by Marilyn Moore

Two regional winners of the 2010 IRA Award for Technology and Reading made literacy lessons meaningful and significant for today’s students using technology integration.

At Central Intermediate School in Wagoner, Oklahoma, Amy Cantrell’s project, Creation Station, developed writing abilities in fourth graders using various web 2.0 tools. The goal was to connect reading and writing in authentic ways. The sites that were used were Glogster, Animoto, Voki, Prezi, Voice Thread, Bitstrip, and Wordle. After reading a novel, the students used Animoto to create an original story patterned after the novel they read.  Last, they published their creation and shared it with the class and their families. The writing process was learned and followed: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Students were happy to write a novel and ecstatic to share their work.

Marlyn Guillen from Lanett, Alabama, teaches sixth grade at W.F. Burns Middle School. She was a regional winner through her project, Building a community of Young Readers and Writers Through Technology Integration. To accomplish the overall project objective of building fluency in reading, writing, and technology skills, students were engaged in three learning activities using Microsoft Word. After reading a novel of their choice, students were asked to type a letter to the author and create a slide show of the novel which was shared with other students in the school library.  In another learning experience, students created an electronic brochure of the lives of Eleanor Roosevelt and Michelle Obama using Microsoft Word. The brochure included pictures and text containing three important facts about Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Obama. A third task included reading the poem, To Young Readers by Gwendolyn Brooks. Then students created their versions of the poem and typed them using Microsoft Word. Students were highly engaged in these projects and some of their poems were published in the local newspaper.

Dr. Marilyn Moore is from National University, La Jolla, California. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG). 

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