Grant reflection on literacy

Inspiration for this post: Reading, Writing, and Technology: A Healthy Mix in the Social Studies Curriculum by Susan M. Tancock. http://www.readingonline.org/articles/tancock/index.html

This is an article that our entire group can take something from. In short, it is a summary and reflection of a grant project completed by an associate professor at Ball State University in conjunction with a local fourth-grade classroom. The focus of the grant was integration of technology into a social studies curriculum. Specifically, Tancock wanted to find out how reading and writing skills were affected by the use of technology.

The Internet element focused on Web quests, PowerPoint, and a classroom created web page. Students were given four focus areas and were assigned "Explorer journals" with which they wrote responses to higher-order thinking questions.

What I really enjoyed about this article was the depth of reflection. There are several paragraphs noting strengths/weaknesses, advice, and a wrap-up. Tancock divides the reflection into four sub-groups; reading, writing, language development, and technology. I will focus on the writing and technology, although I encourage you to check out the reading and language development sections.

Writing: This area proved to be the most challenging due to students' struggles with elements of PowerPoint (spell-check and using complete sentences in the notes section), as well as summarizing text. Despite much instruction, students did not adapt well. On a positive note, students were able to type with relative ease and it made reading a much more pleasing task for the teacher.

Technology: Students caught on quickly. The following quote relates to some of our readings and discussions about the need to focus on the instruction more than the technology: "I believe the children acquired technology skills easily because they were involved in meaningful learning activities. For example, had we attempted to teach the children how to navigate the Web for the sake of navigation, they would not have learned as quickly as they did. In fact, we spent little time (less than we thought we would need) on teaching technology skills. We demonstrated just enough for them to get started, and the students then either taught one another, learned on their own by trial and error, or asked one of us when they hit a snag. This proved very effective. We found that the children took a real problem-solving stance with the technology throughout the project. Their motto seemed to be 'When in doubt, click on something and see what happens' " (Tancock, p 9).

So here we have someone who has been through the numerous ups and downs of technology implementation and came to the conclusion that it is in fact more advantageous to center technology around the learning, not the other way around. This makes me think of our PowerPoint assignment. Dr. Ferdig gave us an assignment, provided some useful tech-help links, but first and foremost focused the assignment on the content. We had to read about learning theories before we could attempt to integrate the technology. Granted, some of our classmates likely had a prior understanding of the theories, but the purpose was still the same. No matter what, we as educators have a core curriculum to follow and it doesn't seem like that will change anytime soon. It seems like the best way to use technology successfully is to focus on the education and enhance with technology. A little trial and error never seems to hurt.