Reflections

The journey continues...... I have encountered some obstacles along the way, but I side stepped them. I encountered some hurdles but I jumped over them. I also encountered some 'potholes' that I fell into, but was quickly able to get out.

It is so easy to become overwhelmed and forget that along the journey of enlightenment there are going to be difficult times. I learnt to recognize that during these times we are provided support from our family, our friends, our colleagues, our teachers and from the Creator. I have learnt quite a lot about myself during this journey, I have learnt to persevere regardless of my fears and shortcomings. I learnt what it feels like to be a challenged learner, because that is what I was at the beginning of this course. My very limited knowledge about digital technology made me question whether I would complete this journey. But HERE I AM competent and confident, knowledgeable about technology and its potential a teaching tool, but more importantly hungry to learn more.

During this journey I have learnt about the wonders of Web 2.0, computing in the clouds, the many features of Microsoft Word (I did not know about), how to blog, how to create a wiki, how to create eBooks, how to access free eBooks, how to create digital photo stories, about podcasts, how to book mark, how to do a web Quest and so much more. But the most important lessons I learnt is how to use these technologies to motivate students and aid read and writing instructions.

I have to thank all my fellow journeymen; my tutors and colleagues for being part of this period of growth and enlightenment.

With laptop packed and the Internet accessible I am prepared to continue my journey of self development. I am committed to share the word that education cannot progress unless we ensure policies and practices are put in place to integrate technology into curricula and pedagogy. Only then, we will be working together to truly ensure 'no child is left behind'.

Photo-story

My introduction to Microsoft Photo Story3 activated my creative juices. My assignment was to take a few photographs from my immediate environment and create a photo story. The process was relatively simple and a lot of fun. I was able to add background music, but what really caught my fancy was the ease with which text, colour and fade-in, or transitions were done. As an instructional tool this technological application has great potential. My web search led me to a site that offers a variety of ways photo stories can be used in teaching. It is worth checking out.

Many of us have photographs on our desktops, our flash drives, or simply lying in boxes or drawers. We can scan, in the case of printed photographs, or open our 'pic' files and get started to creating family treasures or creative teaching strategies.

Here is my first photo story below. Can you recognize the famous actresses?

Motivation a key conponent

Motivation is an important ingredient in reading engagement. Challenged readers with a history of failure in school may come to us as severe reading casualties. As reading facilitators we need to address the problem of lack of intrinsic motivation, before we can address reading assessment and development. Kamil, Pearson, Barr, & Mosenthal (2009) agree that "motivation is crucial to engagement because motivation is what activates behaviour. A less motivated reader spends less time reading, exerts lower cognitive effort, and is less dedicated to full comprehension than a more highly motivated reader." (p. 408) We may therefore, need to engage our challenged readers in activities where we promote the aesthetics of reading, that honors students voices, without an emphasis on grades. For instance,students can listen to stories and give their views and emotional responses to the story, the characters or the setting.

Students must not be kept in a perpetual stage of slow paced reading instruction, but must be provided with authentic real world experiences that are meaningful and address their interest. Why can't a student who is interested in cars have reading instruction done on books or articles about cars?

Providing students with a sense of self-efficacy will boost their confidence to attain intrinsic motivation. Collaborative learning has been identified as a successful motivator. When students believe they can succeed and they have the support of their teacher and their peers they feel a sense of community. Tompkins, (2006) iterates that the role of effective teachers is to establish a community of learners in which students are motivated to collaboratively and purposely engage in reading and writing activities.

eBook exploration

iBook, wow! I want one. I believe we have found the answer to reading disengagement. The only problem is affordability. Don't be discouraged. We have the good old faithful PowerPoint which will allow us to create our lesson specific electronic books. A Google search will also provide us with lots of free eBooks we can download to our desk tops or laptops.

I must admit, I was really impressed by the simplicity and creativity of using PowerPoint to create an eBook. As an instructional tool these electronic books can aid in every aspect of reading development. Most importantly, teachers can design eBooks to address the specific needs of students. Electronic books can be designed in the dialect of the student and another in the second language, with the same content, to help in second language acquisition. It could be a good way to get our Creole speaking students to better understand how past tense is used in Standard English. ( Don't steal this guys, already completed)

Students would be so taken by the sheer interactivity of their eBooks, they may not realize they are learning important concepts. Isn't that what good teaching strategies are supposed to do? We will be 'showing students that there are many forms and reasons for reading." (Alvermann, 2001) Since our male students are more resistant to reading in the traditional way, think about the possibilities of having them create their own eBook.

Check out my eBook below. I did the illustrations myself!

The Internet - Gold or Coal

The Internet with all its wonders, can be a virtual Pandora's Box, at the tips of the fingers. We can be transported into arenas of deep philosophical discourse or into a world of virtual garbage. As educators we are not to fool our selves that we can control the multidimensionality of the digital technology our charges engage in or interact with. We need therefore, to explore what is out there and find out what our students are interested in, in order to help students become critical users of this pervasive technology.

Parents, educators and other interest groups need to learn strategies to evaluate websites in attempts to guide the hungry fertile minds to holistic knowledge acquisition. The saying 'garbage in garbage out' provides a fitting analogy of so much of what is available on the Internet. If as educators we fail to teach our children how to recognize garbage we may wake up one morning to find our children have disappeared, having been lured away by the proverbial music of the Piped Piper.

Teachers can help students evaluate websites and the quality of information by using the 5W's and 1R technique;

• What? - What does the article or information say? Does it answer the question you started with?
• Where?- Where is the source of the information? Does it have a person's name, organization, phone number, e-mail address, site address?
• Who? - Who is the author? Can you get in touch?
• Why? - Why did the author write this information? What is the purpose? Is there a clear point of view? any bias? any important omission?
• When? - When was the information written? Is it current?
• Really? - Is there any way to check the accuracy of the information using other sources? (Lewin,2001)

wiki quest

Wikis are not as easy to use as blogs. My attempts to analyze why I felt frustration at setting up my wiki account and creating a page, stemmed from the fact when I first heard the term wiki in my ICT teacher development course I immediately thought of Wikipedia; the online encyclopedia. I wondered whether I, with my limited experience was expected to create a webpage like Wikipedia. The nervousness I felt was because I was outside my comfort zone. This discomfort led my to reflect on my own attitude to technology, and how it has impacted on my professional development. I have to admit, I have not been a frequent user of digital technology, the most basic; my cell phone is used on a need to use basis. I check and send emails infrequently, I use the computer mainly for its word processing application; mainly to type assignments, mid and end of term exams and write recommendations for students. I do not have a profile on Face Book, nor do I surf the Internet often. I recognize I have deprived myself and my students of exciting modes of teaching and learning experiences, that has the potential to revolutionize my curriculum delivery. My engagement and fascination with digital technology has opened my eyes to why many of my students are disenchanted with traditional text based literacy.

Media technology offers instant gratification. Decoding is made simple by visuals, graphics, hyper-links, and other navigational tools that make the learning experience far more interactive and interesting. I realize it is important for educators to embrace the multi-digital literacy experiences students come to the classroom with, or we as educators will become as extinct as the dinosaurs.

Blogs revisited

I have wondered for quite some time how to transfer the enthusiasm my students share with Facebook to a real book. Now I realize it is not a transplant that is required , but a life line. I have observed my adolescent students speaking excitedly about face-booking, and how many friends they have on Facebook. When I questioned them about their frequency of use of Face book, their collective daily average was forty-five minutes. Homework is rarely done by many of these students, and in fact, many of them are alliterate, yet they spend extended periods of their leisure time engaged in the same activities I struggle to get them to do in the classroom. My introduction to Blogs is the life line I have been seeking. Engaging struggling and alliterate readers can be done through the use of blogs. Blogs are easy to use, they have the potential to promote literacy and dialog.

Blogs give students the same sense of community they enjoy on Facebook, this is especially important for struggling readers. Gunning (2006) agrees that "low achieving readers also need a sense of community. By being accepted and valued in the classroom and in reading and writing groups, low-achieving readers are motivated to try harder."(p. 19) Blogs can aid in all aspects of literacy development, it can also facilitate social collaboration. Students who never had a 'voice' in the class, can freely communicate with teachers and peers by blogging. Students are afforded the opportunity to be creative when blogging, while they engage in the process of reading and writing. I am particularly interested in using blogs to engage my male literature students in actually reading their literature texts. I hope to engage them in discussion of the text, and have them find ways to analyze thematic, character, structural and 'book to self issues'. Since social networking is already a part of the lives of our student, then as educators we need to use all tools available to us to help students acquire the literacy skills the need to succeed in and out of school. My investigations have taken me into literature teaching strategies using a computer virtual world with 3-dimensional characters to bring literature text alive.

As a new inductee into digital collaboration and social interaction as teaching and learning tools, I am concerned by the assumptions we make as educators. We all assume our students, our schools, our curricula and our policy makers have caught up with the need to integrate technology in educational pedagogy. It would seem with all I have been exposed to recently, there is a need to make some drastic changes in our educational system, or else we will eternally be playing catch-up. Many of our schools are without Internet access, we have antiquated equipment and too few computers.

Concept maps in action

My attempts to design a concept map for an assignment forced me to move away from lure of artistic to the fundamentals of concept mapping in websipration. Yes, it is indeed easier to create a concept map without having to draw bubbles and lines manually, while trying to get it to all fit on a page. But the time it takes to manipulate the software left me to question its application as a teaching tool. I recognize one has to pay attention to visual and layout considerations; the shape of the concept map, the size of the bubbles, the colour choices, the font size and the need to differentiate the main concept font from the minor or branched concepts. The issue of collaboration also requires some know how. It is very easy to edit your data unintentionally I discovered. But, luckily it is save automatically, so retrieval is possible. This experience brought to the forefront, the need for teacher competence in the use of software before use as a teaching tool. Detailed tutorials for students is an important prerequisite for students use of the software. The development of a rubric will help keep students focused and help them to design meaningful visually pleasing concept maps.

As teachers we need to focus on the importance of technology as a literacy tool in order to meet the demands of multi literate clients we serve, even if we sometimes feel a bit out of our comfort zone. We have to over come the fear 'of the new' to arrive at the point where we can become critical consumers of technology, to be thoughtful users who question, reflect, and refract on (Pope, 1999) on the best times and ways to integrate technology.(Pope, & Golub, 2000)

Journeying into the world of blogs

Blogs have been on my mind for quite some time, could it be the requirement of my IT course and the need to create twelve blog posts, maybe. It is I believe because blogging is so engaging. Blogs gives the user the freedom to create a space of interest. It is like owning a piece of land in the cyber-world. Blogs offer a lot of possibilities as a teaching and learning medium. As a reading specialist the possibilities for blog use are almost limitless. Not only can blogs satiate the need of technology interactivity by students it can help in :

• developing decoding skills - root words - prefixes - suffixes.
• analysis & identification of morphemes.
• promote reading fluency.
• promote vocabulary development.
• aid in comprehension.
• support writing skills.
• be motivational.

Concept mapping re-discovered

The re-exploration of concept mapping as an instructional strategy has me researching its applications on reading instruction. My interest was further piqued by Novak's (2008) view that concept maps can promote meaningful learning. Since I have used concept maps in the traditional chalk and blackboard, pen and paper forms, the introduction of Webspiration software excited me. After spending three hours working out the features of Webspiration I began to enjoy the creative aspect of the program. I recognize how easy it would be to, not only make instructional delivery more interesting and meaningful, but to appeal to the multiple intelligences of my students. As an educator my quest is ongoing, I'm always searching for meaningful ways to simplify content information to aid students' understanding. Concept mapping offers great possibilities for the challenged readers who may be turned off from the traditional modes of thinking, organizing information, summarizing, and learning difficult concepts. The collaborative nature of the concept web software is ideal to promote 'buddy learning'. I have discovered Kidspiration a kid friendly version of concept mapping. This program is easy to use, there are simple navigational prompts, a lot of colourful graphics and many more resources for reading specialists. And most importantly you are offered a thirty day free trial. It is worth exploring.

The journey continues...

My quest as a Reading Specialist has taken me to new frontiers. I have learnt about the theories that inform my practice as an educator, the many strategies available to help in teaching reading, how to assess and correct reading and writing difficulties and, finally, I am embracing digital and multimedia technology. Not only have I learnt about blogs and wikis, but I have learnt that the word processor I have been using for ages has many more features, like Track Changes Feature which is ideal for collaborative reading, writing and editing. This is a feature I can use with my students right away. I have also really started to explore the Internet as a research tool and I have found some useful links that are free and can help motivate students to read. I am committed to be an effective reading specialist. (Tomkins 2006) Effective teachers establish a community of learners in which students are motivated to learn and are actively involved in reading and writing activities. Teachers and students work collaboratively and purposefully.

The journey begins...

I am a mother of a ten year old boy and have been a teacher for over fifteen years. I love my jobs both as a mother and a teacher and I am constantly trying to find ways to improve my performance in both areas. In fact it is this need to find strategies to help my struggling students that prompted me to become a reading specialist.

My entry into my present school was a culture shock - never before I was exposed to so many students who had little interest in education. The majority of them were interested enough in school to attend regularly, but too many came for everything else but being in a classroom. They would roam the corridors, break classes and even gamble their days away. My attempts to address the problems took the form of remedial reading classes. I was quite enthusiastic and went about trying to source a room to conduct these classes. I was told space was limited, so my option was to use the library. I did not know it then, but the choice of venue was the catalyst for failure. I asked teachers to refer students they felt were struggling readers. Needless to say the numbers were large, in an attempt to reduce the large numbers I held lunch time reading assessment sessions. Did I mention I had no training as a remedial teacher, and had the full complement of periods, since I was a Form Teacher, an English Language and English Literature teacher? Well, I was able to reduce the numbers after my assessment, and met with students at prearranged times. The few who kept our appointments soon stopped coming because the library did no offer privacy, they did not want others students to know about their reading problems. The other students started docking classes out of sheer frustration. My lack of experience was mainly responsible, because I also felt frustrated by the process. After the experience I promised I would one day seek professional training. And here I am today, doing just that. .