Jaxonenglish

In the article Technology and Media Literacy: What Do Teachers Need to Know?, by Dana L. Grisham, the author poses many questions about how well teachers are able to understand, teach, and learn about media literacy. The author believes, "When considering the proliferation of technology and its instructional applications, teachers need to focus on both hardware and software, but move beyond the simple "how to" focus into the whys, when, and for whom issues of curriculum." She also discusses the need for students to learn the history behind multimedia literacy to learn the importance it poses in society today.

The Great School Staff and its main focus in wrote testing in California on standardized testing in schools. The first part of this article talks about all the different kinds of test there are through out elementary school and high school. It examines how schools are given a target in which their student's scores should follow under. These targets are called API growth targets. After the testing is complete the schools will receive rankings comparing similar schools and also comparing schools within in state. It states that these test are mainly important for helping parents understand how well their child is learning, and also how well are schools preparing their students. The results of this test can affect the children, teachers and schools. I

In the book The Trouble With Boys, author Peg Tyre discusses boy's problems at school and what parents and educators must do. By interviewing hundreds of parents, children, experts and teachers, Tyre offers diverse explanations and facts on why the educational system is failing boys. This book is written in 20 informative chapters that provide important facts on ADHD, the necessity of recess, the vanishing male teacher, single-sex schooling and boys and literacy. In Chapter 11: Boys and Literacy, Tyre begins with scary statistics showing that boys have consistently scored less well than girls on tests measuring reading and writing. She also argues that the "male literacy gap" is not a new problem and may be spawning a national crisis. This is becoming a national crisis because "high-level reading and writing skills are essential not only to economic success but to economic survival" (135). Tyre then asks who or what is to blame for "the male reading deficit." Is it biology? Is it culture? The only clear answer is the "small differences get amplified by the careless, and sometimes crushing, messages that boys often get about the importance of reading from their parents, teachers and communities" (142). Boy's conclusions about reading and writing are shaped through schooling and home attitudes towards literacy.

An expansion program was voted on to improve digital literacy in schools such as add faster internet connections in all school libraries.

In Technology a Key Tool in Writing Instruction the author, Maya Prabhu, explains how a report done by the National Writing Project and College Board shows that "teachers play a critical role in driving the use of technology, to teach writing." For this report nine teachers, who were selected for various reasons, were observed by a writer for a day and then interviewed. Results showed that the use of such things like blogs, podcasts, and other software can actually increase students' engagement and improve their writing and thinking skills in all grade levels and in all subjects. These results help fuel the argument that more teaching needs to be done with technology in this new digital age. The NWP and College Board claims that there are ". . . three things [that need to] be done to meet the challenges of teaching and learning in the digital age at all levels of education." A child cannot learn or be impacted by technology if they do not have access, so therefore it is suggested that a child have one-on-one interactions with a computer or some time type of similar technology.

Professors at Harvard university discuss their opinion on whether they think laptops in the classroom is a better learning utility or if it is just distracting the student and others in the classroom.

Many teachers and other school officials in the U.S. are starting to embrace the use of social media in the classroom. With the ever growing popularity of sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Myspace, educators feel that it is important to bridge the gap between the outside world of interactive social media and today's learning methods. Allowing social media and other websites in the classroom has its pros and cons, of course.

In You Can't Learn Much from Books You Can't Read by Richard L. Allington, the author discusses the roles of textbooks in the classroom. The textbooks that are used in grades fifth through twelfth don't match the reading levels of the students reading them. Classrooms use one textbook and go off the "one-size-fits-all" approach and now classrooms are using textbooks with a reading level two or more levels more advanced. This approached is shown by the achievements of US fourth graders shown to be the best in the US and then when they hit the misuse of textbooks, the achievements go down. The solutions to change this problem is to have multiple levels of text in the classroom, have student choice, and have individualized instruction. Student choice consists of having an assignment that can be done multiple ways so the student can pick the way they can excel and be interested in. Teaching the students different techniques to solve problems is part of the individualized instruction and seems to work very well.

In the online article "Playing Music can be good for your brain/Stanford study finds it helps the understanding of language", by Sturrock it goes over research done by Stanford. In their study they had two groups of adults, musicians and non-musicians. They found that musical experience helps "the brain improve its ability to distinguish between rapidly changing sounds that are key to understanding and using language."

In the article "Identity Management: Multiple Presentations of Self in Facebook", by Joan Morris DiMicco and David R. Millen, the authors primarily address the concept of social networking becoming increasingly popular. They wanted to study how people maintain their self-presentation while also maintaining social relationships in heterogeneous networks. Otherwise known as maintaining a professional and social persona in one network.

This article by Amy Garmer, talks about how society is all about digital literacy and improving test scores and every thing through text but how this is a big problem because many students with parent who lacks in knowlegde with technologies aren't able to help their students study. So instead they go online and use computers for entertainments instead. She comes up with an idea about having gov. funded institutes for parents to learn and become skilled with digital literacies so that they can, therefore, help their kids do better in school and on tests.

This article talks about how children are changing their own literacy experiences in chat rooms, blogs, and emails. It is saying that now a days children sit in these structured classrooms and correct teachers and listen to lectures when their world they are living in is more technologically updated and high speed and better for their learning than these structured classrooms. It is based on how we can now have these things called "constructivist classrooms" which are classrooms with different levels of learning so that every child can learn this new world in all kinds of different ways says the article. It ties in how the internet can changes ways of teaching and can help teachers from everywhere learn more about their own teaching. This article hits all the highlights of how the internet affects us in daily lives and it talks about all the uses of it that can be used.

In the article Technology In The Classroom, author Jamshed N. Lam stresses the importance of technology used with children. He states in the beginning of his article, "Currently, there are at least twenty-five million illiterate people in this country and this number is increasing rapidly." He begins to give readers more statistics of how populations will increase and how some cultures struggle and will continue to struggle in school with their literacy practice. Lam then talks about how children growing up in poor homes have a difficult time reading. Since they do not have the money to buy materials to start them early, then they start to fall behind before they even start. "In school, they fall behind at an early age and can never catch up and thus the cycle continues (Bennett, 2002)."

Laura Robb the author of "Multiple Texts" realizes that students are individual and that by being in the same grade doesn't mean they are at the same reading levels. By using multiple texts that are at wide range of reading levels on same or similar topics will let every student contribute and participate.

In the article, "Why Schools Should Learn To Use Online Services Like Facebook & YouTube Rather Than Banning Them," Mike Masnick argues that incorporating Facebook and other social networking sites, would be beneficial to both students and teachers. He says that by trying to fuse these social media sites with the teacher's curriculum, it will make education and school work more relevant to the students lives.

"The entire educational community must share responsibility for the development of literacy skills for the older student. This requires a paradigm shift from common practice where literacy instruction has been viewed as the sole responsibility of specialists instead of general educators. "

High Stakes Testing, by Miriam J. Metzger, Andrew J. Flanagin, talks about testing, and the No Child Left Behind Act and how it has affected schools and their methods of teaching. It explains how because of the No Child Left Behind Act the children are no longer being taught to know the information, but they are being taught so they can pass the tests and get the schools more money. The tests the students are taking are focusing on Mathematics and Reading...

In the Chapter "What Should We Teach? Rethinking Literacy" from the book Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, by Henry Jenkins with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, it contemplates what to do about new literacies. The book talks about how it is just as important for students to learn old literacies, like reading and writing, than it is to learn new literacies as well, digital media. They describe the new literacy culture as participatory culture.

In Christopher Conte's essay, Networking the Classroom Can Computer Technology Reform Education? Conte discusses the roles of computers and other technologies in education. Conte claims that currently the educational system is outdated and should be updated by incorporating the use of computers as well as other types of technology into the classroom.