Transitioning from Traditional Literacies to New Literacies in Reading Workshops.

In this blog, I refer to a couple of important issues discussed by Lotta C. Larson in her article(Larson, 2008); “Electronic Reading Workshop: Beyond Books With New Literacies and Instructional Technologies”. The first idea which caught my attention is one espoused and mandated by NETS (National Educational Technology Standards) They provide standards for teachers and for students. Standards for the students direct teachers on preparing their students for the global society in which we now live. The NETS for teachers is a framework for teachers to transition their schools from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age. (p.121) Caribbean teachers are on the whole struggling to meet the mandates of NETS, since we have genuine socio-economic constraints which have affected the development of technological systems in our various school systems as a whole and in our individual (island) literacy development strategies in part. The Reading Specialist Program at UWI is an attempt to improve or literacy levels in the schools and fortunately at this time many schools have been equipped with computers to facilitate the requirements of the MOE ICT policy and initiatives.

Larson (Larson, 2008), suggests that it is necessary to embed technology in literacy training workshops for teachers. Components of a reading workshop should therefore include not only the traditional approaches to literacy enhancement in that area, but also the new literacy applications. Each workshop should include for sections; literature selection, literature response journals, literature conversations, and project response options. In the Literature selection component, the traditional approach would be to select print texts such as novels, picture books and magazine articles. With the new literacy approach this aspect of the reading workshop should include an electronic component which would include e-books, online reading materials, hypertexts etc. Edrl 6004, in my view is addressing the new literacy aspect of literacy instruction. I think that it would be great to have a part two to this course because it is absolutely fascinating to think of the possibilities in classroom instruction with new literacy strategies and tools. Students at my school are particularly visual and verbal, but struggle with traditional print literacy especially with producing written materials, so I’m happy that I will be better equipped to teach literacy in the new term just with the basics that I have learnt thus far but I will definitely will be.