The paomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mind.  Aoccdrinig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it doeosn't  mtater  in waht  order the ltteers in a wrod are, the only iprmoetnt tihng is taht  the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit  pclae.  The rest can be a total mses and you can sillt  raed it wouthit porbelm . Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mind deos not raed  erevy lteter by istlef, but the wrod  as a wlohe.   Amzanig huh?    

Think about this and the difference of teaching sounding out of each letter in an isolated manner!  First word there tuh-ha-eh if sounded out!  Try and remember how you first learned how to read.  

With today's talking word processors like "KidWorks Deluxe from Knowledge Adventure" or "Writing Buddy by Dr. Bill Peet (available as an app for your computer, iPhone or iPad a great product for teaching reading!)  Every school and home with beginning learners needs to have these.  And of course every early literacy classroom.

Today’s Students:  Powered Up for Success

Teaching is one of the few professions that is not just a job or even an adventure—it's a calling. Great teachers strive to help every student unlock their potential and develop the habits of mind that will serve them for a lifetime. They believe that every student has a gift—even when students doubt themselves.

Global Communications From Home and School

Early Literacy Telecommunication Exchange Pilot Project is the first integrated multimedia, multilingual web based system for young children. It is open and evolutionary; young children 4 and over discover and use the written language by creating stories and drawings and share them with other young children across the world; 

This exciting global project involves classrooms in four countries; France, USA, Spain, Andorra with potential for many more.

Research over the past fifteen years working with children and computers has brought us new insights into how children learn to write and read in both their first and second language.

We have discovered strategies to help teachers make the maximum use of the new technologies and empower all the children in their classroom.

The collaboration now going on among early literacy classrooms worldwide has expanded our professional community and increased our level of literacy knowledge.

Key goals:

1.             Early Literacy telecommunications will allow young children to discover and use the written language in its communication function from the start;

2.      Prevent illiteracy and school failure;

3.            Encourage the use of technology from the start for writing and reading;

4.            Develop international understanding from a young age by introducing a foreign language and enabling cross- cultural exchanges,

5.            Enhance interactive collaborative projects between classes located in different parts of the world,

6.            Create an E-Learning community of children, their teachers as well as other faculty members and parents.

U.S. Progress

Computers are in the classroom.

Laptops and Smart Boards making an appearance, also wireless laptop mobile carts.

Language Processing happens when students think and write directly into the computer daily.

With these new innovations teachers can do a group language processing story on the Smart Board, students also can type there stories to be shown to the entire class, printed out and then used as a choral reading.

For more information on project, workshops or consulting or to find out about how your school or classroom can participate contact:

Dr. Jean Casey, U.S. coordinator

E-mail: jeancasey@aol.com

http://www.csulb.edu/~casey/

blog:  www.casey.com/jean

Dr. Rachel Cohen, Director

French Schools

For more information: http://www.csulb.edu/~jmcasey

Success for your students

Creating the Early Literacy Classroom:

The computer when used as a writing tool empowers all students to become authors.

1) Exploration- Initially students explore the keyboard and type random letters. (this exploration is an essential learning stage.)  As they type a key, they see it, hear it and are actively involved in the process of teaching the letters to themselves. (Alphabet recognition has been shown to be an indicator: http:// of reading success.)

2) Encoding, copying known words- Next the students type their name and words familiar to them like Mom...Dad...Ruff....etc.; they also look around their environment for print and type that print into the computer and hear it spoken and see its form and continually search for meaning and patterns in the letters and words they create on the screen.

3) Writing explosion-Finally students begin to put their own thought together with all these words and the explosion of literacy from one sentence on the screen to long stories occurs very rapidly.  At this stage the learner needs to hear the teacher read many and varied examples of good literature.

Casey, Jean M. coming out in 2011: Power Up: Effective Classroom for the Technology Native Student. Libraries Unlimited.

Casey, Jean M. (2000) Creating the Early Literacy Classroom, Casey, Jean M. (2000) Early Literacy: The Empowerment of Technology, Rev. Edition (2000), Libraries Unlimited, Englewood, CO.  to order books: e-mail jeancasey@aol.com or www.lu.com

Your goal will be to empower your students through Language Processing, taking their own language experiences and writing them on the computer.

Recommended Software:

Kidworks Deluxe and BookBy You from Knowledge Adventure

http://www.knowledgeadventure.com/booksbyyou/

Write Outloud from Don Johnston Company

Also these web sites:

http://atto.buffalo.edu/registered/ATBasics/Curriculum/Reading/talkingWord.php#

http://www.cricksoft.com/us/products/clicker/

http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/wiggleworks/classic/index.htm

http://www.waterford.org/index.jsp

http://www.seussville.com/games/storymaker/story_maker.html try this one out!

Or Google:  Talking Word processors

/Users/jeancasey/Desktop/ELHandoutCUE10.doc

Teaching is one of the few professions that is not just a job or even an adventure—it's a calling. Great teachers strive to help every student unlock their potential and develop the habits of mind that will serve them for a lifetime. They believe that every student has a gift—even when students doubt themselves.<o:p></o:p>

Henry Adams said that "a teacher affects eternity—he can never tell where his influence stops." That is a weighty responsibility and a unique privilege. I thank you for all that you have done and will do to train the next generation of great teachers. The challenges facing our nation's schools of education are great. But so is the opportunity to better serve our children and the common good.<o:p></o:p>

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After being interviewed by the school administration, the prospective teacher said:   
'Let me see if I've got this right. 
'You want me to go into that room with all those kids, correct their disruptive behavior, observe them for signs of abuse, monitor their dress habits, censor their T-shirt messages, and instill in them a love for learning.   
'You want me to check their backpacks for weapons, wage war on drugs and sexually transmitted diseases, and raise their sense of self esteem and personal pride.   
'You want me to teach them patriotism and good citizenship, sportsmanship and fair play, and how to register to vote, balance a checkbook, and apply for a job.   
'You want me to check their heads for lice, recognize signs of antisocial behavior, and make sure that they all pass the final exams. 
'You also want me to provide them with an equal education regardless of their handicaps, and communicate regularly with their parents in English, Spanish or any other language, by letter, telephone, newsletter, and report card.   
'You want me to do all this with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, a bulletin board, a few books, a big smile, and a starting salary that qualifies me for food stamps.   
'You want me to do all this and then you tell me. . . I CAN'T PRAY?<o:p></o:p>

Dear Former Student Teachers, Reading Methods Students both online and at StarView and other schools:
How are you all doing?  Here's a place to keep in touch with me and the other friends you studied with.
Let us know if you are subbing or working?  Where, what grade?  Student teaching where?
As you hear of jobs at places you are at you can share here and help one another.
I will always keep an eye out for you and post any news here that I get about jobs you might be interested in.
Also new software or programs you might want to use in your classroom.
Also glad to be a sounding board and help you figure out anything pertaining to your teaching that I might be able to help with.
So join here today and let's talk, you know I miss you all!
Wishing you the best of success the children out there need you!
Dr. Casey

Students born after 1989 are known as “Technology Natives” how are we serving them?

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 Author Robert X. Cringley told an audience  at an annual Computer-Using Educators (CUE) conference that he asked a fifth-grade boy about technology use in his school. The boy replied, “I have to power down when I go to school!

In the 1985 book Computers and Literacy, Daniel Chandler and Stephen Marcus wrote,” If anything can be predicted about computers and literacy, it is that some people will oversell the technology as a positive force and that others will decry it as an abomination. Perhaps the most we can hope for is a continued reliance on talented teachers acquiring an informed exuberance and the young children excelling on computers in the home growing up and showing us the way. Together they will be major forces in making the most of whatever the technology has to offer us in this new information age."

Recently a student teacher sent me the following e-mail:

“Dr. Casey, I thought about you a lot in my student teaching assignment when I was teaching second graders... that class has almost zero technology in their learning. There were six computers in the classroom. The students never were able to use them in the seven weeks I was there. I finally arranged a lesson around group work on the computers, and found out that none of the log-ins worked any more.”

Another student teacher reported her classroom had six laptops, which the students never used. The master teacher never incorporated any technology into her lessons. The school had a great computer lab and sadly it was not used at all. She felt that the reason the school never had time to use the computers was because of the overwhelming pressure to raise ELL test scores. The focus on English language development shapes the school's curriculum. The school has completely taken out technology, art, and music—despite the fact that recent research about technology and ELLs shows that using computers to write stories improves English language and computer literacy skills in these children.

How are children using technology?

It’s 2008 and let’s look at where we are: Technology outside of school has exploded, with 70% of children ages  2-17 using computers, according to a 2001 article by Tamara Lewin in The New York Times. Children use cell phones, iPods, wireless Internet networks, and video games.

Since 1999, there have been big changes in the percentage of 8- to 18-year-olds who have a computer at home (73% to 86%), have two or more computers at home (25% to 39%), have Internet access at home (47% to 74%), and go online for more than an hour in a typical day. Nearly three out of four (73%) 8 to 18-year-olds read for pleasure in a typical day, averaging 43 minutes a day. Nearly one-third (30%) of young people say they either talk on the phone, instant message, watch TV, listen to music, or surf the Web for fun “most of the time” while they’re doing homework, according to the study Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year olds (available at www.kaisernetwork.org, report 7251).

With this technology explosion going on outside of schools, one might expect our schools to be leading the way in helping students master it. Some innovative ones are; however, in many places that is not the case. In 1999, I was the evaluator for the Simi Star Project funded by IBM and conducted at six school districts in California. The study tested the effectiveness of computers in the classroom and the effects of integrating technology into the curriculum. The kindergarteners and first-graders in these districts were learning to read and write. The upper-grade students won every writing contest in the district, designed Web pages, and were leading the way.

Now, 10 years later in many of these districts the  computers sit largely unused. The money has been used to hire consultants to provide teachers with training on raising test scores. In the meantime the gap between the use of technology in the world outside of the classroom and inside the classroom has grown enormously.

 It is time to discard the old paradigm and create a new technology rich classroom environment that works.  In Ocean View school district through the use of ETT Grant funding they are providing interactive Smart Board technology into every classroom and creating a completely new interactive learning environment for students and teachers.

This generation has come of age with the Internet. Author and game designer Marc Prensky calls these young people  “technology natives”—the students who have grown up with the network. Amazingly, they have become the masters of the new technologies. They learned to crawl alongside the PC.

Kids used to grow up in the dark intellectually, and educators were the people who showed kids the light. Today, kids grow up in the light—they are connected to the world through television, the Internet, social networking sites, etc. If educators were smart, they would find ways to build on this and increase children's understanding. But instead, many teachers make the kids shut off all their technological connections to the world as they enter the school building. In effect, rather than showing kids the light, they bring the kids out of the light back into the darkness. <o:p></o:p>

All teachers today  should be lighting the way for all their students. Technology is no longer an additional "gimmick," but a vital part of students' daily lives. Technology should be used in the pursuit of meaningful learning, not as a conveyor or deliverer of the designer’s message to a passive learner.

As students actively process information while doing an authentic task, they are exploring and creating their own knowledge. The students are empowered by technology rather than subjected to it. This happens when technology is used as a tool for thinking, learning, creating, and communicating in every one of our classrooms. As educators, we can create the most effective learning environments needed by the "technology natives" we now serve. Even as a "technology immigrant" born way before 1980, I can see that! 

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Dr. Jean Casey is a professor of reading/technology education at California State University, Long Beach, California, USA, and an IRA technology committee member. She conducted a three-year study (the Simi Star Project) on the integration of computers in K-1 classrooms in six California school districts.

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