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Technology in Language Arts Articles:
CONTENT AREA: Graduating From Teacher to Facilitator in the Technology-Rich Classroom
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://www.4teachers.org/testimony/webb/index.shtml
Carol Webb, a seventh-grade English language arts teacher, relates her experience in adapting teaching writing to the prevailing educational philosophy, constructivism, in this article—all with the help of technology. She tells how she became the guide on the side by allowing problem-solving to take place with technology as the tool to make it happen. The word-processing/writing process as she facilitates it in a constructivist learning environment makes possible the creation of new meanings and the self-assessments necessary to refining writing skills.
CONTENT AREA: Use of Laptops Powers Better Writing Skills
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPPrint/LAC/20040114/LAPTOP
Sixth- and seventh-graders at Peace River North School District in British Columbia received wireless laptops, a gift that resulted in an impressive jump in their writing test scores, as reported by Caroline Alphonso. This article offers testimonials from school administrators, teachers, and parents confirming the positive effect the conversion to laptop-conceived writing brought about for all the children but especially for boys who had attention disorders, were left-handed, and were kinesthetically dominant learners.
CONTENT AREA: Educational PDA Games Engage Students, Teach Essential Language Skills
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://www.thejournal.com
Howard Tomlinson in this article points out a real, but often ignored, fact of teaching today’s video game playing students. Although the PDA is not restricted for instructional purposes to the middle grades, it is here that Tomlinson’s alternative method of beginning a lesson with the required “hook” for the goal of motivating learning vocabulary and spelling, both integral to middle school curricula, fits most appropriately. His article lists PDA word games that can be powerful teaching tools for two of the most challenging literacy skills for the visual, non-verbal, student population.
CONTENT AREA: Digital Profiles in Poetry: An Updated Silhouette Project
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://www.iste.org/LL
Combining the fun of doing silhouettes with a digital camera with the English language standards that require creative writing in poetic form that is self-expressive, Joanne Fortunato devised a plan for satisfying the students’ fascination with digital photography and the middle-school pre-occcupation with their self-images. In this article, she gives an explicit account of the process she followed, the equipment she used, and the results she obtained in a remarkable learning experience for students with a variety of intelligences.
CONTENT AREA: What Works—Enhancing the Process of Writing Through Technology: Integrating Research and Best Practice
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://ncrel.org/engauge/resource/techno/whatworks/ovrview.htm
This report prepared by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratories for the enGauge Resources’ Technology in the Content Areas pages on their web site extends to middle school English language arts teachers a valuable means of ensuring the writing skills taught in the middle grades are acquired when developmentally appropriate. This source is applicable to older students, but it is in the middle grades that the groundwork as presented on this site is laid down. There are six sections, each treating of the adaptation of traditional methods of teaching writing to the enrichment of the process through the integration of technology.
Technology Integration Websites:
CONTENT AREA: The Write Site
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://www.writesite.org
This web site, developed by Think TVNetwork with a grant from the Ohio Educational Telecommunications Network Commission in cooperation with the Ohio Department of Education, is a multimedia, interactive site for middle school students. It integrates reading, writing, and technology in a simulation of real-life journalism that has three main areas: The Newsroom, The Editor’s Desk, and The Newsstand. The Newsroom has a Features Desk, a Research Beat, a Style Section, and a Classroom Challenge.
CONTENT AREA: Middle School Journal
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://www.nmsa.org
The Middle School Journal site offers full text feature articles on all aspects of middle school education, with a focus on the content areas and research. William Kist’s article, Student Achievement in New Literacies for the 21st Century (2003, September) exemplifies how the site provides input on integrating technology into teaching middle school language arts. He tells how Clarence Fisher, a sixth-grade teacher at Kerr School in northern Manitoba, Canada, has adapted writing reports so as to incorporate technology into the writing process. His students employ digital cameras, a digital camcorder, and the notebooks ubiquitous to writing classes to interview a local fisherman by phone and follow up with digital technology to provide images for the report they will write and post on the web, thus integrating “the new literacies” into a multimedia process and product.
CONTENT AREA: CyberGuides: Teacher Guides & Student Activities
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
URL: http://www.sdcoe.k12.ca.us/SCORE/cyberguide.html
Cyber Guides is a site that covers it all for teaching literature. It has a link for middle school (Grades 6-8) where teachers can search web instructional units all keyed to standards. One example of what can be found on this site is the Internet-based unit for teaching Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Jane Gray. Deborah Gaulin has designed a bound-to-intrigue study that demonstrates how technology can enlist the Internet for the research necessary to a background study for an interdisciplinary essay on the Middle Ages as it shaped the lives and times of the characters in the novel. A list of web sites is provided to be used by the students as they learn how to write the genre of historical literary criticism.
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