Reading and Writing Differently

In the article, Reading and Writing Differently, the educators disagree that digital media and texting has a negative impact on children's abilities to read and write. They argue that new media and texting is just a different way to read and write.

Multiliteracies is the change in communication due to new technologies.

Micah Morris on the Computer by Matthew T. Radar

Benefits of new media and texting include:

• "Building classroom connections with students’ (different) extracurricular reading and writing will prepare them to understand, evaluate, organize and produce multimodal texts. Teachers can and should create these connections." ("Reading and writing," 2008)

• "Students who composed blogs in an American literature class created various identities for themselves. This self-transformation helped them develop new ideas about the books they read as well as new ways of communicating ideas to their classmates." ("Reading and writing," 2008)

 

• "Students’ reading achievement is significantly increased in classrooms—elementary, secondary, and post-secondary— where explicit reading instruction, cooperative learning, and mixed-method approaches (both variation in group size and in media employed) are used." ("Reading and writing," 2008)

This comic strip shows that even though people text in short hand it doesn't mean they will write papers like that. Also by using a comic strip a teacher could have the children of her class address big problems by making them simple with a twist of humor.
"Create activities that allow students to apply literacy skills to real world problems and knowledge building, including opportunities to publish their work to a global audience." ("Reading and writing," 2008)

Reference List:

(2008). Reading and writing differently. National Council of Teachers of English, 15-21. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CC/0182-nov08/CC0182Reading.pdf