Week Three

This week we are discussing why we have to teach reading when we actually teach music or math or science.  I find this to be an interesting thought because I have been raised in a home with a parent who was a K-12 educator and a had other relatives who were K-12 educators and I never got the impression that reading was not part of all subjects.  That may sound silly, but I didn't. 

So, I asked a colleague if I was a little off and she said yes and no.  She teaches both adult basic education classes and college classes.  She came to complete her own GED late in life.  She said that she had wonderful mentors who taught her the way my family thought.  That every subject has reading thread throughout, but that when she worked on her undergraduate degree she found that not all instructors thought that way.  And as I thought about my own education, she was right, I had instructors who did not incorporate literacy either.

But the key to this class is technology and literacy.  And I need to learn about technology!  I love the ideas in the text we are using!  If I only had been able to use technology to learn my vocabulary words in the 6th grade, Miss Larson, so would have given me an "A" for the year!  I am the world's worst speller.  I need a spell check for my spell check!  But in the Pearson book there are different ideas of how students and instructors can collaborate through technology with vocabulary development.  My favorite passages was how the talking aids helped support students advance their reading levels in the Reinking and Richman 1990 study (Anderson, p.71).

As part of this week, we are designing our own graphic organizer.  I have to admit that I am a little nervous that my tech knowledge is not yet up to this level yet.  But I am excited to try! Stay tuned.