Chapter 7

           The seventh chapter of the book, “Reading, Writing, and Literacy 2.0: Teaching with Online Texts, Tools, and Resources, K-8,” discusses writing online. There are many outlets and resources to access digital literacy tools and materials. It is important for teachers to provide models that support learning to write online. One of the digital mentor texts and media mentioned in the chapter include digital anchor texts, which are helpful for student learning. Digital anchor texts can be created in a digital environment and used as a guideline for students.

            Pinterest provides many pins and boards including anchor charts, reading comprehension strategies, and mentor texts, which can be very beneficial for students and teachers to use in the classroom. As a future teacher, Pinterest can provide visuals to help when creating an anchor charts, and also helpful for providing examples of lesson plan layouts and prompts. I love using Pinterest because it provides step-by-step instructions and ideas for any kind of lesson I might want to do. I can organize boards and pins that I like to look back on later, and will deinfitely utilize the resources and ideas this site offers for future lessons with my class.

            I also really like the idea of the SpiderScribe website. I am glad that I was able to explore this site further as part of the explorations for my online course. It provides a visual way for students to share their knowledge and follow concepts. A lot of the websites mentioned in the chapter I had never heard of before and I can’t wait to explore more sites to use in my own classroom. While a lot of the websites and digital media sites support student learning, not all of them will work well for your classroom. As a teacher you will have to decide which sites and digital media sources will be most beneficial and easy to use for your class.

Children's Book Review

I chose the book The Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn as one of my favorite children's books. My Mom used to read this story to my brothers and I, and I remembered the story when I went to college. I think it is a great children's story and children can easily relate to the meaning. The pictures are great and children can connect with this book, especially those who are just beginning school and feeling scared. This is a story I will read when I have a class of my own.

To check out more books by Audrey Penn, visit: http://www.audreypenn.com/ 

Chapter 6

     The sixth chapter of the book, “Reading, Writing, and Literacy 2.0: Teaching with Online Texts, Tools, and Resources, K-8,” discusses using e-tools to scaffold comprehension of e-literature. When reading this chapter, I was intrigued by the WebNotes description. In my own learning I have always found sticky notes a useful, organized strategy for learning. I had never heard of this before and I think this would be very useful when using online literacies and e-books within the classroom. When looking to explore this website, I realized that the site is no longer available. However, there are many websites available that provide similar services and tools to accomplish the goals for learning like with WebNotes, which is now Kami. 

     There are many different resources that can be incorporated and explored within a classroom to enhance and build literacy development. There are traditional print and digital materials that can be used when teaching and assessing the literacy development of children. The digital text environments support self-regulation and monitoring of comprehension. Digital environment can extend monitoring and self-regulation strategies, and two important scaffolds for supporting monitoring and self-regulation are online annotations and vocabulary and background knowledge. The digital environment can offer vocabulary support, such as an online dictionary, for exploring word and concept knowledge. Creating podcasts of students reading their book talks, which the chapter discusses, I agree is a great way to engage students to help share their reading, thoughts, and opinions with others and encouraging other students to read books the class enjoys. This strategy can also help practice and improve fluency. 

     Technology resources are a more modern way of teaching, and very different to use than traditional print materials. However, I realized as I was reading, that even though there are major differences handling and using traditional print materials versus the digital environments, the ways of teaching and evaluating comprehension strategies are the same, just simply adjusted to meet the needs of the students and environment being used.

Chapter 5

The fifth chapter of the book, “Reading, Writing, and Literacy 2.0: Teaching with Online Texts, Tools, and Resources, K-8,” discusses sites and selection criteria for Ebooks. I was not aware of all of the different types of ebooks and websites or apps that are available for them. Hearing books read aloud serves as a great model for reading for children. One advantage of online books that I like is the capability to incorporate audio and video so students can hear and view stories being read aloud. A few resources that the chapter mentioned were Storyline online and Between the Lions, which are both useful sites to help children read along with picture books. Students do need to know how to navigate through the sites regardless of how user-friendly the site is in order to be able to make use of the websites. When selecting online ebooks as a teacher, it is important that the ebooks chosen are appropriate, reader friendly, accessible and take into account the quality to support of the navigational skills of students.  As a teacher, I will be sure to teach my students how to use the programs and become familiar with using them before allowing the students to explore the ebook materials on their own or with other students.

I believe that with the book apps that there should still be an emphasis on adult interaction when reading with children. I think many adults, especially parents, would much rather just hand their child a phone or iPad/tablet and let them explore and entertain themselves. I do think that the book apps are a very useful and interactive way for children to learn different non-literacy skills, and can be explored as a class, with teachers, or at home with parents. There should be a balance between adult-student interactions along with choosing to use book apps and online books as tools to help build literacy skills. There are many resources that are available, and ebooks, if used in an instructional but fun manner, can aid the literacy development and learning of students of all ages.