Archive for Literacy and Technology

The arrival of a new generation of e-book readers in Canada, led by the Sony Reader PRS 505, is a story that suggests we’re nearing a peak of technological development. Does it mean e-book manufacturers will finally realize their dream of the past dozen years or so?

Technologically, perhaps. The Sony Reader PRS 505 is, compared to most of its competitors, small, capable of storing whole libraries, thin (15 mm, including its soft front and back leather-like covers), light enough (337 grams) to hold for a long period of time without fatigue, and ultimately really cool-looking. And the number of books being released is growing every day. Read more about the Sony eReader on the globeandmail.com website.

Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant messages, and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them. The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report titled Writing, Technology, and Teens in April 2008. According to the report, 85 percent of teens ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication. Teens generally do not believe that technology negatively influences the quality of their writing, but they do acknowledge that the informal styles of writing that mark the use of these text-based technologies for many teens do occasionally filter into their school work. View the entire report on The Pew Internet & American Life Project website.

How do you pronounce “Jon Scieszka,” author of The Stinky Cheese Man and the new U.S. Ambassador of Young People’s Literature? Or how about the British fantasy author of the bestselling Redwall series: Brian Jacques?

Imagine introducing one of these authors’ books to students in a classroom or library, and mangling the author’s name. A new online database will help you avoid these blunders. The Author Name Pronunciation Guide is a website created by TeachingBooks.net. The site features hundreds of prominent authors, including many winners of the Newbery, Caldecott, and Coretta Scott King awards.

To create the collection, TeachingBooks asks authors and illustrators of children’s books to call a designated phone line and say, “Hello, my name is…” They are encouraged to add a short bit about the heritage or personal story of the name, or just give a tip on how to remember to pronounce it (“Scieszka,” it turns out, rhymes with Fresca). The website now has more than 400 names, with new names added each week. To hear the pronunciation of your favorite author’s name, visit the TeachingBooks site.

OMGYG2BK. As any teen parent knows, kids today don’t use cell phones to actually talk to each other: They text. Now it turns out teens aren’t the only ones texting their way into history. New survey results released by the Pew Internet & America Life Project show that 58% of adult Americans are using cell phones and other mobile devices for non-voice activities. And, for the first time, more Americans say cell phones—rather than landline phones—are the one technology device they couldn’t live without.

Did anyone else feel the earth shift? Americans now value cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs) over the internet and television—RLY. This quest for faster, mobile access is transforming communication. And young adults, particularly Hispanics and African-Americans, are leading the way. The trend is particularly strong among Hispanics, 73% of whom say they send or receive text messages. This compares with 68% of African-Americans and 53% of white adults. Read more in eSchool News online.

The Library of Congress—the largest library in the world and the oldest U.S. federal cultural institution—on Saturday, April 12, 2008, will debut an immersive, new “Library of Congress Experience,” offering visitors unique historical and cultural treasures brought to life through cutting-edge interactive technology and a companion website.

There will be new ongoing exhibitions, dozens of interactive kiosks, an inspiring multimedia “overture” on the collections and programs of the Library, and a continuing online educational experience at the upcoming website. Detailed information on the Experience can be found online.

Next time you see kids wearing ear buds and a smile, don’t assume they’re rocking out to Hannah Montana. They may be listening to the classic novel The Secret Garden.

Portable listening devices—now a decade old and ubiquitous among American children—are being used to listen to audio books, in part shifting comprehension from the written to the spoken word. Newark-based Audible.com, the largest provider of downloadable audio books, yesterday launched its AudibleKids.com division at the North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey. Dozens of middle-school students got a free Zen Stone Plus MP3 player to download some of the 4,000-plus titles on the new website. Audible has been very successful: Amazon just bought the company for $300 million.

Parents may be the initial core audience for the service, but it’s drawing interest from schools, teachers and children’s librarians as a way to encourage kids to read. Listening to literature is one way to reinforce comprehension, experts say. Nonetheless, some worry the service may threaten traditions such as parents reading bedtime stories. Read more in The Star-Ledger online.

The little black devices, the shape and size of small cellphones, have begun to appear in hundreds of Washington, DC, area classrooms. Hanging from the necks of elementary school teachers in Alexandria and kindergarten and first-grade teachers in Prince George’s County, they might herald the most significant change in classroom technology since the computer, some predict.

They are infrared microphones, designed to raise the volume and clarity of teachers’ voices above the distracting buzz of competing noises—the hum of fluorescent lights, the rattle of air conditioning, the whispers of children and the reverberations of those sounds bouncing off concrete walls and uncarpeted floors.

“It makes it so much easier for the children but also for the teachers,” said Lucretia Jackson, principal of Alexandria’s Maury Elementary School, one of the first in the area to use the devices. All Alexandria elementary school teachers now have them. “They are no longer suffering from laryngitis,” Jackson said. Read more in The Washington Post online.

ePals, Inc., an Internet-based global learning community, and National Geographic Ventures (NGV), which creates and distributes digital content for the National Geographic Society, are partnering to enhance the ePals site with National Geographic content. The partnership is intended to appeal to the rapidly growing ePals’ Global Community™, which reaches more than 13 million students and teachers in 200 countries and territories.

Initial topic areas of focus include maps and geography, habitats, global warming, natural disasters, people and culture, great leaders, water, and weather. In each area, classrooms and teachers will be able to choose among projects that emphasize collaboration, 21st-century skill building, and the use of school-safe communication tools to work with learners around the world or down the block. For more information, visit the ePals website.

It has never been easier to read up on a favorite topic, whether it’s an obscure philosophy, a tiny insect or an overexposed pop star. Just don’t count on being able to thumb through the printed pages of an encyclopedia to do it.

A series of announcements from publishers across the globe in the last few weeks suggests that the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encyclopedia is well on its way to becoming the first casualty in the end of print. Read more about the end of the print encyclopedia in The New York Times online.

If Google and a librarian had an informational smackdown, who would win? Many people champion Google, with its impressive number of results.

But research librarians say their powers have been unfairly dismissed in the online age. Not only can they outsmart Google’s dead ends and weaknesses, librarians say, but they can help people surf faster and smarter by showing them hidden databases and tricks.

In an age of clickable gratification, when books, articles and data are moving online, some people wonder whether librarians are relevant, said Leslie Burger, the immediate past-president of the American Library Association. But Burger said they are more necessary than ever. Read more about librarians’ evolving roles in The Houston Chronicle online.

Online courses have changed the way people attend college. Now, an experimental online persuasive writing course has targeted talented fifth- and sixth-graders in a rural area of New York State. The course allows students to work independently, and it provides a convenient and affordable way to provide enrichment to talented students, according to an article by Omar Aquije in the Glens Falls Post-Star.

"This is really a great opportunity for that child who needs enrichment, who needs something beyond traditional," says Kristina Schroeder, who is teaching the online course. For further information, read the full article.

Losing personal computer files can be upsetting. But failing to protect academic, government, or corporate data could erase irreplaceable pieces of history, says Francine Berman. She co-chairs a newly formed panel of experts tasked to ask how the world can protect its digital past, and answer a more nagging question: Who's going to pay for it?

“It’s hard to read the information on floppy disks these days,” says Berman, who is director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. “Very few people still have the drives. It’s hard to play LPs. They were everywhere only a decade ago. But now many people can’t read them.” And if diskettes or vinyl aren’t kept in the right environment, it won’t matter if people have the right drives. The disks will decay. The records will warp.

“It’s the great challenge of the Informa­tion Age,” she says, and a problem that her Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation will explore over the next two years. Read more in The Christian Science Monitor online.

Taking a cue from the music business, a major publisher has begun selling the individual chapters of a popular book to gauge reader demand for bite-size portions of digital texts. Random House Publishing Group’s experiment, started February 11, 2008, appears to be the first time a major consumer publisher has offered a title on a chapter-by-chapter basis. It will sell the six chapters and epilogue of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each.

The move comes at a time when retailers and publishers are looking for clues into how readers want to access digital content. Read more about the novel idea in The Wall Street Journal online.

"Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly," an article by Dian Schaffhauser appearing in Campus Technology, offers an indepth look at Google's book digitization project and its implications for readers and researchers everywhere. For further information, read the full article.

Microsoft will spend $235 million over the next five years to expand its educational program that includes getting more computers into classrooms to help bridge the digital divide, the company said January 22. The world’s biggest software company said it aimed to reach 270 million people with the second stage of its Partners in Learning program, three times as many as it reached with a similar investment over the last five years.

Microsoft works with governments and non-governmental organizations around the world to help put computers such as Intel’s “Classmate” laptop into schools, train teachers and influence education policy. The company says it hopes to achieve its first major milestone—reaching the next billion of the 5 billion who still have little or no access to technology—by 2015. Read more of the Reuters article.

For 17-year-old Sydney Key, using her cell phone to text is faster than using it to talk. “When you get fast at it, it’s just easier than calling somebody,” said the junior at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. “Plus, you can end a conversation by not texting back.” Key said she often texts without looking at the phone. “That’s why it’s easy in class. You can just sneak it under the desk and send a text," she said.

Some schools are beginning to embrace the technology teens are using—including cell phones and texting. At Doherty High School in Colorado Springs, teachers decide whether cell phones can be on, or used, in class. Principal Jill Martin said students are not allowed to use phones to text or call their friends; phones are only allowed for educational purposes. But even that is a change from last school year, when phones had to be turned off.

And English teacher Eric Beard incorporated the language of text messaging into a lesson on Shakespeare. Read more in The Gazette online.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative has generated its share of skepticism since its announcement three years ago, according to an article in eSchool News. But children in the Andean village of Arahuay, Peru, can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

Peru made the single biggest order of XO machines to date--more than 272,000--in an attempt to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Fifty primary school children in Arahuay received machines from the OLPC project six months ago. To learn more, read the full article.

A new report by the University of Minnesota's Institute on Race and Poverty shows that while the digital divide remains a problem in Minnesota, community technology centers can help bridge the gap. An article by Jessica Mador for Minnesota Public Radio describes how programs such as the one at the Rondo Community Outreach Library in St. Paul help more people become computer literate.

A recent survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that nationally, more than 70 percent of all adults use the Internet. But those figures vary by race and especially by income. More than 90 percent of people with incomes over $75,000 a year are online, compared with just 55 percent of those making less than $30,000 a year. Community technology centers such as the one at the Rondo Library can help bridge that gap.

For further information, read the full article.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has said teachers who refuse younger students access to the site are “bad educators.” Speaking at the Online Information conference at London’s Olympia, he played down the long-running controversy over the site’s authority. He said young students should be able to reference the online encyclopedia in their work. Wales said the site, which is edited by users, should be seen as a “stepping stone” to other sources. Read more at BBC NEWS online.

Amazon’s new Kindle e-book device—touted to make reading easier—may be setting the digital world aflame, with initial supplies quickly selling out after its unveiling last week despite its US$399 price tag. Company officials say they’re not sure if those who order now may get it in time for the yuletide holidays. But experts say it may take many months, if not years, for Kindle and other e-books, such as Sony’s similar Reader device, to make their way into the digital mix among libraries and public schools.

In the past decade, new technology has dramatically changed the information and entertainment offerings on local shelves and in classrooms. “It's going to be a long time for the schools to convert, because of the cost of these machines,” says Rita Kaikow, a library media specialist at Oceanside High School and president of the Long Island Media Association, a 200-member school group overseeing technology mostly in Nassau County. “you have a large school, how do you buy and safeguard this equipment?” Read the article at Newsday.com.

Researchers in New Zealand have developed a virtual teacher that is able to respond to children's moods. The near-human animated teacher, called Eve, is designed to teach math one-on-one to 8-year-olds, according to an article in the New Zealand Herald.

Linked to a child via computer, Eve can tell if the child is frustrated, angry, or confused by the on-screen teaching session. Eve can then adapt the tutoring accordingly. Eve can ask questions and provide feedback to the young learners. For further information, read the full article.

The Universal Digital Library, a book-scanning project backed by several major libraries around the world, has completed the digitization of 1.5 million books and on Tuesday (November 27, 2007) made them free and publically available. The online library offers full text downloads of works that are in the public domain, or for which the copyright holder has been given permission to make available. Having the backing of prominent institutions such as the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, however, the collection goes far beyond the widely available classics. “You’re not going to find over 900,000 works in Chinese on Google,” said Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and director of intellectual property for the Universal Digital Library (UDL). Read more about it at CNET News.com.

As of September 2007, 42 states have significant supplemental or full-time online learning programs (or both), according to Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning, a new report from the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL). The increase in online learning has made new courses available to students and has provided rural districts with access to resources not formerly available. For further information, read the full report.

Huddled in a corner of their house in south Sacramento, California, their faces awash in the blue glow of the computer screen, the Yang family is learning the intricacies of English grammar. Seven siblings—ages 5 through 18—read in chorus the sentence on the screen: “Magnetic storms create cool, dark patches on the Sun’s surface. They are sunspots.”

For these Hmong children, in the United States just three years this month, this is a slow yet steady lesson in a new language they must master to succeed. It is a lesson they can practice to perfection in the comfort of their home, learning in unison with squirmy siblings and without the pressure of the regular classroom. Their journey to learn English no longer stops when the school day ends, thanks to an innovative program designed by Luther Burbank High School teacher Larry Ferlazzo, who is the grand prize winner of the International Reading Association’s 2007 Presidential Award for Reading and Technology.

Ferlazzo has provided home computers to these children in hopes that the lessons will reach family members as well. The Yang family was one of the first to pilot a project crafted by Ferlazzo a year and a half ago. The program has since expanded, with computers now in the homes of almost 50 families—including more than 80 Burbank students and nearly 150 students within the Sacramento City Unified School District. The project also provides high-speed Internet access for the families, allowing them to visit a Web site Ferlazzo has created. Read more in The Sacramento Bee.

In a new report, Maximizing the Impact: The Pivotal Role of Technology in a 21st Century Education System, the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), the International Society for Technology in Education, and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills urged renewed emphasis on technology in education.

The report urges federal, state, and local policymakers and other stakeholders to take action on three fronts: (1) Use technology comprehensively to develop proficiency in 21st century skills. (2) Use technology comprehensively to support innovative teaching and learning. (3) Use technology comprehensively to create robust education support systems.

For further information, visit the SETDA website.

It is a truth too rarely acknowledged, that a commuter in possession of a sophisticated electronic device, must be in want of a good book. Put another way, free of the influence of Jane Austen's famous first sentence, I just read Pride and Prejudice on my BlackBerry. And, reader, I liked it. Against all my own prejudices, all my own pride in the history and tradition of the printed word, I liked it. I liked it all so much, I've moved on to Austen’s Persuasion and am, frankly, halfway annoyed at having to take time away from that to write this. What comeuppance will the vain spendthrift Sir Walter receive, and will his deserving daughter Anne find satisfaction?

I hadn't expected to fall so easily under the spell of the e-book. Read more of Steve Johnson's ideations in The Chicago Tribune online.

Many children from low-income families in the United States now have access to a variety of technology to help aid in learning, according to new research funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement and conducted by the Michael Cohen Group LLC, under the auspices of a grant to the Ready to Learn Partnership. Specifically, nearly 75% of caregivers at the federal poverty level (annual household income of less than $25,000) report they subscribe to cable television, two-thirds have DVD players, more than half have mobile telephones, more than one-third have computers, and more than one-quarter have home access to the Internet.

While television took decades to become universal, gains in the new technology have taken just a few years. For further information, access the full report on the Ready to Learn Partnership website.

Surging oil and gasoline prices in Africa usually weigh most heavily on the emerging urban middle class, making it a struggle to put fuel in cars and to pay home electricity bills. In Senegal, the energy shock is starting to filter down to isolated rural areas, where illiterate parents hoping their children will have a better life through education are worrying about how to put fuel in oil lamps so their children can do their homework. “It is very difficult, because at night, we need to make light but there has not been any petrol in the area since last year,” said Abba Diallo, president of the Parent–Teacher Association in Thiancone Boguel, a town in northeastern Senegal, some 690 kilometers from the capital, Dakar. Read the article at IRIN News.

When Palo Alto resident Carrie Karnos landed the latest Harry Potter book minutes after its midnight release, the first thing she did was chop off its spine. Then she scanned, proofread and uploaded the book onto Bookshare.org, where by about 4:30 a.m. about 600 blind or dyslexic people immediately began reading it. Users download the books as digital files and listen to them with a voice synthesizer or read them on special Braille computers or via enlarged type.

This week, Palo Alto–based technology nonprofit Benetech announced it will be expanding its Bookshare.org project, the world’s largest collection of scanned books and periodicals, through its first federal grant. The U.S. Department of Education has awarded Bookshare $32 million over five years to open up its collection of more than 34,000 volumes free of charge to all blind or dyslexic students from kindergarten through graduate school.

The 5-year-old Bookshare already has 6,000 to 7,000 users, but that should increase to about 100,000 as a result of the grant, said Bookshare CEO Jim Fruchterman, who last year won a MacArthur Fellowship for his work. For details, go to MercuryNews.com.

For nearly a decade, pundits have been predicting the imminent rise of the e-book as a major force in the publishing industry. To date e-books have not really captured much of the market. All that may soon change, according to an article by Daniel Lee appearing on the website of the Telegraph in London. Lee quotes several experts in the publishing field who predict that e-reading will soon take hold in a big way.

Still, just as television did not kill the cinema, the experts do not believe that new forms of publishing will kill printed books. "The new forms of publishing will be complementary with traditional books," says Stephanie Duncan of Bloomsbury.

For further information, read the full article.

While applauding what the Internet and digitization have done for research and classroom learning, some academics are also expressing concern that the technology has changed the way students read, according to an article by Bill Schackner appearing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Some students have trouble distinguishing between what information is credible and what is not, and many students tend to piece together nuggets of information quickly gleaned from various sources rather than gaining the knowledge that would come from reading a complete work on a given subject.

Still, educators interviewed in the article agree that technology has made available to students a wealth of knowledge that was not available to them a decade or so ago. For further information, read the full article.

An online tool designed to help local literacy organizations evaluate their programs, make changes to produce better results, and help increase national literacy rates, was unveiled this week at the National Literacy Summit at Georgetown University. The evaluation program, known as the Verizon Literacy Program Self- Assessment Tool, was created by the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) and funded by the Verizon Foundation. It is free and available to all literacy programs at Thinkfinity.org. The assessment tool provides a detailed online questionnaire that asks about a literacy program’s methods, the education level of its students, parental involvement, and current tools used to assess the program’s success. Read more at CNN Money.com.

A primary school in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou held an online parent–teacher meeting on Wednesday, October 10, 2007, providing a novel and instant way to foster communication between the two sides. At 4:30 p.m., after students were released from school, Li Yujuan, head teacher of Grade 5 at Yong’an Street Primary School, opened her laptop to commence the online conference. “Was not yesterday's homework too much? My kid did it until 11 p.m. at night,” a father said on the class forum. “My son did his homework until 10:30,” complained another parent. Read more about the new conferencing method at China Economic Net.

Every year, Roberta Valentine, an elementary school teacher in New York City, encounters a few students who cannot concentrate for more than a few moments. As a girl from her class once said, “Sometimes if I have to sit still for one more minute, I just can’t stand it.” A few years ago, Ms. Valentine read a book by Mel Levine, an expert on learning disabilities, about schoolchildren who have trouble focusing, and came across his term “mind trips” to describe such moments of distraction. She felt that it offered a clue about how to proceed. Read how she incorporated Levine’s ideas, writing assignments, and PowerPoint into her classroom to help her students focus in this article from The New York Times.

Canadian ministers of education celebrated the 40th anniversary of their intergovernmental organization this week in Victoria, British Columbia. To mark the occasion, the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), announced an innovative forum on literacy to be held in spring 2008. The event will be designed to increase awareness among Canadians of the importance of literacy as a lifelong issue, and to encourage collaboration and sharing of information on literacy across Canada. The forum will be hosted simultaneously in a number of locations across the country and will take advantage of technology to create a virtual meeting space, where participants will be able to listen to and interact with keynote speakers in real time. Read more about the planned national conversation.

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The early reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start next month. Orders, however, are slow. That might change with the introduction of a new marketing program, called “Give 1 Get 1,” in which Americans and Canadians can buy two laptops for $399. One of the machines will be given to a child in a developing nation, and the other one will be shipped to the purchaser by Christmas. Read more about the details of this plan in this article from The New York Times.

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes—a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis—as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message. To mark the anniversary, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize. Read more of this article from CNN.com.

As students of all ages return to the classroom this fall, the wireless world is changing the nature and possibilities of their education. Teachers who are using blogs, social-networking sites, and video-sharing sites in school settings are giving young people the opportunity to tune their thinking and writing to a larger audience. When students know that anyone in the school with an Internet connection—or around the world, for that matter—can read what they have written or created, it is remarkable how quickly their thinking improves, not to mention the final product. Read more of this column from The Christian Science Monitor.

Technology evangelists have predicted the emergence of electronic books for as long as they have envisioned flying cars and video phones. It is an idea that has never caught on with mainstream book buyers. Two new offerings this fall are set to test whether consumers really want to replace a technology that has reliably served humankind for hundreds of years: the paper book. Read more of this article from The New York Times.

As teachers head into the classroom for the new school year, there is one more item they can add to their back–to–school list: Thinkfinity.org. It’s free, and it makes life easier for teachers. Thinkfinity.org is for teachers looking for a quick and innovative way to find compelling lesson plans and interactive learning tools to engage students. Thinkfinity.org is the Verizon Foundation’s, comprehensive program and online portal to 55,000 educational resources, including standards–based, grade–specific, K–12 lesson plans and other student interactives provided in partnership with the International Reading Association and many other leading educational and literacy organizations. And, Thinkfinity.org requires no downloadable software.

OMG! TXT MSG turns 15! Cellphone-accessorized teens may think that’s just GR8. But as the lexicon spawned by a 160-character message limit starts to spill off the cellphone screen into written work, some of their English teachers aren’t exactly ROFL. Nor does seeing text abbreviations crop up in essays bring a smiley face to college admission officers. Read how text-messaging is like wearing flip-flops in this article from USA Today.

University of California Santa Barbara cultural studies professor Constance Penley says that when it comes to literacy among youth, there’s entirely too much hand-wringing going on. “They’re reading; they’re writing,” she said, “just not in the ways we think of it.” According to Penley, we need to see video images and text messages as an evolution rather than a devolution of literacy. Read more of this article from the Ventura County Star.

More than half of employers in England say high school graduates often cannot function in the workplace due to a lack of basic math and literacy skills, a survey sponsored by a business lobbying firm suggests. But the poll of 507 firms also said youngsters’ IT skills can give them the edge over their bosses in this area. The CBI survey found many employers were having to retrain recent grads in the basics they should have learned in class. But CBI director general Richard Lambert said, “Their fluency with iPods, mobiles and MySpace has translated well into the workplace.... The challenge ahead is for schools to channel that same enthusiasm into numeracy and literacy skills, where far too many young people are struggling.” Read more at BBC News.

At least half the adolescents who exchange messages for hours with their friends online or by cellphone spend part of the time discussing their schoolwork, a new study shows. The survey, commissioned by the Alexandria, Va.-based National School Boards Association, showed that 96 percent of adolescents with access to cellphones and Internet-capable computers use them to build and maintain social networks. NSBA leaders believe those numbers must point the way for educators. Social-networking technologies are so popular and offer such promise for education that district and school officials would be remiss not to adapt them for the classroom, they said. Read more of this article from Education Week.

The video–game industry won a minor battle this week when a California judge shot down a state act prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children, ruling that the proposed law was too broad and that, in any case, there was insufficient evidence showing such games have a negative effect on kids. In fact, more and more studies are emerging that show video games may be good for you. A study released earlier this year by researchers at the University of Rochester, New York, showed gamers achieved higher scores in vision tests than a control group who played the simpler, puzzle–based video game Tetris. Another study published by researchers at Toronto’s York University last year showed evidence that video–game players—not unlike bilingual speakers—tend to score higher in various, relatively difficult, mental tests than do non–players. Read more at globeandmail.com.

A century ago it was saws and sewing machines, now it’s computers, but teaching low–income people to improve their lot through technology is a constant at Erie Neighborhood House on Chicago’s Near West Side. With 60 computers, the long-established social service agency is on the front line fighting to close the digital divide that separates poor and minority families from the middle class. Perhaps surprisingly, that includes learning how to play computer games. Promoting computer games as the path to a new literacy has become a central concern among educators and librarians. Last month, the American Library Association sponsored a national forum in Chicago to examine the growing role of gaming in libraries. Read more at chicagotribune.com.

According to a study by researchers at Ball State University, the use of wireless handheld reading devices, or eBooks, in classrooms can boost students' interest in reading. As reported by Laura Devaney in eSchool News Online, the study results suggest that many elementary students who have been ambivalent toward reading in the past have displayed enthusiasm for reading with the devices. For further information, read the full article.

The National Braille Press estimates that today only 12 percent of 55,000 legally blind children in the United States can read braille. Although the number does not account for those cognitively unable to read, the literacy rate is down significantly from 50 percent in the 1960s. It seems the time, effort, and money it takes to teach children braille is sometimes passed over in favor of less expensive and less time-consuming audio and computer aids. To many within the blind community, this trend holds serious ramifications. Read more of this article from The Christian Science Monitor.

Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson says he has always liked the comma, but finds that its use is shrinking. He writes that “the comma’s sad fate is, I think, a metaphor for something larger: how we deal with the frantic, can’t-wait-a-minute nature of modern life.” Read his column on how the comma’s fading popularity is also social commentary.

Teens who plan to prep for college-admissions tests this summer can find a plethora of ways to make it fun and flexible. Want to study in the shower? Lose yourself in a comic book? Take a quiz on your iPod? Or how about rocking out to some songs that stretch the lyrics just a tad in order to be educational? Read about these test prep options in this article from The Christian Science Monitor.

Angie Lebron clicks rapidly through the brightly illustrated passage on her computer screen to learn about an archaeologist’s study of the mummified remains of the Chachapoya people, who lived in South America more than five centuries ago. When a difficult term or phrase trips her up, she simply points her mouse to highlight it and bring up a definition or detailed description. Earlier in the school year, Ms. Lebron would have been frustrated by the complicated language and historical content in the reading assignment. But with the help of a reading-intervention program that includes computer-based lessons that adapt to her reading skills and specific instructional needs, Ms. Lebron is now on grade level and learning to enjoy reading in school and at home. Read more about the many ways that computer software is helping students learn in this article from Education Week.

Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business. Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with university libraries and a technology company. But unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes. Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Over the past few years Nelson Lauver’s nationally syndicated radio feature, The American Storyteller Radio Journal, has established a dedicated US listener base. Fans refer to his stories as unique, timeless, and great radio—and have likened his style to that of Charles Kuralt and Mark Twain. The online companion to the radio feature, theamericanstoryteller.com, offers hundreds of free mp3 stories for listening and download. Now these mp3 audio stories have also become a bonanza for those wishing to learn to speak English. The site has been inundated by visits from American immigrants as well as individuals around the globe. Read more of this article from the website urlwire.com.

Britain's schools face an insurmountable digital divide if new ways of teaching are not tested, David Puttnam, a member of the House of Lords in Great Britain warned Tuesday. Launching a new report from the thinktank FutureLab, Puttnam said it was time to seriously consider how technology can be used to bridge inequalities in the education system. "Despite being a rich country, the UK is failing children in a whole slew of ways," he told an audience in London. "Today's digital technologies have already been adapted to help overcome social isolation ... we have proved that students who are dissatisfied, disaffected and disengaged are reachable." Read the article at Guardian Unlimited.

Google’s plan to scan the collections of some of the world’s most prestigious libraries just doubled in size. The Mountain View, Calif.-based firm announced that its Library Project has teamed up with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, a national consortium of 12 research libraries, to digitize collections in its libraries. Read more about Google’s plans in this article from Forbes.

Thousands of British schoolchildren have made it their mission to break through Internet filters in schools meant to stop them surfing 'social network' websites such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook, according to The Observer. Head teachers are increasingly banning access to the web pages, amid fears they are being targeted by bullies and pedophiles. Independent schools are spending thousands of pounds to tackle infiltrators, but the ways tech-savvy children try to bypass the system are numerous, according to a director of a girls boarding school in Ascot, Berkshire. Read more at Guardian Unlimited.

At 5:30 a.m. I am at my desk in my bunny slippers, waiting for my laptop to come to life. As soon as it does, I will answer an average of 35 e-mails, check to see who has completed which assignments in my class, grade a recent quiz, and send weekly grade reports to my 40 students. All of my classes are online. I "retired" from face-to-face teaching three years ago. I teach chemistry and forensic science for Iowa Learning Online, an initiative of the Iowa Department of Education designed to expand learning opportunities for public high school students. We offer a "blended course" that combines an extensive online experience and limited face-to-face gatherings. Read more by online teacher Shannon C'de Baca at Teacher Magazine on the Web.

Thousands of teachers could lose their jobs if and when computer-based learning is fully implemented in Kenyan schools. Education minister George Saitoti said May 28 that the country was making major strides towards e-learning (online) methods that are cheap and need less manpower. He said information and communication technology (ICT) is cheap and cost effective compared to current methods of teaching. The government now has made it compulsory for teacher colleges and universities to offer ICT training to all graduating teachers. If implemented, e-learning would enhance access, equity, relevance and quality of education, the minister said. Read the article at allAfrica.com.

The local media in Saudi Arabia is not doing enough to educate youth and raise the level of awareness about the possible harmful influences posed by the Internet, satellite television channels, and other forms of mass media, Minister of Education Abdullah Al Obaid said at the First International Media Education Conference held recently in Riyadh. He said media education is important because youth are being subjected to subversive propaganda through the Internet and other means of audio-visual communication. Read more at Khaleej Times online.

Elementary schools, squeezed by standardized testing and an increasing number of curriculum requirements, are spending less time on penmanship. By high school, most students stop joining letters, reverting to the print style they learned from kindergarten through second grade. One measure of how eager they are to abandon cursive writing is the SAT. Since the College Board began requiring handwritten essays as part of the exams two years ago, 85 percent of the more than 4.5 million essays have been printed, said Caren Scoropanos , a spokeswoman for the College Board. Read more about it at boston.com.

The Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, New York, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty—and worse. “After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement—none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. Read the article on The New York Times website.

Despite Rwanda's stated support of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative of Nicholas Negroponte, currently on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, some questions have been raised about the feasibility of the Rwanda project. The Rwandan government has said it will make sure each pupil in all primary schools owns Negroponte's invention, the XO laptop, within five years. But recent reports indicate XO laptops are not free. Each child will have to part with $100 for the laptop, according to a report in The New Times. Other potential problems include teachers' lack of training in computer technology, the short supply of electricity and some difficulty in operating the hand-cranked computer. Read more about the OLPC program at allAfrica.com.

The youth of Ireland are becoming increasingly poor spellers and writers, and their love of text messaging on cellphones is a major reason why, according to the Education Department. In a report published Wednesday on national test results in English for about 37,000 students aged 15 and 16, the department’s Examination Commission said cutting-edge communications technology has encouraged poor literacy and a blunt, choppy style at odds with academic rigor. Read more about the report in this article from USA Today.

What light through yonder window breaks? It is a video game and Juliet is the star! On the 443rd anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth, the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, has launched an interactive adaptation of Romeo and Juliet to get schoolchildren excited about English literature's most famous writer. Entitled Speare, the video game requires the player to lead an "elite squadron" to overcome a dangerous enemy that has plunged the entire Prospearean Galaxy into an age of dark despair by capturing the ancient text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The creators of the game see it as a logical and powerful way to improve the literacy of kids aged 10 to 15. Read the article at TheStar.com.

Enough is enuf. The Simplified Spelling Society (SSS) is celebrating its 99th birthday by launching a new campaign to make it easier to read and write English. With texts and e-mails revolutionizing the way we communicate, SSS secretary John Gledhill says the time is ripe for phonetic reform and spelling simplification. Read more of this article, from the Reuters news agency, on the Scotsman website.

 Thinkfinity (formerly MarcoPolo) has been named the best site to download free lessons and materials in Edutopia’s second annual Reader’s Survey. This marks the second consecutive year that the program has received this recognition. ReadWriteThink.org is one of seven Thinkfinity Content Partners and was developed by the International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The website provides educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and English language arts instruction. The site features standards-based lesson plans, interactive student materials, and a literacy calendar. Read more at Edutopia's website.

Alan Johnson, education secretary in the United Kingdom, has come under fire for recommending the use of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia for schoolwork. At the annual conference of the National Association of Schoolteachers and Union of Women Teachers (NASWUT) in Belfast on April 11, Johnson praised the Wikipedia as affordable and easy to use. But teachers and the website’s founder, Larry Sanger, criticized Johnson for encouraging pupils to use the website. The general secretary of the NASWUT, Chris Keates, said the union itself had been the victim of scurrilous claims on Wikipedia. Read more at The Guardian website.

Educational software, a $2 billion-a-year industry that has become the darling of school systems across the country, has no significant impact on student performance, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Education. The study, mandated by Congress when it passed No Child Left Behind in 2002, evaluated 15 reading and math products used by 9,424 students in 132 schools across the country during the 2004–05 school year. It is the largest study that has compared students who received the technology with those who did not, as measured by their scores on standardized tests. There were no statistically significant differences between students who used software and those who did not. Read more about the study in this article from The Washington Post.

A new digital education system being used in Mexico uses giant electronic screens attached to the walls of about 165,000 classrooms. Some five million 10- and 11-year-olds now receive all their education through the screens. From math to music, geography to geometry, black and white boards have given way to electronic screens. Five years in development, the entire school curriculum for fifth and sixth graders has now been digitized and is accessible on the screens. The system is called Enciclomedia. “It is fabulous,” says teacher Arturo Vazquez. “The children concentrate more, they interact more and so they get more out of each class.” Click here to read more.

WETA, the public television station serving the Washington, DC, area offers America at a Crossroads lesson plans that take their cue from a public education campaign coming in April to help students think for themselves and confront their own assumptions, stereotypes, and fears in a post 9/11 world. The middle and high school lesson plans are called “Stop the Bus” and were created in conjunction with the broadcast of the PBS series called “America at a Crossroads”.

If you haven’t heard, MarcoPolo, the free, standards–based curriculum website for teachers, has merged with the Verizon Literacy Network to become a single digital learning platform called Thinkfinity. The new Thinkfinity contains more than 47,000 educational resources, such as lesson plans and interactive student activities, across seven academic disciplines. Thinkfinity is the site of the week for eSchool News online. Check it out.

Coburg Senior High School in Victoria, Australia, is a school without a library. For the students who started at the new school this year, finding information is just a matter of stepping up to one of many computers dotted around the school and logging on. Principal Don Collins calls this a “distributed library at point-of-need.” He says the school will not buy printed copies of encyclopedias and dictionaries because they are too expensive. “It is cost-efficient overall when you consider the cost to the family and school,” Collins says. “One great thing about the digital world is you can update easily.” Click here to read more.

Starting in 2011, the National Assessment of Educational Progress will test how well students in grades 8 and 12 can write on computers, rather than with the old schoolhouse standbys of pencils and paper. According to the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework, 100 million blogs—online journals—now exist worldwide, and 171 billion e-mail messages are sent daily. Future writing instruction, it says, must take into account how computers affect both the writing process and the types of text produced. Read more about these changes in this article from Education Week.

America needs a Center for State Education Data to aggregate student information and identify what works and what doesn’t in our schools, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates told Congress on March 7. He also reiterated his call for an overhaul of the nation’s schools and asked lawmakers to revamp immigration laws to keep jobs from going overseas and to maintain American competitiveness in the new global economy. “... We need data by race and income,” Gates said. He urged lawmakers to support the creation of a one-stop access portal for education research and policymakers, along with a public website to streamline education data reporting. Read more at eSchool News online.

A newspaper designed especially for primary school children, delivered by e–mail to about 300 primary schools across South Africa, is gaining new subscribers, including parents who want to get the newspaper at home for their children. Duncan Guy’s paper, The Times I Am Living In, has its origins in a newspaper he designed for his son in February 2005. It contains Guy’s simplified version of local and international stories by the South African Press Association, a glossary, and a section called Today in History, which provides interesting historical details and famous figures’ birthdays. Read about it at allAfrica.com.

The federal government’s first evaluation of school software, nearly a year overdue, is due out at the end of the month. The U.S. Department of Education $10 million report is based on studies conducted during the 2003-04 school year and some critics say the data will be so old that it won’t be meaningful. The results will be released in aggregate, meaning school leaders won’t have any meaningful information to help them understand which specific products work and which don’t. Read about this and another federal report on the effectiveness of technology in the classroom at eSchool News online.

The future is now for 1,370 students in the Lemon Grove School District just outside San Diego, California. This week, students at the district’s two middle schools began receiving their “e–Pads.” That’s the trademarked name of the district–designed wireless computers that Palm and Lemon Grove middle school students will keep until they graduate from eighth grade. The yellow-framed e–Pad connects from home or school to the central server at the district’s office, and every participating household has been provided with a free broadband Internet connection. Read the article at SignOnDiego.com.

Alarmed by a survey that found that nearly 14 percent of teens in China are vulnerable to becoming addicted to the Internet, the Chinese government has launched a nationwide campaign to stamp out what the Communist Youth League calls “a grave social problem.” Internet addiction has been blamed in the state–run media for a murder over virtual property earned in an online game, for a string of suicides, and for the failure of youths in their studies. Those who say heavy Internet use should be defined as a mental disorder say the addiction can be crippling, leading people to neglect work, school, and social lives. Read about the controversy at washingtonpost.com.

Various government agencies that have been pumping huge amounts of money into literacy and adult education programs might have achieved their targets faster by simply sponsoring cellular mobile-phones among illiterate people. Many people in India are learning to identify English alphabets by using their mobile sets and are effectively putting their knowledge of English to use in different spheres of life. Read more of this story in The Times of India.

For many students today, writing extended essays is a task performed almost exclusively on a computer. It comes as no surprise, then, that a number of states have incorporated computer-based testing into their writing assessments. The movement to assess writing on computers also could grow if the directors of the influential National Assessment of Educational Progress act on a proposal to replace the handwritten test of writing at the 8th and 12th grade levels with a computerized exam. Find details in this Education Week article.

To keep pace with the changing demands of a new global economy, the International Society for Technology in Education is revising its nine-year-old National Educational Technology Standards (NETS), a pioneering set of guidelines for what students should know about, and be able to do with, technology. ISTE has released a draft version of its new NETS for students and is seeking feedback from educators. Read more of this article from eSchool News online.

Researchers at Harvard, MIT, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have developed a project that uses “augmented reality” to teach students math and literacy skills. The researchers say the project holds great potential for engaging students and teaching high-level skills. Read more about the project in this article from eSchool News.

Many people living in Ranchi, India, have learned to identify English alphabets by using their cellular phones and are effectively putting their knowledge of English to use in different spheres of life. Claiming the trend is positive, a Ranchi Women's College sociologist said fast learning comes from the social laboratory. Read the story at The Times of India website.

Computerized interactive white boards in British classrooms fail to boost pupil achievement, research into their early use suggests. Interactive white boards can even “slow the pace of whole class learning,” suggested the study commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills. The boards can also lead to “relatively mundane activities being overvalued” the Institute of Education study found. The team visited London schools in 2004-05, a year after a government project to introduce the boards. An interactive white board can capture writing electronically in group presentation situations while projecting computer images. Read the article at the BBC News website.

In a recent interview with eSchool News, Jon Bower, a Stanford-trained reading specialist with an MBA from Harvard, said he believes reading fluency is critical to ensuring that American students are prepared to succeed in an ever-evolving, global economy. Read the interview in this article from eSchool News online.

 Each month, the ReadWriteThink.org Calendar offers quick classroom activities, lesson plans, Web links, and texts pertaining to various reading-related and general interest events. Here is a sampling of the links for February:

February 1: Langston Hughes was born on this day in 1902
February 2: Groundhog Day
February 5: Celebrate 18th National African American Read-In
February 9: Author Alice Walker was born on this day in 1944
February 12: Judy Blume was born in 1938
February 14: Valentine Day
February 18: Chinese New Year starts today
February 27: John Steinbeck was born in 1902

There also are links relating to other noted authors and events, and more. For further information, visit the ReadWriteThink February Calendar page.

The ReadWriteThink.org website is administered jointly by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English, in partnership with the Verizon Foundation. It is part of the MarcoPolo program, which provides standards-based Internet content and professional development to K-12 teachers and students throughout the United States. Visit the main site.

Czech government officials have announced that US$46.4 million promised to the Education Ministry for 2007 won’t be coming. The money was to go toward improving the availability and quality of Internet and computer resources in state schools. The news came as a shock to the ministry, which called the whole mess “unbearable” and “unacceptable.” Dana Krupičková, principal at the ZŠ Libčická school in Prague 8, however, said this isn’t the first time education funding has been slashed unexpectedly. Krupičková said her school had been planning to obtain four more computers this year. The school also had to cut its computer–training program for teachers, she said. Read more at The Prague Post online.

Grammar lessons often are associated with high school drudgery — diagramming sentences and memorizing obscure rules in between passing notes in English class — but an Arizona technical writer has turned the seemingly dry subject into a popular podcast. Mignon Fogarty, the woman behind Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, has been explaining the finer points of commas, colons and split infinitives since July. The show is currently the 47th most popular podcast on Apple’s iTunes service, right behind Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day. The shows have been downloaded more than 1.3 million times. Read more about the podcast in this article from CNN.

Sometimes it seems like kids are using another language. And sometimes, they are. Call it “text speak,” or “Web slanguage.” No matter how you label it, if you were born pre-Internet era, odds are you don’t understand it. Teachers in some Tennessee schools believe this shorthand style of writing is destroying fundamental grammar skills. Read more about it in this article from The Tennessean.

To entice teenage students at West Nottinghamshire College in Mansfield, England, into literacy and numeracy classes, computer science teachers modified an Atari game to require students to solve educational challenges to advance to the next level of the game. Success rates in key skills at the college have trebled to 94%, officials say. The college serves students age 14 and older. Read the article at the BBC website.

 One of the many recent articles on the invasion of “textspeak” into school essay exams and writing assignments refers to a lesson plan on the topic that appears in readwritethink.org, the joint IRA–NCTE treasury of online teaching resources — but fails to mention the title of the lesson plan. For the record, the lesson cited in the Washington Post article is “Audience, Purpose, and Language Use in Electronic Messages,” by Laura Hefferly, Sheree Rivas, and Lorelei Wofford.