A fellow EDC3100 student Leesa, posted this to her blog, and it really got me thinking. My intention is to create my web artifact for assignment one with an English context, and so the idea of Literacy came up. I know when my daughter first started the iPad program at her primary school in 2014, even I had some concerns. Was there enough focus on traditional literacy skills. Even just simple ones like handwriting, looking up works in the dictionary, self editing. Things we take for granted so many years past our own schooling. It’s not surprising Parents would be concerned that by embedding lots of ICT in classrooms, some of those skills would be lost. And truly some of them are still vital even in our tech-heavy society.
The aim for teachers is to provide a balance between using these new tools to foster a love for technology, an understanding of technological literacy and enhance traditional literacy skills as well.
The link Leesa provided does a pretty good job of all of that. It’s a list of 21 Literacy based Resources for ICT in the classroom. There are a few that are a particular stand out for me. I’ve talked about my middle daughter before, and our ongoing struggles with her phonic awareness. We think there is a deeper processing issue (dyslexia or similar) and so there is ongoing testing happening, but at the core we are really just after ways to support and encourage her learning so that she doesn’t fall so far behind that she loses faith. Here are two resources from the list that I think will be fab for her!
Word Hippo
Charlotte really struggles with sounds, and decoding sounds in words. So being able to type in a word she isn’t sure of the letter combination, and find other words that sounds the same (even if they aren’t spelt the same) will hopefully improve her knowledge of blending and sounds!
Missing Letters
This game works for me because it has a voice over that says the word, and requires her decode which letter will blend with the others around it to make the correct sound. And it has a lot of rounds (32) so lots of practice!
TrackStar
Okay, this one isn’t strictly for Charlotte, but certainly I could use it for her. This website allows you to create a set of online tasks from different websites, and assign that set to each student. The student then works through the websites, like a learning path, and TrackStar tracks their progress and results. This looks like a great tool for setting homework tasks with differentiation options!! Looking forward to having a play.
You can find it at; http://trackstar.4teachers.org/trackstar/
Happy Thursday!
Wxo
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