blending technology with face-to-face teacher time generally produces better outcomes than face-to-face or online learning alone
Rather, what matters most is how students and teachers use technology to develop knowledge and skills. Successful technology integration for learning generally goes hand in hand with changes in teacher training, curricula, and assessment practices
Students playing an active role in their learning and receiving frequent, personalized feedback
Students critically analyzing and actively creating media messages
Teachers connecting classroom activities to the world outside the classroom
Experts figure that kids today read and write even more than previous generations. And they do so in a broader and more complex environment — though not always in academic ways.
Roberts wields every tool available to lift students toward "new literacies," the confluence of language and technology that's evolving as fast as researchers can study it.
as 21st-century literacies blend with traditional skills.
"I'm not going to say it's a good thing or a bad thing," says Elizabeth Kleinfeld, assistant professor of English at Metropolitan State College of Denver. "But it's a thing for sure, and we have to deal with it in our classrooms, in our workplaces and in our relationships."
Her research indicates that students have a troubling tendency not to read deeply, though she's quick to add that there's no evidence that previous generations fared any better.
Mastering the technical aspects of multimedia tools is essential.
Perhaps most important, the breadth of information that flows from Internet search engines requires that students cultivate a discerning eye.
"I think there should be very much a conscious, strategic moving back and forth between rapid locating (of information) and deep reading."
"The Internet offers incredible opportunities to build high-level, deep thinkers if we provide the instruction that's needed."
New literacies aren't about displacing mainstream standards
"If you choose to see (new literacies) as dumbing down, you're going to see lots of evidence of that," Knobel says. "But if you choose to see it as something new and opening up all sorts of opportunities for young people to really think about media, how truth itself is often up for grabs, then there are all sorts of ways of understanding it."