Also, you may want to consider the free and open source program Moodle as an alternative to Blackboard. Here is a recent EdWeek article that outlines the two programs.

If you choose to write a professional response on this, and connect it to our next topic of newer and multiple literacies, you could discuss the ways in which a management system such as Moodle can be used to support the goals of your writing workshop. How could it support key ideas from the workshop such as student choice and peer response?

Education Week: Market for K-12 Course-Management Systems Expands

Through Moodle, Ms. Tipton now posts reading passages and links to Web sites that are related to her lessons. She also has set up a popular online chat room for her students and posts homework assignments online, a feature that students as well as some parents have embraced. Moodle’s online capabilities, she said, are making her social studies classes a hybrid between traditional and online courses.

Ms. Tipton is part of a growing number of K-12 educators in regular classrooms who are using course-management systems to share assignments, homework, classroom assessments, and other information with students and their parents. A course-management system is a software program that allows controlled exchanges via the Internet of just about any kind of information related to a course, although the features of individual products differ.

iPods loaded with content In a place where not everyone has a home Internet connection or even a home computer, every student in grades three through eight has a personal school laptop to work on, and students in some grades get to take home iPods loaded with class content. Next year, the Le Flore County school district hopes to add a set of iPod Touch devices — essentially iPhones without the phone utility.

The technology is not there for looks. Students use it on a daily basis, and teachers make sure it’s used in a way that enhances the students’ education and not as a sanctioned distraction.

Reading, Writing and iPods? – Education – redOrbit

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The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading.
By Howard Gardner
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01

What will happen to reading and writing in our time?

Could the doomsayers be right? Computers, they maintain, are destroying literacy. The signs — students’ declining reading scores, the drop in leisure reading to just minutes a week, the fact that half the adult population reads no books in a year — are all pointing to the day when a literate American culture becomes a distant memory. By contract, optimists foresee the Internet ushering in a new, vibrant participatory culture of words. Will they carry the day?

Maybe neither. Let me suggest a third possibility: Literacy — or an ensemble of literacies — will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision.

The End of Literacy? Don’t Stop Reading.

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TOWARD A DEFINITION OF 21st-CENTURY LITERACIES
Approved February 15, 2008

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF 21st-CENTURY LITERACIES

This is timely given that we will soon turn out attention more specifically to twenty-first century literacies.

Also, I encourage you to think about how the principles outlined here align with what we have been learning about the principles of the writing workshop. This could be the basis for an interesting professional response.

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As you read this, think about the perspective that he is taking towards technology: is it just a tool? Is it a literacy practice? How are policies related to technology enforced? How are teachers positioned in the entire process of curriculum, assessment, and instruction?

A School That’s Too High on Gizmos – washingtonpost.com

For a while, I thought it was just older teachers like me — immigrants to the Internet world — who were chafing at the so-called technology initiative, but it turns out that even the youngest teachers are fed up. “They would rather have a cyborg teaching than me,” one young English teacher complained to me. “It’s technology for the sake of technology — not what works or helps kids learn, but what makes administrators look good, what the public will think is cutting edge.”

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When we think about we can do (and want to do) with our students in relation to writing and revising with technology, this election may determine a great deal about the ways in which we are able to reimagine schools and the teaching of writing.

Top News – Education, technology, and the 2008 campaign

As the campaign picture continues to become clearer, it’s time to take a closer look at the positions of all three candidates on issues relating to education and technology.All three candidates believe the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) needs reform—but Clinton and Obama would go much farther than McCain in proposing changes to the law.

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• In what ways is understanding and using technology a literacy skill? How does it relate to reading and writing?
• To what extent do I, as a language arts teacher, have the responsibility to teach my students these skills in an already jam-packed curriculum and school year?
• What are the specific skills that tests like these are attempting to assess and how do these skills relate to what you are teaching in a writing workshop including elements of choice, time, inquiry, revision, and publication?

Education Week: Tests of Tech Literacy Still Not Widespread Despite NCLB Goals

Any educator who’s ever had to ask a pupil to fix a computer might be surprised to learn that not all students are technologically proficient—or at least not savvy enough to be considered “technologically literate.”

While that term has no universal definition, the core idea could be boiled down to this: Technologically literate students not only know how to operate hardware and software—they can also analyze the information flowing through it, evaluate that digital content’s relative merit and relevance, and use it creatively and ethically in communicating with others.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law six years ago, made it a national goal for all 8th graders to be technologically literate. Unlike reading and math, though, tech literacy does not factor into the law’s school accountability provisions, and most states do not administer separate tech-literacy tests statewide.

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