The course EDRL 6004 ICT in reading has finally come to an end and I must commend the lecturers for doing such a fantastic job on organizing and executing such a challenging course in a very short time. I have been informed about technology that I have always heard of but never really saw the need to use until now. The Web 2.0 tools are so beneficial for us as teachers, reading specialists and parents.
Wikis, podcasts and blogs can be used in a diverse number of ways to teach reading in our students. A wiki is a programme that is based on adding, deleting in essence editing information at any given time. Wikis are best used in the creative writing process but it can also be implemented in other reading areas as vocabulary, morphology, decoding, comprehension and fluency. Blogs on the other hand are used for adding comments to the topic of interest but the writer of the topic is the only one who can edit and others can only add comments. Blogs are not appropriate for writing but it can be used in the other areas of reading. According to Lewis (2010) “podcasts provide your students with excellent opportunities to access and create authentic digital audio and video material,” (p. 69). Students can therefore use podcasts to discuss their creative writing pieces, to discuss topics such as verbs in English Language and even narrate stories, or comment on a news-piece and present this as digital audio. Podcasts can be downloaded to mobile players therefore making it easily accessible that is to say you do not need to have a computer to view a podcast.
Digital story-telling and e-books are great ways to teach fluency, vocabulary, morphology and even comprehension. The concept mapping software is also beneficial to the classroom and us as developing reading specialists. All these forms of technology that I have learnt in this course are lifelong learning tools for my students, my children and me.
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