Hello, everyone, I am an ESL teacher who is in her first year of a PhD program in bilingual education studies through the department of Language Reading and Culture at the University of Arizona (Tucson).
We have been talking a lot in my class about the use of different technologies to promote literacy development. I would be interested to hear about how you incorporate the Internet in your classrooms. It would really help me with a paper/presentation I have to do for class!
Thanks!
Amanda Sox
PhD Candidate
LRC, College of Education
University of Arizona
Hi Amanda,
We, at our college in the UAE, have been using the internet for lots of things. One interesting use was
Project
Based
Learning with our beginner level students (around 400 students in our campus). Basically, this takes the form of a series of weeks throughout the academic year which are given over to doing integrated (maths, English, computers and personal development) themed projects. Examples have included health, environment, shopping, travel etc.
The students are organized into groups and must work
collaboratively to make a product, be it a poster, a holiday brochure, a medical pamphlet, a PowerPoint, whatever by the end of the week. Another important aspect of these products was, following (Kress, 1997), a move toward the recognition of the importance of visual literacy and the creation of
hybrid or multi-modal visual-verbal texts. It is all very well having a well written piece, Millard’s & Marsh’s (2001:55),
“continuous, uninterrupted prose”, but if it isn’t also visually appealing then it’s less likely that the other students would read it and therefore it has failed to achieve its goal. These were different types of “texts” and therefore,
“…invite[d] different types of literacy practices.” (Snyder, 2001:121).
Furthermore, although the end product was important, and indeed the students took great pains in the creation of their product, the emphasis, for the teachers, was on the process of retrieving and utilising the knowledge rather than the knowledge itself – the how, not the what. The benefit of this became clear as the classes progressed throughout the year. Whereas, at the start of the year, they were swamped by
infomania (Heim,1992), as they progressed they became better at sifting through the
datasphere (Rushkoff, 1994) and their visual literacy also progressed, cultural definitions of aesthetics aside.
Another use to which I have put the internet has been blogging. The students are shown how to create a blog on
blogspot.com which they are required to update weekly. The students must connect to the blogs of the other students in the group. I then mark their writing and create a series of questions based on the students’ blogs which the other members of the group have to answer. This mark is recorded and goes towards a final assessment.
Hope this helps.
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Heim, M. (1992). Infomania.
The metaphysics of virtual reality. New york: Oxford University Press.
Kress, G. (1997). Visual and verbal modes of representation in electronic mediated communication: The potentials of new forms of text. In I. Snyder:
Page to screen: Taking literacy into the electronic age. Sydney: Allen and Urwin.
Millard, E & Marsh, J. (2001). Words with pictures: the role of visual literacy in writing and its implications for schooling.
Reading Literacy and Language, (July).
Rushkoff, D. (1994).
Media virus: Hidden agendas in popular culture. New York: Ballantine.
Snyder, I. (2001). A New Communication Order: Researching Literacy Practices in the Network Society (117-131). In
Language and Education Vol. 15, No. 2 & 3.
