October 7th, 2009
How important is 1:1 to literacy?
We heard yesterday morning that Macedonia is rolling out 53,000 Classmates to improve education throughout the country. At about the same time, I took a class about literacy in schools and ways to enhance both reading and writing skills in all grades and all content areas. One of the real takeaways from the class was the absolute need for students to read and write every day.
We certainly see this with our students. Our literacy specialist showed me data from our regular assessments where students made moderate progress throughout a year, but by the following fall, were back at their baseline reading levels from the year before. This just didn’t make any sense, I thought. However, as she pointed out, these are the kids who haven’t read and/or been read to for an entire summer. They haven’t touched a book.
Summertime is hard to address without changing the way in which we schedule our years. During the year, though, daily, intensive, level-appropriate reading and writing with feedback from peers and instructors is something we can provide. The exact pedagogy of literacy instruction in schools I’ll leave to the experts. What I can do is provide technological tools to support extensive writing and reading efforts.
As I watched videos yesterday and talked with colleagues about “writers’ workshops,” I saw a lot of kids spending a lot of time writing and rewriting. It was all by hand. Laborious writing, revising, and rewriting with paper and pencil, followed by peer editing, teacher feedback, and more rewriting. While this process is incredibly important, I couldn’t help but wonder if an infusion of technology might not allow the kids to focus more on the writing and less on the writing by hand.
Perhaps I’m missing something important here in terms of the actual, tactile act of writing - feel free to talk back and let me know if I am. However, when Google Apps, Word, and plenty of other tools allow easy tracking of revisions and have built-in facilities for editing and review, wouldn’t it make sense for students to not only be practicing writing every day, but also be practicing it using 21st Century tools? Don’t get me wrong: we all need to know how to write (as in paper and pencil). But for projects devoted to clear, written expressions of thoughts, ideas, and research, dispensing with writing by hand allows far more time to be spent on content once students have mastered basic keyboarding skills.
When was the last time you hand-wrote a document at work? And then revised it, rewriting it by hand? Even the staunchest handwriting advocates can’t argue that editing isn’t easier on a computer. Let’s pretend for a minute that every kid from the 5th grade onwards could have a laptop (it doesn’t matter if it’s a Classmate, an OLPC XO, or a MacBook; just assume they always have a laptop at their disposal). According to researchers from the University of Southern Maine (Maine has one of the largest 1:1 programs in the country),
The first in a series of studies aimed at evaluating Maine’s pioneering laptop program, Maine’s Middle School Laptop Program: Creating Better Writers concludes that the use of laptops improves scores on writing skills assessments, that more frequent use is linked to higher scores, and that writing skills of laptop users transfer to writing without a laptop.
Next –
>
Pages: 1 2
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
Subscribe to ZDNet Education via Email alerts or RSS.
(nt)
