Empowering Students with Technology

I bought Empowering Students with Technology by Alan November for my Kindle program on my Mac. I've never played around with e-reader technology before, stubbornly saying that I prefer a physical book. However, I discovered something very cool that the Kindle does - any portions of the text that had been highlighted multiple times by Kindle readers had dotted lines under them, with the number of highlights indicated below. I thought this would be a very helpful technology for kids, particularly in determining what the most important information in the text is. Also, Kindle makes it very easy to access any highlights, notes, and bookmarks you've made in the text in a menu on the side of the screen. I was amazed at how easy it was to purchase the book, begin reading it immediately, and be able to annotate it paperlessly. The applications for my classroom (once I convince the publishers to make my texts available on e-readers!) are innumerable - if it were to have a live vocabulary look-up, half of the time my students take in translating passages would be eliminated, and we would be able to proceed to interpretation that much more quickly.

Beyond my excitement at reading a textbook in a new format, the content of the book has given me a lot of ideas on how to help my students develop a more sophisticated digital literacy. One of the things that November explains is the grammar of the internet, in particular how to read URLs to find indications that a site is endorsed by an organization or is a public page hosted by the organization (which would be less trustworthy). Being a Latin teacher, I love grammar and understanding the hidden clockwork that makes language work, and I think that being able to understand the clockwork behind the internet will be of great interest to my students, since it is something that they use everyday. The benefit of that understanding is that they will be able to use the internet more effectively as a research tool to expand their learning. As November puts it, "If you do not know the rules, it is impossible to win the game." Alan C. November. Empowering Students With Technology (Kindle Location 236). Kindle Edition. (Hey, look, the Kindle cited it for me, too!) I'd like to be able to connect the concept of grammar they are learning in my class with the grammar of the internet - they both work with very mathematical rules, and looking at the concept more broadly may help my students have a better understanding of it as a result.