After reading the articles, these are the responses to the questions I have come up with:
- How have these readings changed, confirmed, or complicated your thinking about the effects of digital media on young people's abilities to read and write? Specifically, the article Can Texting Make You Smarter? really confused me but didn't sway my thoughts about texting. The article states that texting can strengthen phonology skills. This statement frustrates me. Just because a child can sound out a word, does not mean that they will be a strong speller. Also, the short wording used in texting or abbreviations is not a child modeling that he/she is a strong phonology speller; it shows laziness. I also disagree with the statement in that article that students know when and when not to use their chosen abbreviations. I still get papers where students use these abbreviations and I even get emails from adults with the use of texting abbreviations. ("Can texting help," )
- How have these readings changed, confirmed, or complicated your thinking about the effects of school-based writing instruction on young peoples abilities to read and write? In the article Writing Now it was a little disheartening to find out that not a single writing tactic can help every student or teach every student. I completely understand that we teach a diverse set of learners in a day, but what happened to the basic mechanics of writing? For example: indenting, capitalization, grammar, spelling, beginning, middle, and end points, etc. Speaking from our school's experience, I think we have gone too far from the basic writing instruction. Students now don't seem to know what a paragraph is or how to even properly construct one. I think if we are going to use technology in writing, it needs to be used as an enhancement to writing. For example: using technology for students to properly type stories; checking for punctuation, spelling, indenting, etc. When I went to college, I had an incredible English professor who took the time to teach me the little things about writing I did not learn in school. His patience, diligence, and need for me to be a well-rounded writer really helped me and prepared me for the mounds of essays and papers I was expected to write in college. I wish I would have learned the mechanics he had taught me EARLIER IN LIFE! ("Writing now: A," 2008)
- What changes do you think educators need to make so that reading and writing in school have a more positive effect on children's abilities to read and write? I think to have a more positive effect on students' reading and writing abilities, students first need to learn how to read and write. So many students are pushed through without being taught how to read and properly write. Students even more importantly need to be taught the five main components of reading: phonics, phonemic awareness, comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary. These, in my opinion are building blocks that begin with phonological processing. For example, for a student to be able to comprehend and use different and rich vocabulary, they need to have developed phonological processing and be engulfed in phonics instruction. I also think that this process starts in the beginning at home. Parents need to speak to their children and converse with them as much as possible. When speaking of how to incorporate digital media, I think it needs to be done carefully and with thought. It does not need to be used just to be used. Digital media needs to be used to enhance phonological awareness and phonics instruction.
- Find a video, online article, or blog post that supports your line of thinking. Summarize the information and explain how it provides evidence to support your thinking about the role of digital media on young people's abilities to read and write. I was able to find an article on Fairmont's library site. The link to the article is: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.fairmontstate.edu/docview/214900934 This article is written by Gary A. Troia, Froma Roth, and Steven Graham. I am very interested and have read several articles written by Troia. Troia has written many articles focusing on teaching through writing and also phonological processing and its influence on literacy learning. This particular article discusses intervention activities that target phonological issues while working with at-risk students. This article also speaks about how young children are capable of learning different sounds and how they need to be encouraged to develop these skills. Supporting my thought process of the importance of tapping into phonological awareness and teaching phonics, Troia, Roth, and Graham state in this article, "In recent years, phonological awareness has garnered much attention, both by researchers and by educators, because of its direct link with the acquisition of basic literacy skills. Studies have clearly demonstrated that children who perform well on sound-awareness tasks often become successful readers, whereas children who perform poorly on these tasks later struggle with word identification and spelling" (Troia, G. A., Roth, F. P., & Graham, S., 1998). These authors also suggest different intervention tasks that could be done using digital media. For example, deciphering which pair of words rhyme could be done on a computer, matching games where the student chooses the words with the same syllable pair could be done on the computer, etc. The authors also suggest a specific digital media game called "Daisy Quest". They state, "In DaisyQuest, the following skills are taught: rhyming, initial sounds, final sounds, and medial sounds. Daisy's Castle focuses on onset-rime blending, sound blending, and sound counting. For each skill, a tutorial as well as matching and judgment exercises are provided. A different scene is used for each exercise to maintain the child's interest. Correct responses are reinforced through verbal praise such as, "Keep it up," "Way to go," and "Super." Incorrect responses are accompanied by comments such as, "Not quite" or "That's not right." Frequently, though, more explicit error-correction procedures are necessary to improve a child's understanding and performances, so the teacher should be present throughout computer instruction" (Troia, G. A., Roth, F. P., & Graham, S., 1998).
- Find an image that supports your stance on the value of using digital media to support reading and writing instruction in school. Please provide proper attribution for any images you embed in your Blog (see support for providing attribution below.)
In this picture, a student is using a kindle to READ; not for gaming purposes.
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png" /></a><br /><span xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" property="dct:title">The pros and cons of tablet reading</span> by <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://images.google.com/search?as_q=kid+using+kindle&tbs=sur:fmc&tbm=isch#facrc=_&imgrc=hFeX7ZbID4OL8M%253A%3BTNjyW8YhKTlQmM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fblog.appsymap.com%252Fen%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252Fsites%252F3%252F2014%252F03%252FeReaders-for-Kids.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fblog.appsymap.com%252Fen%252F476%252Fthe-pro-and-cons-of-tablet-reading-for-kids%252F%3B560%3B370" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">http://images.google.com/search?as_q=kid+using+kindle&tbs=sur:fmc&tbm=isch#facrc=_&imgrc=hFeX7ZbID4OL8M%253A%3BTNjyW8YhKTlQmM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fblog.appsymap.com%252Fen%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252Fsites%252F3%252F2014%252F03%252FeReaders-for-Kids.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fblog.appsymap.com%252Fen%252F476%252Fthe-pro-and-cons-of-tablet-reading-for-kids%252F%3B560%3B370</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>.
Resources:
(2008). Writing now: A policy research brief. National Council of Teachers of English, Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Magazine/Chron0908Policy_Writing_Now.pdf
Can texting help with spelling. Scholastic Instructor, Retrieved from
Troia, G. A., Roth, F. P., & Graham, S. (1998). An educator's guide to phonological awareness: Assessment measures and intervention activities for children. Focus on Exceptional Children, 31(3), 1-12. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.fairmontstate.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/224045192?accountid=10797
