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Laidy Zabala-Jordan

Education Update:Leveraging Technology to Improve Literacy:Leveraging Technology to Imp... - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...ology-to-Improve-Literacy.aspx

technology education improves increase digital literacy

shared by Laidy Zabala-Jordan on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • Technology is changing literacy, claim Web 2.0 advocates, university researchers, edgy librarians, pundits of the blogosphere, and the media. The visual is ascendant, text is secondary—and linearity? Forget about it. Web surfers flip from one information wave to another, gathering and synthesizing. Beginning, middle, and end are up for grabs.
  • In the classroom, some educators are attempting to harness the power of technology to increase literacy rates for struggling students, but does using technology really make a difference? An initial assessment of the research on the current generation of technology used to aid literacy yields interesting, if somewhat lackluster, results.
  • According to Kamil, however, that's not necessarily a bad thing: "The important aspect, from my perspective, is that these were classroom programs that replaced about 10 percent of instructional time. What that means is that since there was no difference, the software programs were as good as the teacher." Such findings, Kamil explains, could signify a shift from teachers using technology as merely a supplement to using it as the means of instruction.
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  • Now, Kamil notes, newer and better technology is coming out all the time to make the option of classroom technology even stronger, especially for struggling readers and writers. He points to advances in speech recognition technology, such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh's research-based Reading Tutor project or programs such as Pearson's Quick Reads, as examples of tools that can improve students' reading fluency.
  • Despite the lack of data showing that technology has a tremendous effect in the classroom, teachers have found that using technology may help address students' specific learning needs. Charles MacArthur, a special education professor at the University of Delaware, explains that students who have learning disabilities, including dyslexia, typically need help with transcription processes to produce text, spell, and punctuate correctly. However, any students having trouble with writing fluency can benefit from teachers integrating technology into the classroom. And sometimes tried-and-true technology works the best.
  • "The only tool that has enough research behind it is plain, old word processing," MacArthur says. "Students with writing difficulties are able to produce a text that looks good, and they can go back and fix things without introducing new mistakes."
  • Carol Greig, a former technology coach, won the International Reading Association's 2008 Presidential Award for Reading and Technology for her Reading Buddies program, which uses MP3 players to increase the literacy skills of beginning readers
  • Greig tested the group of students every two weeks on pre-reading and early reading skills, such as naming letters, phonemic awareness, and ease of decoding nonsense words accurately. After six weeks of using Reading Buddies, Greig says, "We saw kids who had been operating at the 10th and 20th percentiles moving up to the 40th and 50th percentiles." At the end of the 10-week pilot, Grieg says, "[Students] were at or above the test's benchmark."
  • auditory processing problems or dyslexia, schools are using various computer technologies to make students more aware of the sounds of words when others speak or when students themselves read aloud.
  • At Howard Elementary, teachers also use technology to assess students' individual comprehension and written work.
  • The Reading Buddies program
  • Pointing to the school's use of the FastForWord Language and FastForWord Literacy programs, Egli explains that computer technology can slow down a word's "sound signature" so that students become more aware of the phonemes that make up that word. For example, students who reverse the "b" and the "d" may do so because of auditory problems distinguishing those two phonemes, which are extremely brief compared to a typical vowel sound. To help retrain the brain to note the distinction between the two sounds, teachers highlight the differences by slowing down and amplifying the sounds slightly. Students then focus on them through computer activities. Typically, it takes many repetitions of the exercises to retrain the brain.
  • The technology "builds those auditory and language skills" of students, allowing them, generally, to be more receptive to learning because typically 80 percent of the instructional day relies on auditory information
  • "They're better able to make use of classroom instruction because they can understand the language of the instructor better,"
  • Recently, the Bridges Academy also started using Reading Assistant, a program that uses speech recognition technology to help students improve their reading fluency.
  • using technology alone is not the answer to improving literacy, but the tools help teachers move students toward their individual learning goals. "Using some of the technologies we have now, we can do some things that many of us hoped to achieve for a lot of our special-needs kids—but at a much more efficient rate
seabreezy

Education Week: Classroom-Tested Tech Tools Used to Boost Literacy - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...02literacy.h04.html

technology literacy education adolescent learning improves increase skills digital literacy digital fluency web2.0 television

shared by seabreezy on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • For instance, in her classroom, Sullivan uses photos licensed under creative commons, an alternative to copyright that allows varying degrees of sharing, as a jumping-off point to start a conversation with her students. “It gives them a mental image to connect to,” she says, “a familiar, relatable scene so we can discuss what we see in the photo as a class and build the vocabulary.” Then the students can transition into a writing exercise, says Sullivan. Sullivan also uses audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs for the students to take home and listen to
  • seabreezy on 14 May 14
     
    "For instance, in her classroom, Sullivan uses photos licensed under creative commons, an alternative to copyright that allows varying degrees of sharing, as a jumping-off point to start a conversation with her students. "It gives them a mental image to connect to," she says, "a familiar, relatable scene so we can discuss what we see in the photo as a class and build the vocabulary." Then the students can transition into a writing exercise, says Sullivan. Sullivan also uses audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs for the students to take home and listen to"
wickizer

How The Internet Saved Literacy - Forbes - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...x_mf_books06_1201literacy.html

internet literacy forbes

shared by wickizer on 16 May 14 - Cached
  • The Internet has become so pervasive that to be truly literate in 2006 demands some degree of technological fluency or at least familiarity. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 73% of American adults had used the Internet or e-mail as of March 2006. For the first time, the National Association of Adult Literacy—the most wide-ranging U.S. study of literacy—will test computer literacy in its 2008 survey that measures overall literacy. With such a large proportion of reading and writing taking place on the Internet, literacy has changed from a solitary pursuit into a collective one. “You aren’t just a consumer of text anymore,” says Margaret Mackey, a professor at the University of Alberta’s Library and Information Studies Department. Reading now demands an almost instantaneous response, whether through commenting on a blog or writing a review on Amazon . The Internet has shortened the feedback loop on writing and has made readers more active participants, says Matt Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. “Reading is more intimately associated with writing,” he says.
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