Digital Literacy Team A

What are literacy skills? Literacy skills help students gain knowledge through reading as well as using media and technology. These skills also help students create knowledge through writing as well as developing media and technology.

Technology Literacy We are living through a technological revolution, with huge changes taking place over brief spans of time. A decade ago, Facebook didn't exist, but now many people could not live without it. The average cellphone is now more powerful than computers from several years ago. We are surrounded by technology, and most of it performs multiple functions. In Growing Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World, Don Tapscott outlines the following eight expectations that students have of technology. Freedom to express their views, personalities, and identities Ability to customize and personalize technology to their own tastes Ability to dig deeper, finding whatever information they want Honesty in interactions with others and with organizations Fun to be part of learning, work, and socialization as well as entertainment Connecting to others and collaborating in everything Speed and responsiveness in communication and searching for answers Innovation and change, not settling for familiar technologies but seeking and using what is new and better

The Ten Fundamental Reasons for technology in education

It is amazing how technology has changed the whole world giving rise to new forms of education we never thought of. Our students are more digitally focused than any time before. They spend more time interacting with their mobile devices than they do with their parents or close relatives. Admittedly, this digital boom has both  positive and negative impact on our students. Lack of concentration, short attention span, distraction, visual  stimulus overload, identity theft, lack of real world socializing, privacy issues, depression, and many more are but a direct result of the growing exposure to this technology. Studies have even proved that multitasking, which some educational technology experts brag about in relation to the use of today's technology, reduces the power of our concentration to the half.  We should not, However, only look at the empty side of the cup, the other side is way bigger.

Thanks to the rise of in-classroom technology, the focus in education tends to be on student engagement and how to improve learning. It becomes easy to forget the importance of great teachers. Startups, entrepreneurs, businesses (and the rest) need to remember that technology doesn’t have to put teachers in jeopardy; it can help them lead the education evolution, even if their traditional role in the classroom becomes obsolete.

However, within the mobile phone group, there was evidence that use of text abbreviations was positively related to gains in literacy skills. Moreover, after controlling for individual differences in IQ, and the children's performance at pre-test, textism usage was able to account for a significant amount of variance in post-test spelling scores. These results show that text messaging does not adversely affect the development of literacy skills within this age group, and that the children's use of textisms when text messaging is positively related to improvement in literacy skills, especially spelling.

Although most participants in all three groups violated grammatical convention in their text messages, researchers found no evidence that this affected their understanding of written or spoken grammar at either point in time. For the primary school children, there was an association between punctuation errors in texts and spelling ability. Children who made fewer punctuation errors when texting tended to be better at spelling and quicker to process writing than those who made more errors in their texts.   For the undergraduate group, there was some evidence of a link between punctuation errors in texts and the spelling ability and grammatical understanding of participants. However, this link was weak and researchers concluded it was more likely related to the IQ score of students. The latest findings follow an earlier study led by Professor Wood that showed children’s use of text abbreviations can have a positive effect on literacy outcomes and may even enhance children’s understanding of conventional spelling.

Research literature throughout the past decade has shown that technology can enhance literacy development, impact language acquisition, provide greater access to information, support learning, motivate students, and enhance their self-esteem (ACT, 2004; CEO Forum, 2001; Boster et al., 2004; Mann et al., 1999; Tracey & Young, 2006; WestEd, 2002).

Activity theory provided a framework for data analysis and interpretation related to the patterns of activities that took place while students used each Web 2.0 tool. Web 2.0 was found to enhance all five information literacy standards. These standards related to collaboration, information organization, creativity, discussion, and technology education.[Copyright &y& Elsevier]