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bengalsfanatic

How to Improve Literacy Rates in America - 0 views

  • The best method the government can use to improve literacy rates in America is to advance the system of education and education technology. Of course advancing the education system isn't as simple as it sounds. Increasing the budget on education and education technology is a good start but without a proper plan then there is a possibility that the increased budget will only provide disappointing results. The first priority should be researching the effectiveness of schools when it comes to increasing literacy rates so that the government can find out if the teaching methods should be revised. There is also the possibility that some schools aren't accessible to the poor and that the government needs to provide financial support. This is the reason why thorough research is needed before advancing further into the plan. After adequate information is gathered, the Department of Education can devise a nationwide plan to enhance the education system.
  • People can also make good use of education and education technology to reduce the number of illiterates in America. The internet can be used as a great tool to promote learning since it has such a wide range. Almost everyone has access to the internet and if it is utilized properly, it can spread literacy advocacies like wildfire. This can be done quite easily by using the popularity of social networking websites to speed up the process of spreading information. If enough people are made aware of the literacy problems in America then it will make the task of improving literacy rates easily achievable.
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kjroach

Education Update:Leveraging Technology to Improve Literacy:Leveraging Technology to Imp... - 1 views

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • According to MacArthur, word-prediction software, which generates lists of potential words as students type initial letters into the computer, can also help students dramatically improve the legibility and spelling of their writing. In a 2006 article in the Handbook of Writing Research, "The Effects of New Technologies on Writing and Writing Processes," he explains that his series of three studies of 9- and 10-year-olds with severe spelling problems showed that these students' legible words increased from 55 to 85 percent, and their correctly spelled words rose from 42 to 75 percent.
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  • Reading Buddies program, which uses MP3 players to increase the literacy skills of beginning readers at Howard Elementary School in Eugene, Ore.
  • 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."
  • Greig found that, for these students, the program's benefits included higher test scores as well as increased comprehension and confidence. "These were kids who, in a large or small group, would just as soon not give answers—they'd be in the back making trouble," Greig notes. "In two weeks, they were the kids raising their hands and saying, 'I know that.'"
  • 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, Egli says. "They're better able to make use of classroom instruction because they can understand the language of the instructor better," she explains.
  • Recent summer school data revealed that this combination of technology and direct instruction helped some students improve as much as two grade levels in their word attack skills over six weeks, Egli says.
  • "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," she says.
bengalsfanatic

Why is Digital Literacy Important? - Purposeful Technology-Constructing Meaning in 21st... - 0 views

  • Literacy skills have always been important. In centuries past, people communicated via letters. These letters soon turned into telegraph messages. From there we advanced to the telephone, internet and then text messaging via a phone. Today's options for communication far outweigh the one or two of generations pasts. "Children learn these skills as part of their lives, like language, which they learn without realizing they are learning it." (N. Andersen, New Media and New Media Literacy: The Horizon Has Become the Landscape—New Media Are Here,; report produced by Cable in the Classroom, 2002, pp. 30–35) Students today learn in ways that their teachers could not even imagine decades ago when they were in school. Students learn technology just like they do the spoken language, by doing and today it is not uncommon for a 3 year old to have some basic knowledge regarding how to get on to the computer and load a game (hopefully educational). The way students learn and their abilities to showcase their learning has surpassed the years of book reports, posters, and shoe box representations. "We will not be able to achieve a liberating, collective intelligence until we can achieve a collective digital literacy, and we have now, more than ever, perhaps, the opportunity and the technologies to assist  us in the human project of shaping, creating, authoring and developing ourselves as the formers of our own culture. To this end, we must create the conditions for people to become wise in their own way."  (Poore, M. (2011). Digital Literacy: Human Flourishing and Collective Intelligence in a Knowledge Society. Australian Jouranal of Language and Literacy, 19 (2),20-26.)
  • Digital literacy is one component of being a digital citizen - a person who is responsible for how they utilize technology to interact with the world around them.Digital technology allows people to interact and communicate with family and friends on a regular basis due to the "busy constraints" of today's world.Not only do white-collar jobs require digital literacy in the use of media to present, record and analyze data, but so do blue-collar jobs who are looking for way to increase productivity and analyze market trends, along with increase job safety.
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    I feel these actions being processed now will help Digital Immigrants to become Digital Natives . As well as their children and spouses to become more and more familar with new technology . The children being taught to use this process not only help themselves in learning.But may also impact their parents lives by showing them as well .
gamemastr777

Using Technology To Increase Literacy Skills - 0 views

  • Computer reading software programs give the student the opportunity to manipulate text and have words and sentences presented in a way that makes learning the sounds and words easier. Teachers are better able to individualize reading instruction by having the ability to construct customized reading materials. Children with visual impairments and visual processing difficulties can have larger sized text and extra spacing between words. Text can be repeated as often as necessary and the rate or pace of speech can be adjusted for students with auditory processing difficulties. The use of graphics, sound, and animation can help to motivate and encourage children to complete reading tasks more successfully.
  • Creative writing programs can help stimulate children’s creativity and make them more successful at writing stories and assignments. Word prediction programs are available and can offer students help with spelling, word finding, and auditory processing difficulties. Good writing programs include features such as text-to-speech with male and female voices, the ability to enlarge text, different font choices, the use of color coding and highlighting, spell checkers and grammar and punctuation dictionaries.
  • Computer-aided writing software can assist students with handwriting and other expressive writing problems. Talking word processing programs can make writing tasks easier for students with learning disabilities
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    Love the first paragraph. It explains a lot about how technology can help children with visual problems. Technology also helped Stephen Hawking by letting him use his eyes to type and to also research other things to make him one of the most known scientists.
DJ Heath

David Crystal on why texting is good for language - 0 views

  • People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy.
  • Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
  • The fact that texting is a relatively unstandardised mode of communication, prone to idiosyncrasy, turns out to be an advantage in such a context, as authorship differences are likely to be more easily detectable than in writing using standard English.
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  • But the need to save time and energy is by no means the whole story of texting. When we look at some texts, they are linguistically quite complex.
  • The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.
  • Some people dislike texting. Some are bemused by it. But it is merely the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings.
  • We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English. The language as a whole will not decline. In texting what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution.
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