Multiple Literacies

It’s one of the rallying cries that many digitally oriented educators use when it comes to using this piece of software or the other – it allows students to explore literacies that are not accessible in traditional text or are now inconvenient (due to space, time or money) to explore like art and music. One of these literacies, it could be argued, is spacial. The knowledge and interpretation of 3D space is something that is going to become increasingly important as it seems that we might have many future interfaces generate 3D space within which to work.

So when I caught this story out of Google that Big G was working with autistic spectrum kid, I got really interested. I know many researchers in the field and my wife’s classroom this year is autistic, so if nothing else, my own awareness helped to catch this. Working out of Boulder, Google has developed a set of lesson plans using SketchUp to allow autistic kids to express themselves in 3D space.