Reading and Technology

Reading And Technology

Literacy and reading in particular is just one of the aspects in which research has provided evidence of potential impacts of new technologies such as multimedia and hypermedia. Most of the studies address literacy or reading in the early years of schooling. These technologies may be important for older readers also, particularly those that have not experienced success in their school careers already. The purpose of the paper is to determine whether digital technologies can affect the acquisition of advanced reading skills such as comprehension, meta-cognition, strategy use, motivation, and engagement.

Technology and reading is becoming popular with each passing day. There are such things as computer games, video games, and internet games that help children read as young as four and five. These technologies help children to begin to read before they enter school. Technology at times can have a positive effect on reading comprehension.

Technologies offer a means to assess students in a different way in all grades across the curriculum. It may also give teachers a better understanding of their students' achievements. This article describes recent developments that argues the fact that enthusiastic readers have many types of things such as TV, computers, video games, and movies that compete for their attention today. It suggests that reading itself demands a lot of attention, time, and commitment and that student's may need more instruction in reading in nonfiction texts rather than from their textbook. Finally there are several ways provided here in the article that show news ways to try and engage students in content literacy. Reading literacy and technology tend to be paired more together in today's world. Some suppose that technology can improve literacy and instruction. In order for reading and technology to occur the teachers need to be skilled in the effective use of technologies for teaching and learning. We know that electronic storybooks help to improve student comprehension and motivation and can provide feedback for students.

Internet and other forms of information and communication technology (ICT) such as word processors, Web editors, presentation software, and e-mail are regularly redefining the nature of literacy. To become fully literate in today's world, students must become proficient in the new literacies of ICT. Therefore, literacy educators have a responsibility to effectively integrate these technologies into the literacy curriculum in order to prepare students for the literacy future they deserve.

If properly used and produced new multimedia technology enables students to better use, visualize, empathize with, and understand events like the Holocaust, World War II, or even more ordinary instances of racism and prejudice (Hammer & Kellner, 1999 p. 522). Multimedia refers to the use of newspapers, video ant television, bulletin boards, magazines, and the internet. Teachers must also make sure that there are opportunities for them to learn safe and responsible uses of information and communication technologies. Technologies can also be used for writing instruction.

How do we define literacy? How do we define computer literacy? Is computer literacy synonymous with technology literacy? What about information literacy or technology competency? How has rhetoric and composition defined these terms? Have the definitions evolved? These are all questions that would likely be answered differently by those in other disciplines. Literacy in its original sense is knowing how to read is universally required in our society. The discipline of rhetoric and composition defines these terms much differently, and yet much in the same way. Selfe's well-timed Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention (1999) initially focuses on establishing a broad, somewhat open-ended definition of the term. Some people define the term as computer literacy, and rightly so. Instead, they define technology literacy as 3 a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments, including reading, writing, and communicating. In this context, technological literacy refers to social and cultural contexts for discourse and communication, as well as the social and linguistic products and practices of communication and the ways in which electronic communication environments have become essential parts of our cultural understanding of what it means to be literate. (Keinking, 1999, p. 11) Her training suggest that we as a people in order to teach or learn about technology must know how the application works or what its intention is and that the training cannot be its only goal. Technology has some critical components and responsibilities