March 2003 — Features
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Integrating Technology Into a Reading Program
2002). One of the reasons for this is that technology is a great motivator for students. However, teachers must be careful that they are not using the technology in a way that prohibits learning. "The value of educational time spent on using technology to support students' literacy development rests on its ability to promote higher-level thinking, collaboration, constructivism, speed and information evaluation - i.e., those competencies required for the 21st century" (Asselin 2001).There is a big consensus that for our students to be prepared for the 21st century, they will need to have technological knowledge and skills. One way for students to get that knowledge is for teachers to integrate technology into their daily curriculum. In my classroom, the students are exposed to different types of technology that require them to use higher-level thinking, collaboration and information evaluation. For example, if the students read a book and are asked to create a story web using Kidspiration about how the book relates to them, then they are using high-order thinking. This is not just recalling information about what they read, but applying it to themselves. Also, when students read in groups they discuss what they have read with each other. Students can then use Timeliner to create a timeline based on the events in the book.
Furthermore, as new technologies emerge, students need to gain more knowledge on the types of literacy they see. Today, students interact with several types of literacies; they no longer just see words in books. Literacy education is very important because of the changes in the different literacy types.
"Technology profoundly affects the learning and teaching of literacy as well as the nature of literacy itself. It always has. The development of book technologies in the early 1500s set in motion the need for book literacies and many of the abilities we currently teach in our classrooms. Today, new literacies emerge as new technologies for information and communication demand new skills for their effective use. These include the literacies of word processors (e.g., using a spell checker or knowing how to format a paper), e-mail (e.g., managing a digital address book or effectively using an electronic mailing list) and the Web (e.g., using search engines to locate information on the Internet or knowing effective strategies to critically evaluate Web site information). As a community of literacy educators, we are responding to the emergence of these new literacies in many ways" (Teale et al. 2002).
Teachers are now focusing on five main areas of reading: phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension and fluency. Districts nationwide are looking at using different types of technology to help in these areas. The Software & Information Industry Association recently reported that in studies focused on reading and language arts, technology was shown to provide a learning advantage in the areas of phonemic awareness, vocabulary development, reading comprehension and spelling. When an early multimedia literacy program combines software with print, audio, visual materials and manipulatives, it provides teachers with a rich variety of tools to reach all individual learning styles (Grogan 2002).
