It was a Blast!

We have sadly completed our ICT course and have also come to the end of our academic year. As we reflect, let us ask ourselves what do we do with this wealth of knowledge? When we look around, in our schools and in our classrooms, there is a large percentage of our students who are struggling readers. Too often they cross our paths and they 'pass through the system'.


As professionals, let us raise the standards of our approach to teaching and learning. We are in the digital era and our children are fascinated by technology. The question is how can we incorporate technology in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension to make learning fun yet achieve our objectives. Colleagues, let us practice and practice until we get it right and even in the absence of technology, we should still find creative ways to bring life to learning.

Let me leave you with this.............

• Remember to always be prepared.


• Enhance learning through technology.


• Always put our children first.


• Deliver your lessons with enthusiasm, vigour and vitality.


• Improve on your strategies.


• Never give up, even though the situation seems impossible.


• Go out there, confident, knowledgeable and with a drive to succeed!

Digital StoryTelling is Dynamite!

I read several articles on digital storytelling and several authors described it as a very effective tool in the classroom. At the time, which was approximately one week ago, I was not a big fan. In fact, the seven elements of digital storytelling made me sceptical about creating the book.

Then eureka! Today we learnt to create a digital storybook and off course, hands on learning has proven for years to be effective.It was simple, fun and it kept my interest. Now, the emphasis is on the photos because the photos tell the story. So, yes, we must have some knowledge about photography and follow some basic rules:

• A centred picture is boring.


• Ensure you look for distance in the frame


• The great "Rule of Thirds"

Something else came to mind.There is a child I tutor who is abused by her foster parents. She has some reading challenges but is excellent with the computer because it builds her confidence.She expresses her feelings through drawings and she loves to take pictures.The digital story book will be excellent for her to create a narrative of her life and I can understand her hidden feelings. Remember pictures are powerful!!

I mentioned it to her and she agreed. So colleagues, this can be used for expressing one's thoughts while exploring literacy in the 21st century.

Endless Opportunities for ebooks

I have heard the term electronic books (eBooks) and my understanding was simply a story book in a digital format. Well I read a few articles,did some research and to my surprise the information that I received was more than I bargained for. You see, apart from the basic features of the ebook such as it saves paper, it is simple to resize print, it is a way of preserving books, very easy to access and update, it can also be very effective in the classroom.

As reading specialists this tool is extremely motivational to students and useful in developing skills in literacy. Children in the 21st century are computer savvy and enjoy spending time in front of the computer so why not use this to our advantage and enhance children’s reading skills.

Some other fascinating features are:


1.Hyperlinks can be placed on eBooks to access additional information
2.You can incorporate sound, images or animation in the books
3.Excellent to motivate students to write.
4.Work can be published on eBooks
5.Comments and feedback can be posted on an eBook


Use your ebooks in the classroom and explore ways of teaching vocabulary, skills in fluency, comprehension or even phonics. The sky is the limit! It is up to us to be creative and make learning fun for our children.

Emerge into Literacy!

I often chat with my friend Hana about her son’s literacy development and recently she mentioned how much progress he is making while interacting with a child’s website. It is because of this I want to share my thoughts on the importance of emergent literacy.

We are all parents and teachers and we can hold the future of our children in our hands. All of us are aware of emergent literacy and it is my firm belief that if our young ones go through the stages of early literacy development they will be successful at reading and writing.

Children are learning from birth and it is our responsibility to talk to them daily so that they become familiar with language. The oral language is powerful especially in the development of phonological awareness. Talk to your child about objects, colours, people, or places. Do we teach our infants rhymes or is that something of the past? I still remember sitting on my mom’s lap listening to Jack and Jill and repeating this all day long. Expose your child to print! Read to them labels, signs, directions, recipes and stories upon stories. Draw their attention to beautiful pictures and discuss what you see….and most of all allow them to scribble….and if you don’t want those walls dirty then stick a sheet of paper over it but never stifle your child’s creativity!

This sounds so simple but yet some of us can’t find the time to share these special moments with our little ones. As reading specialists we have the responsibility of making Trinidad a literate society. We have to start sharing our knowledge with others so that our nation’s children will be able to read and write.

A Technique in Using Technology

Today I was chatting with my friend who has just completed a course on the basic uses of computers in the classroom and she said something that started a long discussion. If her baby did not cry, well I would still be at the mall, with no intentions of going home. She said “I want to introduce blogging in the classroom, I wonder if I can use it in a Social Studies lesson?”

I remember briefly discussing this very same question during one of the ICT sessions and strange enough, I did some reading a few days ago on infusing technology in the curriculum. As teachers, we plan lessons daily and in doing so we try to choose the strategies, techniques and resources that will enhance our lessons and provide a greater understanding of the concepts being taught. We don’t do the reverse which is choose the strategy, technique and resources then sit and say “I wonder what lesson I can teach now”……. at least I hope not!

To infuse technology in the classroom we must first understand the goals and objectives of every lesson, be aware of our pedagogical context and critically analyse the technology that we want to use. Critical analysis involves basic questioning, for example:

• would the wiki enhance writing skills?



• will my objectives be met by using the wiki ?



• will it be worthwhile to use the wiki?

If the answers to these questions are positive then the wiki is the way to go. You see, we cannot infuse technology in our lessons because we are just fond of it but rather we use technology only because it can provide a deeper understanding of concepts for our children. If the technology we are using is stifling learning then we are moving in the wrong direction!!

Delicious is it?

While perusing my E learning, I was fascinated by the term Delicious.com so I decided to click on the link to see what awaited me. It was indeed delicious. I heard about social book marking but never had the opportunity to use it so I ventured into the unknown. I stumbled upon a social bookmarking service and what I found was a gold mine for my children to use in the classroom.

I taught my Standard Five children how to save WebPages to my favourites (with supervision off course) for future access and they all grasped it very easily. They have found it to be very beneficial and used it often whenever we visited the labs. Delicious.com provides me with a new way to bookmark but this proves to be more effective and reliable. Through creative tagging, the students can organize and manage their bookmarks for easy accessibility. Social bookmarking can teach essential skills in literacy such as sorting, labelling and providing appropriate titles. The students will be given the opportunity to share links and communicate globally with other internet users.

My colleagues this is just another tool to stimulate our children and create a literate society. Literacy cannot be restricted to a book and chalkboard but it is best taught through engaging students in a meaning making process. This new literacy is what is called ‘network literacy’ and it is just another way of communicating!

What a way to go! Concept Mapping!

To continue what I saying, a concept map is a simple attractive tool for organizing and representing one’s thoughts and information. I was introduced to Webspiration and immediately I fell in love with it. Being an educator, several thoughts of incorporating this technology into teaching and learning raced through my mind.

As far back as my memory can take me, I used semantic maps in the classroom for activating prior knowledge in creative writing. My children enjoyed them and they have proven to be effective for struggling readers and visual/spatial learners. One reason for this is the fact that motivation is one of the key factors of learning and by using the maps the children were stimulated and were better able to understand the content of the lessons.

Webspiration is multidimensional and can be even more effective than the semantic maps we use in the classroom. Through proper scaffolding, the students can organize their thoughts, revise and edit their own work and assist in revising the work of their peers. Imagine the depth of learning that would emerge from this simple activity! It is excellent for teachers because we can use the tool to assess students thus moving away from the typical paper and pencil assessments.

We all can attest to the difficulty of content area teaching and as I mentioned previously Wespiration is excellent to enhance these lessons. Use them to define concepts, such as the water cycle or the Spanish influence in Trinidad, even the learning of a second language or area of solids in mathematics. The list can go on and on and as educators use your imagination. The sky is the limit and make use of these opportunities!