Content Literacy

Getting students engaged in 400-year-old drama is usually a challenge, to put to mildly. But in Seale’s classroom, classic literature gets the Web 2.0 treatment. During Romeo and Juliet, for example, Seale used Ning.com to create a class-only social media group called Verona Lifestyles, where her students, posing as characters in the play, created profiles and posted updates and discussion forums. “Posting in character got them more engaged,” explains Seale, “and gave them confidence to tackle the language. They even took a stab at writing couplets and shared them on Ning

“It’s about initiating higher levels of engagement,” says Seale, “and making the learning more self-directed and self-motivated.” “Let’s face it,” she adds, “being literate today means more than reading words on a printed page and writing an essay.”

Digital technology, however, still suffers from an image problem. To their more boisterous critics, blogs, video games, wikis, and other social media have stunted the attention span and diluted the concentration of an entire generation. What’s more, Web sites provide not knowledge, but the lesser currency of “information,” broken down into bytes to be skimmed over and hyperlinked.