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)