My name is Laura Corbello. I have been teaching for four years, all in fourth grade in Forsyth County.
Literacy learning, as I understood it--reading (print materials) and writing--has always been fairly easy for me. I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing. In elementary school, I read books in my free time and wrote many stories locked away in my room. My elementary school teachers spent a good part of the day focusing on literacy instruction. Our writing was authentic, always with a purpose, always focused on the writing process, and always for a specific audience.
In high school and in college, I realized that while I was proficient in reading print and writing using pencil and paper, I was illiterate in some new literacies, especially those centered on technology (word processing, blogs, wikis, multimedia, internet browsing and research). For example, I went to college in the fall of 2001 without a computer and with little knowledge about how to use the Internet or how to save a word-processed document. As a result, I’ve struggled to learn 21st century literacies effectively and efficiently. I still don’t know about half of what people my age know regarding technologies/computers and their features and functions. It is my goal to learn.
Because of my love for reading and writing, and because of my struggle with 21st century literacies, I am most interested in teaching students to become better readers and writers and helping students to develop a passion for reading. I also hope to become more proficient in technology and incorporate it successfully in my class so that literacy is more relevant and meaningful to my students.
Laura Corbello
Comments (1)
Laura,
I am interested to know why you feel you are "out of the loop" when it comes to technology. I know that when I was growing up, we took keyboarding in tenth grade and we still used typewriters. The old Tandy computers from Radio Shack were beginning to make an appearance and we had dot matrix printers. (I think that's what they were called.) I often feel that I am lost with things such as these blogs, podcasts, and other uses of technology that we are being expected to learn. I know these were things I did not learn to do when I was in school. Since you said you started college in 2001, I would have thought you would have been exposed to much more in the way of technology. Was this just not your thing or were you not given instruction in using technology?
Clyde Rice
Posted by Clyde Rice | June 6, 2010 11:20 AM
Posted on June 6, 2010 11:20