Because of my interest in literacy instruction, I chose two articles that talked about literacy projects using technology.

The first was Digital Connections: Transforming Literacy in the Primary School, by Cathy Burnett, Paul Dickinson, Julia Myers and Guy Merchant. This article was written about a research project involving fourth and fifth grade students attending two British schools.

The authors were looking for ways to transform literacy instruction using technology, not just using technology as enrichment for current teaching methods.

Students from two schools used e-mail to communicate with each other to produce a PowerPoint presentation about their views and interests. The PowerPoint was presented to a group of student teachers. The project was purposely planned for a real audience (the student teachers) and with real communication necessary through e-mail. The students met together twice while putting together their PowerPoint, but their initial interactions were by e-mail and then after meeting once, e-mail was used to refine the PowerPoint drafts.
E-mail was used to get things done and PowerPoint was used to demonstrate what had been achieved.

To show that the curriculum had been transformed through the use of technology the authors gave several examples. Digital writing involves different skills than those needed to write with paper and pencil. For example, students needed to know how to use a mouse, a keyboard and a screen. Students asked questions as they worked which led to informal peer tutoring on skills such as font size, and copying chunks of text. Students tended to edit as they wrote, usually a word at a time, rather than writing a whole message or text and then going back to edit.
Use of e-mail encouraged children to communicate in a way that focused on exchange of information, playfulness and experimentation. They were highly motivated and willing to experiment and learn about writing in this context. They developed their ability to create meaning in different ways.

I think it would be very feasible to work on similar projects with fourth and fifth grade students. I feel it is very important for students to have real reasons for doing projects and e-mailing other students for information to produce a project is meaningful. The students could be given suggestions of final projects, such as creating books, PowerPoint presentations, etc. for use by younger students or for use in the community and then be allowed to decide what they would like to produce.

E-mail may be a little out of date for students of today, but in the elementary school, where digital phones are banned, it would encourage writing. There might be more motivation to write this way than on paper as mistakes are easily corrected and the final product is never illegible.


The second article I read, Bookbinders: Fusing, by Johanna Riddle, talked about four media projects the author had done with elementary students. She found that the more she was able to integrate literature, visual literacy, technology and creative problem solving, the more the students were motivated to learn.

For primary students, she used “I Spy” books by Jean Marzollo and Walter Wick. Each student picked a book and then used the digital camera to take pictures of other students with their books. Students read their books and generated a list of objects mentioned in the book. The students then collected real objects to represent the objects on their lists. Students learned how to scan objects and then made a digital picture of their concrete objects. They wrote questions about their objects and attached those questions to their pictures. The picture and questions were taped to the inside cover of the book.

Another primary project was similar, using the Tana Hoban book, “Look Again”. Students used a digital camera to take a picture of a familiar object, then enlarged a small portion of the picture. The children learned to crop and the small section of the picture was put into a PowerPoint by the teacher. The PowerPoint collection of all the students’ pictures made an electronic book, similar to “Look Again” that the students could read as a class and share with others.

For older students, the emphasis was on using technology in literature circles. The first project had students making book covers using a photograph that symbolized some aspect of the story. The covers were printed and put on school copies of the books.

The second project was a “You Are There” style unit. Students used word processing, scanning, digital photography, PowerPoint, Publisher and Adobe Photoshop Elements to produce a finished product, an image from the book created by the student, overlaid with descriptive text.

These projects all seemed very doable to me. There would be other ways to accomplish these projects without using technology, but then the students would not have been introduced to the many possibilities of creating with computers.