Here's another piece (from the Hartford Courant) about the impact of technology on how students learn. Perhaps the most interesting comment in the article (you'll have to click on "more here" to get to it) is a suggestion that students who are poor readers of traditional print texts can be good readers of the web.
Testing Kids' Web Smarts
By ROBERT A. FRAHM
Courant Staff Writer
June 12, 2006NORWICH -- Millions of American students still learn the way generations before them did - by reading textbooks and other material assigned by teachers. But do they have the reading skills they need to explore the wide-open, uncharted world of the Internet?
With the help of students like seventh-grader Erica Grant poised in front of a computer screen, University of Connecticut Professor Donald J. Leu plans to find out.
"We're going to ask you to think aloud. ... We really want to get inside your head and see the skills and strategies you're using," Leu tells her as she prepares to search the Internet to answer the question "Why do rainbows form?"
The recent session at Norwich's Kelly Middle School is part of a three-year, $1.8 million federally funded study to test Leu's theory that online reading poses new challenges to students and requires skills different from what most schools have taught.
More here.
