SED 445 Blog

In "No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can't Wait," Troy Hicks and Kristen Turner delve into the world of digital literacy and what it means for English teachers. Something that really stuck with me from this article was the line, "Digital literacy is about more than just adding technology into the teaching we already do." I guess I had never really thought about it before, but as a student, there has been plenty of times where powerpoints were supplemented for content and blogs were used in an incorrect fashion in order for the teacher to claim that they were "integrating technology." For example, something that I really disliked was when I took British Lit as an online course at CCRI, we would have weekly discussion board posts. Except the word, "discussion" might as well have been left out because discussion is the exact opposite of what it was. Each week there was a reading assignment and then the discussion post for that week would...

When I was in high school, writing just was not my thing. I hated the closed-minded limitations of essay writing and the strict regulations that we were expected to follow. I feel like I never really learned how to write in high school, what I learned was how to plug-in information into a 5-paragraoh essay formula, that was never actually taught, but rather assigned. Reading Christensen’s chapter on Writing Essays forced me to relive some of the pretty awful experiences I had in high school but also helped me see that there’s a better way to do things. It also made me wish so badly that one of my English teachers had read this chapter and done what Christensen writes about.  A lot of my teachers simply assumed we knew what to when it came to writing papers, and a few even acknowledged the fact that we didn’t but they didn’t have time to go over it during class. Looking back, I think that my teachers just didn’t want to deal with teaching something they felt we should al...