Daily Archives: February 20, 2014

A multitude of communication resources

cartoon_newliteracies

When I saw this comic it made me chuckle.  I enjoyed the comic’s gentle reminder that children/youth routinely engage with and expertly navigate a variety of communication tools. Clare and I (Lydia) conducted a two-year collaborative self-study of our efforts to incorporate various technological resources (e.g. a wiki) into our pre-service literacy methods courses. This research helped us identify both the challenges and successes we encountered along the way.  Our research efforts also made us more mindful of why we chose to incorporate certain technological resources into our pedagogical practice — questioning for what purpose and to what end.   Through the analysis of our efforts we realized that we had initially seen technology as an end in itself, not as a tool to support learning. In the second year of the study, we focused much more on student learning and became more systematic in our efforts. Over the two years of the study, our identities as teacher educators shifted as our pedagogies became richer, our use of technology more fully integrated into our literacy courses, and we received validation from others and from each other.