things that I have never thought out aloud before. The words just seem to form themselves and the brains capacity to formulate completely new thinking ‘on the fly’ is extraordinary. We have all experienced this at some time in our lives.
The learners in the video above are explicitly being taught to be orally literate and given an audience to experiment with! The learners are using scaffolds provided by their educators to enhance and encourage their capacity to question each other and challenge each other in their conversations. The learners are provided a toolbox of oral initiators such as collections of sentence stems, discussion guidelines, talking points79 and ‘speed dating’ oral language sessions80 etc.
Increasingly, almost every device we have and every website, or online resource has a microphone icon where you can speak in your search terms, video requests, complaints, comments. All major computer operating systems have a voice to text facility and these days these features are very accurate if you articulate each word succinctly. Using voice to text tools hones learner’s oracy very quickly.
Increasingly we will write less and speak more just as we will watch video to learn rather than just read and write. This is an existing trend that is becoming increasingly common, especially with younger technology users. Voice to text and text to voice is now commonplace with tools such as Siri and we are increasingly using these tools to communicate more efficiently and effectively.
Resource 20: Google Voice
Google is an excellent example of the shift to voice, with the microphone now saving people having to type in search requests to get their results. Oral literacy is increasingly becoming as important, if not more so, than reading and writing and we need to provide learners with the learning experiences they require to build their oracy.
78 YouTube. School 21 Edutopia. (2016) Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ADAY9AQm54
79 Mindshift –KQED. (October 2016) Why The Art of Speaking Should Be Taught Alongside Math and Literacy. Retrieved from https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/10/03/why-the-art-of-speaking-should-be-taught-alongside-math-and-literacy/
80 Bryan Betz. (October 2016) Speed dating English. Blog Post. Retrieved from https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1ee3f6ded1b765da26d18636bb904e70e926c1c434ca7ac7a54416ad03a20d60.jpg