The ease with which young people communicate, though, can help in advancing literacy in a digital age.

"People are often concerned that technology will detract from students' literacy skills, but it is important to look at all the new things we can do to support literacy and learning," said Alyssa Wise, assistant professor in Simon Fraser University's faculty of education, who works with the program on educational technology and learning design.

"You can think about it as new forms of literacy," she said. "It is important to think about the ways computers can help students become more literate. Computers enable us to do much more."

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.

technology as an independent variable, were aimed at kindergarten-age students, included early literacy development, and were published after 2001.

There is positive evidence of the role of technology in supporting early literacy acquisition for this age group. In a majority of the studies used in the analysis, there was a lack of attention paid to the role of the teacher. The specific study outcomes may be promising but they may also be more difficult to replicate without this information.

First, technologies have affordances and constraints making them more or less useful in different circumstances

Before there were cameras, computers, or even books, stories held the knowledge of all civilization

In this age of multimedia, a new kind of storytelling has emerged. Digital Storytelling takes the art of storytelling and adds elements of sound, video, and photo images to create a multi-dimensional tale that draws the reader into the story. It's an excellent tool to encourage students to take their writing to a new level as well as a way to bring technology into your curriculum.