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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.
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Text messaging and literacy | Language Debates - 0 views

  • TEXTING, since its advent in 1992, has become well rooted in our daily lives. It started as a useful communication tool, as well as a bit of fun, being used between friends and writing in ‘secret code’.
  • It is common to adapt our language when texting or communicating via an electronic device, also known as CMC (computer mediated communication). When people send texts to friends they may write something like ‘wuu2’ instead of ‘what are you up to’ or ‘c u l8r’ for ‘see you later’. Texters usually want to send messages quickly, and shortening words or purposely misspelling for ease does this. This is also done to fit in with peers who text this way too. There is the fear that this ‘new language’ may replace Standard English and young people will become unable to use our language ‘properly’.
  • Tagliamonte & Denis suggest that “computer-mediated-communication [...] is not the ruin of this generation at all, but an expansive new linguistic renaissance” (2008: 27).  They are suggesting that this new variety of our language is an exciting development.
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  • There have also been studies conducted on the topic over the years. Varnhagen et al. (2009) studied 40 adolescent texters between the ages of twelve and seventeen and measured their spelling ability. In conclusion to their study, they “are optimistic that spelling ability is not adversely affected by instant messaging” (2009: 731).  They suggest that those who used more abbreviations and other features of texting were better spellers.
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21st Century Skills - Technology Literacy | Iowa Department of Education - 0 views

  • Regardless of current realities, literacy in any context is defined as the ability "...to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge society..." (ICT Literacy Panel, 2002) "....When we teach only for facts ... (specifics)... rather than for how to go beyond facts, we teach students how to get out of date." (Sternberg, 2008) This statement is particularly significant when applied to technology literacy. The Iowa essential concepts for technology literacy reflect broad, universal processes and skills.
  • Although it is important that current technologies be integrated into all teachers' classroom practices and all students' experiences, it is also important to understand the broader implications of the transforming influence of technology on society. For example, creativity, innovation and systemic thinking are requirements for success in this environment. Technology is changing the way we think about and do our work. It has changed our relationships with information and given us access to resources, economic and professional, that were unimaginable just a few years ago
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Quality Television Shows That Focus on Early Literacy | Homework & Study Skills | At Sc... - 0 views

  • Young children are constantly in the process of developing their ability to understand information and make sense of what is real and what is pretend.
  • This is why choosing appropriate television shows for your children is a critical element of their development. The good news is, watching developmentally appropriate programming with your children can have many positive benefits (bonding between caregiver and child, the introduction of new vocabulary words, exploring new places together, etc.).
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Can technology improve literacy skills? Yes, if done right - 0 views

  • 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."
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  • As an example, students today can more freely revise their work, not bound by pen and paper that makes revising a tedious and clumsy process. "Computers enable people to be more reflective about their writing," Wise said. "When a student is writing an essay and is not sure it is structured right to make a good argument, the text can be moved around and the different versions can be compared. "Using a computer can help support higher literacy skills."
  • "There are people I know who are doing amazing things with literacy and digital storytelling," said Wejr, who also teaches reading to the Grade 1 students in his school. "Right now I am using conventional methods for teaching reading because that is the culture of our school. "But there are Grade 1 teachers who are using technology in their classrooms, using the iPod touch in reaching, having pens you can speak into. "All these things that are happening are using technology as a way to promote literacy. The idea of a Grade 1 student writing a blog is fascinating to me."
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Critical Issue: Using Technology to Improve Student Achievement - 1 views

  • A decade ago, access to technology was limited and wiring schools was one of the nation's highest education priorities. Ten years of substantial investments have vastly improved this picture. According to the Secretary's Fourth Annual Report on Teacher Quality, virtually every school with access to computers has Internet access (99%), compared to only 35 percent of schools in 1994, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (Parsad & Jones, 2005). Public schools have also made consistent progress in expanding Internet access in instructional rooms, according to NCES. In 1994, 3 percent of public school instructional rooms had Internet access, compared with 93 percent in 2003. And between 1998 and 2003, the student-to-connected-computer ratio went from 12-to-1 to 4.4-to-1. Along with expanded access has come a growing pervasiveness of technology in society. For a generation of young people, technology, particularly the Internet, has assumed a substantial stake in their social and educational lives. A recent survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Hitlin & Rainie, 2005) found that roughly 21 million youth between the ages of 12 through 17—approximately 87 percent of the entire age bracket—use the Internet. Of those 21 million online teens, 78 percent (about 16 million students) say they use the Internet at school. This translates into 68 percent of all teenagers, up from 47 percent in 2000. The survey also found that most teens believe that the Internet helps them do better in school (86 percent of teens, 88 percent of online teens).
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    Having access to technology in the classrooms, makes learning fun. Modernizing the tradition classroom environment makes it more eye appealing to the modern student, causing the student to engage in classroom activities more and more . Students who might struggle with lessons can now go on the internet and receive information to help in daily lessons.
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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 .
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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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Education Week: Classroom-Tested Tech Tools Used to Boost Literacy - 1 views

  • Technology, such as the Internet and Web 2.0 tools, makes it easier for teachers to tap into students’ interests and personalize what they are reading, he says.
  • The Internet allows her students to engage with an authentic audience, says Parisi, which motivates them to record podcasts or write blogs that are more polished than what they might create for just the teacher.
  • And using technology also provides an opportunity to teach other kinds of literacies, such as digital and media literacy, says Van Sluys.
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  • Technology can help “extend a teacher’s reach”
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    "The Internet allows her students to engage with an authentic audience, says Parisi, which motivates them to record podcasts or write blogs that are more polished than what they might create for just the teacher. "
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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.
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The Future of Reading - Literacy Debate - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.
  • Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.
  • Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.
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TV can improve literacy - Free Press - 0 views

  • "Moderate amounts of television viewing were found to be beneficial for reading," states Annie Moses in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, further stating that "programs that aim to promote literacy in young children have been found to positively impact specific early literacy skills".
  • Moses found in a broad review of past studies and publications in the field, that children with a moderate amount of age appropriate exposure to television (even from a very young age) actually have better literacy outcomes, with no detectable difference in emotional stability or overall development.
  • In this age of digital cable, satellite TV, and public television programming ripe with educational programs, parents have a large variety of material to choose from when selecting programs for their children.
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  • The success of programs such as Dora the Explorer, Diego, Sesame Park, Between the Lions, Super Why and a large force of other educational cartoons speaks to the growth in a field once dominated by only two or three programs.
  • If the scientific and psychological research reviewed in this study has demonstrated anything, it's that television, like all forms of entertainment, is healthy in moderation and with some level of supervision.
  • Further, if parents are particularly careful about program choices, research shows that they may even improve their young child's future literary development.
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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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Technologies for Acquiring and Making Literacy - 1 views

  • 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
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  • More importantly, electronic storybooks impacted literacy skills differently based on the interactivity they afforded and the number of student interactions offered.
  • Technology can positively impact emergent literacy acquisition, however, it does not mean it always will. Some electronic storybooks used in certain ways can positively impact literacy skill development, however, it does not mean all e-books will work all the time, even if they demonstrate success in one environment.
  • In the end, such analyses help us evaluate our current literacy stances. Are we creating new technologies that mirror our pedagogical stances? Are technologies pushing our pedagogical strategies in intended and unintended ways? And/or are we utilizing the technologies outside of literacy to better inform our pedagogical needs in literacy acquisition and instruction?
  • It simply demonstrates a lack of published research on technologies and experiences rooted in student development and production for those age and date ranges. Compare this to the movement of production as literacy as evidenced by the coding movement or the notion that production can lead to literacy gains (e.g. see Jason Ohler’s resources about Digital Storytelling in the Classroom).  Think about the “maker movement” (e.g. http://makerfaire.com/) identified through tools like 3D printers and Lego Mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com).
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Using Technology to Support Literacy | Scholastic.com - 1 views

  • 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.
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Middle school special education reading teachers' experiences utilizing Stu...: EBSCOhost - 1 views

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    "his study used interviews, observations, and analysis of Study Island reporting data in order to understand the experiences of the teachers and determine if the middle school boys were progressing in their literacy ability. The results of this study revealed that Study Island was effective if students were well-behaved and focused on the material, thereby enhancing the teachers' perceptions of personal satisfaction."
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Engaging literacy: A case study in the use of e-reader devices: EBSCOhost - 2 views

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    "The researcher of this case study sought to determine whether e-readers could be useful in solving the problem of struggling readers not being engaged in reading. Student participants in this research study were engaged and motivated to read on e-readers. Students' self-efficacy was impacted by the use of an e-reader and the literacy skills of comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary improved for these struggling readers."
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