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 //Keeping Up with the Times//

Web 2.0 

Welcome to the wiki created for a presentation at the New England Reading Association Conference on September 25th, 2008 in Springfield, Massachusetts. If you found your way here you attended our presentation, had someone share the address with you, or just stumbled upon it.

In any case, welcome.

This presentation, //Keeping up with the Times, // came about due to an interest in Adolescent Literacy and the need to engage students, primarily at the middle school level. With the arrival of Web 2.0, educators need to take stock of what and how we are teaching. We need to see how we can engage the young people today who are often more technologically savvy then we are. Adolescents today use different means of communication (IM and text messaging, for example) than we did and even still do. I know from firsthand experience when trying to use my remote with our Replay TV or even when inputting names into my phone, that this process is one that takes practice in order to do so quickly. Students today have cell phones that are text enabled and computers with email and instant messaging capacities. They have Play Stations and Nintendo, each with its own action packed games requiring skills that seem foreign to many of us. These students can tell you the entire Zelda or similar story line with all the pitfalls and secrets to navigating through the multiple levels within these games. So how do we compete and capture their attention long enough to build upon these reading and literacy skills? We can hopefully do this by engaging them where they are by using Web 2.0 tools which utilize a more interactive and perhaps more authentic reading and writing environment.

Meredith Menton, Reading Consultant, Region 15, Memorial Middle School mmenton@region15.org

Deb Thibault, Literacy Coordinator K-12, Berlin, CT Hubbard School, East Berlin, CT 06023 dthibault@berlinschools.org

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