Joshua Welch's List: Instructional Technology Coordinator

• The Internet, like all intellectual technologies has a trade off. As we train  our brains to use it, as we adapt to the environment of the internet, which is  an environment of kind of constant immersion and information and constant  distractions, interruptions, juggling lots of messages, lots of bits of  information. As we adapt to that information environment, so to speak, we gain  certain skills, but we lose other ones. And if you look at the scientific  evidence, it’s pretty clear particularly from studies of like video games, that  use of online media enhances our – some of our visual cognitive ability. So our  ability to spot patterns in arrays of visual information to keep track of lots  of things going on at once on a screen but along with that, what we lose is the  ability to pay deep attention to one thing for a sustained period of time, to  filter out distractions.
• With the arrival – with the transfer now of text more and more onto screens, we  see, I think, a new and in some ways more primitive way of reading. In order to  take in information off a screen, when you are also being bombarded with all  sort of other information and when there links in the text where you have to  think even for just a fraction of a second, you know, do I click on this link or  not. Suddenly reading again becomes a more cognitively intensive act, the way  it was back when there were no spaces between words. And as a result, I think  we begin to lose the ability to read in the deepest, most interpretive ways  because were not kind of calming our mind and just focusing on the argument or  the story.

• Literacy has been described as the ability to read for knowledge and write coherently and think  critically about the written word. Literacy can also include the ability to  understand all forms of communication, be it body language, pictures, video  & sound (reading, speaking, listening and viewing)
• Reading development involves a range of complex language underpinnings including  awareness of speech sounds (phonology), spelling patterns (orthography), word meaning (semantics), grammar (syntax)  and patterns of word formation (morphology),  all of which provide a necessary platform for reading fluency and comprehension.

  • Let's note that Mathematics contains elements of all of these things too.
• information and insights from text as the basis for informed decisions and  creative thought.^[

• Teaching English literacy in the United  States is dominated at present by a conception of literacy that focuses on a  set of discrete decoding skills. From this perspective, literacy - or, rather,  reading - comprises a number of subskills that can be taught to students. These  skill sets include: phonological  awareness, phonics (decoding),  fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Mastering each of these sets of  subskills is necessary for students to become proficient readers.^[36]

   

  From this same perspective, readers of alphabetic languages must understand the alphabetic  principle in order to master basic reading skills. A writing system is said  to be alphabetic if it uses symbols to represent individual  language sounds,^[37]  though the degree of correspondence between letters and sounds varies across  alphabetic languages. Syllabic  writing systems (such as Japanese  kana) use a symbol to represent a single  syllable, and logographic writing  systems (such as Chinese) use a symbol to represent a  morpheme.^[38]

   

  There are any number of approaches to teaching literacy; each is shaped by  its informing assumptions about what literacy is and how it is best learned by  students. Phonics instruction, for  example, focuses on reading at the level of the word.^[37] It teaches  readers to attend to the letters or groups of letters that make up words. A  common method of teaching phonics is synthetic  phonics, in which a novice reader pronounces each individual sound and  "blends" them to pronounce the whole word.^[37] Another  approach to phonics instruction is embedded phonics instruction, used more often  in whole language  reading instruction, in which novice readers learn about the individual letters  in words on a just-in-time, just-in-place basis that is tailored to meet each  student's reading and writing learning needs.^[37] That is,  teachers provide phonics instruction opportunistically, within the context of  stories or student writing that feature many instances of a particular letter or  group of letters. Embedded instruction combines letter-sound knowledge with the  use of meaningful context to read new and difficult words.^[39] Techniques such as  directed  listening and thinking activities can be used to aid children in learning  how to read and reading  comprehension.

  • This is the definition "has been described as the ability to read for knowledge and write coherently and think critically about the written word. Literacy can also include the ability to understand all forms of communication, be it body language, pictures, video & sound (reading, speaking, listening and viewing)." And our method of teaching it is described as the mechanics of teaching phonetics. Sad but true?

  • Doesn't this whole section seem so shallow in comparison to the definition of litteracy above?

2 more annotations...