Brandy Billings's List: How Technology benefits literacy

• Digital Literacy is Necessary for Today’s Jobs
• Ninety-six percent of working Americans use new communications technologies as part of their daily life, while sixty-two percent of working Americans use the Internet as an integral part of their jobs.
• Between 1998 and 2008, the number of domestic IT jobs grew by 26 percent, four times faster than U.S. employment as a whole. By 2018, IT employment is expected to grow by another 22 percent.
• High-speed Internet access and online skills are not only necessary for seeking, applying for, and getting today’s jobs, but also to take advantage of the growing educational, civic, and health care advances spurred by broadband. For example, an increasing amount of activities – such as taking college classes, monitoring chronic medical conditions, renewing your driver’s license, tracking your child’s school assignments  – are now commonly conducted online.
• Digital Literacy Training is Needed
• Despite the growing importance of the Internet in American life, 28 percent of Americans do not use the Internet at all.
• While there is no single solution to closing the broadband adoption gap, increasing digital literacy skills among non-users is key to bringing them online and opening doors to opportunity.
• Curriculum materials such as lesson plans, student handouts, and class exercises that teach basic computer and online skills in formal and informal classroom settings.

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• Television can be another good way for English language learners to learn new words and improve their overall English skills. Of course, it is best when television is used in moderation, and when shows are appropriate for young audiences.
• five educational children's television shows that focus on either literacy, English language skills, or Hispanic themes.

• students browse social ­networking sites, blogs, websites and magazines much more frequently than they read books.
• One study surveyed more than 2,000 students aged 7 to 15. The other involved more than 3,000 students aged 9 to 16. According to these studies, 20 per cent of students never read fiction or nonfiction books, but about 67 per cent surf websites weekly, 55 per cent read e-mails and 46 per cent read blogs.
• Teenagers may not be reading books, but they are clearly interested in social networking.
• But do social networking sites have any educational benefits? Aside from helping students to make new friends, do social networking sites facilitate learning? The answer seems to be that they do. The National Literacy Trust found that social networking sites and blogs help students to develop more positive attitudes toward writing and to become more confident in their writing abilities.
• 49 per cent of young people believe that writing is “boring.”
• However, students who use technology-based texts such as blogs have more positive attitudes toward writing
• Whereas 60 per cent of bloggers say that they enjoy writing, only 40 per cent of non-bloggers find writing enjoyable.
• students who write blogs or maintain a profile on a social networking site tend to be more confident about their writing ability.
• More than 60 per cent of students who blog and 56 per cent of students who have a profile on a social networking site claim to be “good” or “very good” writers,
• compared with only 47 per cent of those who don’t use online formats.
• Having a blog also affects writing behaviour. Students who are active online are significantly more likely to keep a journal or write short stories, letters or song lyrics than those without a social networking presence.
• According to the ­research, 13 per cent of students have their own website, 24 per cent write a blog and 56 per cent have a profile on a ­social networking site.
• 82 per cent of students sent text messages
• 73 per cent used instant messaging,
• 67 per cent sent e-mails and 63 per cent wrote on social networking sites.
• 20 per cent of the older students attributed their poor writing skills to the fact that they do not write much.
• What can we conclude from research suggesting that blogging and using ­social networking sites such as Facebook may help to improve children’s writing skills and self-confidence?
• What is the significance of the finding that more than half of all students think writing is “boring” but that student bloggers enjoy writing more than their peers?
• Perhaps text messaging, social networking sites and blogs are a new form of literature that will soon be studied in schools in the way that books, plays and poetry are now.
• In Scotland, new curriculum literacy guides specify that children should be familiarized with new media and taught modern communication methods so that they will be able to function in today’s workplace.
• The guides emphasize the importance of teaching ­students how and when to use particular communication methods. For example, students are taught to avoid using abbreviated text language in e-mails in which formal language might be more appropriate.

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• University of Tasmania, psychology honours student, Catherine Bushnell, associate professor, Frances Martin and I looked at the links between “textese” use and the spelling ability in 227 children in grades 5 and 6, in three different schools.
• Of the 84% of these 10- to 12 year-olds who used a mobile phone, virtually all (96%) reported sending text messages regularly.
• What was most interesting, however, was that the number of textisms that the children produced was significantly related to their general spelling ability.
• This fits with the findings of UK researchers Clare Wood, Bev Plester and colleagues that suggest the children who are more fluent in using textese are the children with better literacy skills.

• Honours student Cathy Bushnell and I went on to ask a subset of 86 grade 5 and 6 children to read and write a set of messages on a mobile phone, half in conventional English, and half in textese.

    

  In this more detailed study, we again found positive links between fluency with textese, and higher literacy.
• But the research shows that for children who are good at reading and writing, text-messaging is just another way of using their language-related skills. In essence, those children that are good at one, are likely to be good at the other.
• One is phonological awareness, or the ability to figure out the series of sounds that make up a word, which then must be combined with knowledge of the series of symbols that can represent those sounds
• This skill is useful for spelling or reading real words. For example, “mate” sounds like “late” so if you can spell one, you can use that knowledge to spell the other.
• Phonological awareness could also help with making up or figuring out textisms. For example, you can write ‘l8’ for ‘late’, and you know ‘mate’ rhymes with ‘late’ so you can write “Hi, m8”

• As we become more fluent at reading and writing, we simply memorise the spelling of many English words.

    

  Similarly, children who are good at such memorisation are probably also good at remembering and using more textisms.

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• Technology has certainly changed the way we do everything. We work from our computers, we make friends online and we even find dates on the internet.
• Then there is literacy. The face of literacy has changed since the internet came along. We can download books and read the newspaper for one thing. We can also chat on the internet. That isn’t the best thing for our literacy, but it does have an affect on it.
• When a person can go online and find a discussion about a classic book, it can help them to understand the book al little bit better than they would have otherwise.
• We can also find much more written information on more subjects more quickly than we were ever able to do before.
• Reading has never been so easy and people are doing it much more than they ever did before.
• Most people on the internet don’t even realize how much they are learning everyday when they log on.

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• children watch a lot of TV – on average four hours a day, which turns out to be more time than they spend in school each year.
• having print and reading materials at home helps kids learn to read. And, the more they read, the better they read. Unfortunately, more than 30% of city children live in poor households which tend to have few books or reading materials.  One study found that poor families had, on average, less than one book per household.
• TVs must all have the technology to show captions and most programs and movies must have written transcripts. So, if you turn on your TV’s captioning feature, the words that are spoken – and many of the sounds as well – will appear in writing at the bottom of your screen.
• But, parents, teachers, and caregivers, given that most children are watching TV every day, why not turn on the captioning and let them “see” the words as they hear them? And for older children who can read, how about also turning off the sound so that they can follow along by reading the dialogue?
• I found web references about the use of captioning by English-language learners to improve their English and a few studies of remedial reading teachers who used captioned TV to get “reluctant readers” to read more.

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