Some Final Thoughts

These classroom scenarios illustrate how technology can provide opportunities for students to construct knowledge from multiple symbolic respresentations and to reflect on language and other forms of expression. There is no single answer to the question of how classroom technology can be used to support literacy learning. As we explore the possibilities, we will find out the ways that literacy development is constrained and supported for individual children in a multitude of contexts. Throughout our own explorations, we must continue to look at our students with caring and compassionate eyes that respect the different ways they will come to define themselves as readers and writers.

Perhaps the most important contribution of classroom technology is that it provides a venue for children's communicative creativity. Its greatest promise may be that it can offer children the opportunity to dance on the keyboard, to engage in a little “cyber Wanderlust” as they create their own travels on the information highway. If we want children to interact in new ways with all the media available to them, we must be prepared to travel with them. Their literacy journeys are also our own, and we must celebrate our discoveries together. Let the dance begin!



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Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 1999
© 1999-2000 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232