neil mathis's List: Misinformation Debate

• A new study indicates that preschoolers become literate faster in a curriculum that uses video and online technology.
• They're great," she says. "As you can see, they're eager, they love the sound, they love the music. And I like the fact that they can get up and be engaged with the video. They don't have to just sit."
• "It was exciting to walk into the classrooms and see my children explain reversible change, and irreversible change, and actually know what they were talking about."

  • Interactive gaming that inspire's a child to focus on comparing and contrast
• The literacy curriculum in the study is based on the PBS television series "Super Why", launched in 2007 and released on DVD this year. It presents kids with a problem that can be solved with a word they must spell. Acquiring the right letters is part of the game.
• The study concluded that children, especially in low income groups, learned an average of 7.5 more letters than children who didn't use the system during the same time period.
• "I think one of the powerful draws of media is that it brings kids in. And that's a very important thing for building these basic, foundational literacy skills."

  • Interesting point:  It's also my belief once you bring them in, or if a child enjoys it; The possibilities are endless.  We all know once a person is doing something that they actually enjoying doing they're going to excel in it.  It's the inevitable.

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• For instance, in her classroom, Sullivan uses photos licensed under creative commons, an alternative to copyright that allows varying degrees of sharing, as a jumping-off point to start a conversation with her students.
• “It gives them a mental image to connect to,” she says, “a familiar, relatable scene so we can discuss what we see in the photo as a class and build the vocabulary.”

  • Connectivity, important when teaching today's youth.
• Sullivan also uses audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs for the students to take home and listen to.
• Most students in her classroom do not have computers at home, but they do have DVD players, says Sullivan. And having a variety of student-teachers record the words makes students more adept at recognizing what they are.

• “Hearing a model reader helps with the fluency and the comprehension,” she says.

   

  Recently, her class listened to the audiobook of James and the Giant Peach, and at the end of the unit, only two students did not pass the test—a vast improvement. When Sullivan gave her students a choice of reading their next book out loud or listening to the audiobook, they chose audio.

  • Another interesting fact: when we provide options for learning students tend to excel because the curriculum is tailored to their learning preference.

• Working with two elementary schools in Kansas, Frey observed 27 2nd through 4th graders over 16 weeks as they used webcams to see themselves reading and then he identified their mistakes.

   

  Within the first five weeks of the experiment, all of the grade levels made at least two fewer mistakes per minute.
• “New technologies are making amazing inroads into helping students overcome some of the challenges that have prevented people from keeping up with reading,”
• “The last two years I really looked at the data to see how the kids were doing using all of this technology, and in both the past two years, I ended the year with no children below grade level in reading,” she says. “I do think that technology has a very large part in that.”

• Parisi uses podcasting to help her students practice fluency.

   

  “One of the really neat things to do is have the kids edit their own podcasts,” she says. Then they can literally see the pauses or mistakes they made in the editing program and correct them.

• Parisi also uses blogs to engage her students in reading and writing.

   

  “They have contests to see who can get the most comments,” she says. And what most students have figured out is that the better their writing is, the more visitors and comments they receive.

  • Another example of technology increasing literacy and interaction among today's youth.
• Teaching students to read in an authentic context is a key part of being literate, says Jeffrey Wilhelm, a former middle and high school teacher who is now at Boise State University, where he does research on struggling readers.
• “Being literate has always meant the capacity to use a culture’s most powerful tools to create and communicate meanings,” he says. “If you’re not teaching with [technology], you’re not only not preparing the kids for the future, you’re not preparing them for the present moment.”
• 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,
• “Most of the technological [interventions] that I see are decontextualized,” he says, “but it’s only going to help [the student] comprehend better if [he or she] is inquiring about something [he or she] cares about.”

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• • Another documented study that confirms technology and the use of technical tools in an collaborative effort produce positive outcomes through "connectivity".

• • Technology without a shadow of doubt changed our traditional curriculum into a more interactive environment friendly learning forum.  Providing students with various methods of interactive learning.