Literacy and Technology Fall 2021

SEL & The Use of Technology      Social-emotional learning (SEL) has become a priority in a growing number of classrooms. Especially now as students and teachers wrestle with the changes and uncertainty brought about by school closures during the pandemic.  Social-emotional learning is seeing an increase in the educational landscape. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic clearly illuminated the fact that academic growth and social and emotional wellness are interdependent and that educators must take into account the social and emotional aspects of a student’s reality as they consider academic development.       Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, social-emotional learning was essentially its own entity. It’s now, however, become connected with other instructional practices, including the use of technology.  SEL and SEL practices have been designed to empower each student to have a voice and to expand their minds.  For starters, educators...

  Image Credit: ISTE ( International Society for Technology in Education) Before exploring ISTE’s resources last week, I thought digital citizenship dealt mainly with online safety and treating others with respect online. While this is undoubtedly important, digital citizenship has a much broader and more empowering focus. Richard Culatta talks in this keynote about the actual concept of digital citizenship: “using technology to make your community better, to respectfully engage with people who have different beliefs than yours, to be able to shape and change public policy,” and “to be able to recognize the validity of online sources of information.” ISTE identified five core tenets of digital citizenship. Be Inclusive: respectfully and thoughtfully engage with others online, even when you have different opinions; be kind and show empathy. Be Informed: evaluate online sources for accuracy and validity; consider the author’s perspective and possible bias. Be Engaged: how can we use ...

  As technology has become more prominent in education, online literacy programs have become a staple in many elementary school classrooms. Many of these online programs target students' reading comprehension and fluency. Districts around the country purchase subscriptions to these programs for their teachers to use and often require students to spend a minimum amount of time on the program per day or week. While these programs can be helpful tools to differentiate literacy based on each students' reading level and skills, are they engaging enough for the amount of time students spend on them?  Here is a list of just a few online literacy programs that I have seen used in elementary schools and a blurb from their websites: Lexia Core 5 Reading  " Lexia  Core5  Reading is an adaptive blended learning program that  accelerates the development of literacy skills  for students of all abilities, helping them make that critical shift from learning to read to...

As the technological world continues to progress we are seeing it used in classrooms more and more. Technology can have so many positive educational benefits, and open doors to endless possibilities. With that being said, this boom of technology use in the classroom has created the digital divide . What Is The Digital Divide? It is the idea that as technology use in schools continues to grow, we are creating a gap between students with the financial means to access technology and those who cannot. This gap causes students who do not have easy access to fall behind due to the hurdles they have in their efforts to keep up. Looking at the history of technology in schools, computers were making their way into classrooms as early as the 1980s. During this time public schools were receiving funding by the government to provide these resources. However, eventually that government budget ran out and schools had to begin to pay for technological resources using local property taxes. This is whe...

  Building Empathy in the Classroom Have you noticed that your students could use support in having more empathetic responses in social and academic settings? Are you studying a topic that may be sensitive for some of your students? Do you feel that you need to deepen students’ ability to understand one another and or write about emotions in characters that you are teaching?  The past year and a half has been more challenging than any other. The world that we live in has changed dramatically and in response to this drastic change it is more important now than ever that we treat each other with empathy. With that being said, our children need to be equipped with language to identify and express their emotions so that they may better identify their feelings in any given situation as well as connect with others emotions. Teaching and building empathy in a classroom is no easy task, but is vital to our classroom communities.  According to the article, “How to Build Empathy an...