WEB 2.0 – WIDENING THE LITERACY GAP?

June 8, 2008 at 10:26 pm | Posted in ICT, literacy, Technology | 1 Comment
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Authored by Chris Woods
(Each student in GMST has written their own post for our class blog.)

The Thornburg Center blog quotes Chris Dede, who In a 1997 statement to the Public Communication of Science and Technology Panel says,

The most dangerous experiment we can conduct with our children is to keep schooling the same at a time when every other aspect of our society is dramatically changing.
Although this was penned in 1997, it perhaps rings more true today than ever, considering the prevalence of the idea of Web 2.0. The tools available to classroom teachers are more powerful than ever before, and without any doubt, more and more educators will begin to take advantage of these tools, providing great long-term benefits to their students.

One unfortunate aspect of the Web 2.0 concept that exists is its availability, or the lack thereof. As a prospective urban teacher, how can I be excited about the use of Web 2.0 in my classroom when my district’s resources are a mere fraction of surrounding districts? Will Web 2.0 simply widen the literacy gap between students in high-needs districts and those who are not?

On-line Comprehension

February 14, 2008 at 12:12 am | Posted in Content Area Literacy, ICT, literacy | 31 Comments

For the past 3 weekend sessions we have been exploring a plethora of strategies (pre, during, post) for developing content area literacy including vocabulary instruction, think-alouds, reciprocal teaching, Socratic seminars, note-taking skills, and use of graphic organizers just to name a few. Identifying alternative, more authentic sources to a textbook to use within the content areas has also been a focus, but the more I reflect, the more I feel we need to design specific strategies for developing on-line reading comprehension skills. We are still stuck in the “book” mode even with incorporating alternative text sources.

Session handouts from the 2008 TRLD Conference are available
on-line and one I found that connects with the need for a closer examination of on-line reading comprehension can be found under the Friday session keynote: How Reading Comprehension Has Changed While We Weren’t Looking, Donald Leu.

Leu is also part of The New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut where research is being conducted on the new reading comprehension and learning skills required by the Internet and other emerging information and communication technologies. For further information on this research, go to the Publications page where many articles can be downloaded for personal use.

What have you discovered about on-line reading comprehension? Will the tried and true literacy strategies still be effective or even relevant in an on-line environment? What do we need to create, what can we modify, and what should we discard to develop our students’ literacy skills?

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