Ch. 14

One thing that I have been struggling with lately is the question of true literacy. What is literacy? What should our students be expected to know when they graduate? What should I be teaching them in an English classroom? Because of my childhood with and love of books and reading I automatically want to say that I need to be teaching my students how to understand, process, and think critically about a piece of text, and then translate those thoughts into coherent writing. Other sources claim that students need to be taught how to become interested in reading and make it more exciting, and that reading anything is good enough. Still others say that literacy is not limited to a page and that students need to have technological as well as book-reading skills. Who is correct? And is it possible to teach all three?
Perhaps it is because of the area I come from, but as I read this chapter I doubted the students' excitement over the new projects in their classroom. In high school I never heard of anyone listening to podcasts, wikis were used to find quick, easy information for a paper, and video projects were bothersome tasks that took too much planning and team work to produce. Because most of us rarely interacted with these technologies, incorporating them into a class would have been even more work for the teacher, who would have had to teach the technology as well as the concept. Also, I personally don't think that technology improves learning, it simply garners more interest. So while students may be more intrigued by the assignment initially, it is really not producing any better results than a traditional assignment would. 
Maybe I just have a bad attitude towards technology because I'm such a paper-and-pen type of person. Computer malfunctions hinder progress, software glitches frustrate the students, and shooting off a two sentence discussion board post is a much easier assignment than writing a full-out response to a reading, and often takes less thinking. I'm also a very private person, and I'm not entirely comfortable with knowing that anyone can read what I'm posting right now. I don't entirely trust technology, and I'm not sure why. I think the best plan for me would be to ask my students at the beginning of the school year the types of technologies they interact with regularly and how they would like to see those integrated into our class. This will spur me to learn more about the specific tools they enjoy and attempt to use them effectively in the classroom.