Conference reflections

The session that I listened to was titled Promise into Practice: What It Now Means to Teach Adolescent Readers and the Impact of the Results. I truly enjoyed this session and learned some interesting information. The lady in the presentation spoke about the students’ experiences in language arts classrooms and how many of them are smart yet receive bad marks. She said that students come to our classroom fully literate but receive bad marks because their literacy does not meet the state requirements.
This is where she brought up the idea of two different literacies. One of the literacies is the traditional literacy, the kind we are used to seeing in the classroom; there is also another kind of literacy, a new one, the literacy students use outside of school and are very good in, and this includes technological devices, such as computers, voice threads and the like.
One of the teachers who noticed this fact set up an experiment and divided the class into two groups, one more traditional and the other was a group that integrated technology into their lesson, for example, instead of writing a letter they were allowed to use voice thread. Basically what the teacher did was she used the students’ outside literacy to help with school required literacy. As a result, this opened up what valued communication in the classroom is and by increasing their confidence it increased their performance.