Bridging Literacies

Today more and more students use certain nascent technologies, such as the Internet, gaming software, video conferencing, web pages and weweblogs (“blogs”) to communicate and read and write, both at home, and in outside-school settings. The challenge for us teacher educators – who are technological “immigrants”—is to provide our younger, technologically “native-born” students with both expertise in their virtual world, and also critical perspectives on its place in the real world. This weblog provides a forum for constructive conversations among pre-service and in-service teachers, teacher educators, students and parents toward achieving these goals. More specifically, the weblog serves the following objectives:

• To learn how to weblog;
• To respond to others’ thinking and ideas, educational policy, and recent research trends in a thoughtful and critical manner;
• To share with others ideas, tips, and resources about literacy and language arts instruction in general and in particular with modern technologies;
• To model to our students meaningful, respectful, and thought-provoking collaborative learning with modern technology tools;
• To encourage and model multimodal composition;
• To create space for celebrating our best writing pieces;
• To create a community of learners through a multi-channeled interaction with peers and the audiences beyond the classroom wall.