Penny's Top Ten

Our goal, “to design instruction that empowers students as interpreters and producers of text and provides them with metaknowledge that will enable them to function in various discourse communities” (Pence, 2010).

My summer gains in literacy: reading , writing, and beyond.

1) I have become more computer literate by learning the Elluminate system. I am really glad that I have had this opportunity. Like it or not, online instruction is the way of the future. As a student and as an instructor I must keep up with the technology of education. Teachers who are able to deliver instruction through this method will have greater job security and be able to help students all over the world!

2) I have become more computer literate through the wiki experience class story. I didn't think I would like it at first. It was fun to join ideas together with others, but when the dog became a bug I was a bit thrown off. Then I realized that I needed to lighten up! The story was supposed to be fun and creative and now it was! So this experience has made me more literate in realizing that writing collaboratively forces us out of our comfort zones and maybe out of our own ruts.


3) Writing a blog and responding to others – again, I didn't think I would like it at first. I didn't think anyone would really care to hear what I had to say for one. But I see the great value in our assignment. We were able to hear about a lot of great books. I could not have read all of those books in one summer myself. Now I have gleaned from all of them and have an idea of which will be helpful for me to read myself fully. I think my students would enjoy a classroom blog. I would like more ideas about how to use it with my class. I am concerned about how much time it would take for me to monitor it.


4) Dave Marvitt's distributed knowledge video lesson taught me that by working together we are all smarter than the smartest member of the group. Collaborative work helps everyone produce a better product. Students need to learn to produce better products as this is very applicable to the work place. However, they also need to be able to produce something on their own at times, especially when assessments are necessary.

5) “What is literacy?” wiki - Putting distributed knowledge into action was another chance to grow in literacy. I found that we each brought different contributions to the plate. This made for a very nice finished article on literacy. I could not have produced such a thorough response on my own.

6) My book, Reading for Understanding, has taught me much about literacy, particularly the apprenticeship approach to helping junior and senior high school students gain more efferent comprehension from academic texts in the content areas. The main practice is the modeling of 4 strategies for students: questioning, summarizing, predicting, and clarifying. Student are also taught to take a metacognitive stance, thinking about their reading processes and about themselves as readers.

7) Gee has taught us all much about literacy. His idea that literacy is a Discourse helps us to move students into the realm of academic subjects more smoothly. When we remember to, “design instruction that empowers students as interpreters and producers of text and provides them with metaknowledge (we) will enable them to function in various discourse communities” (Pence, 2010).

8) In “Two Student Readers” teacher DeRose asked her student Jeremy, “Can you tell us why you decided that was most important?” I believe that in doing this she is causing the student to think about how he thinks, engaging his meta-cognition. I learned about literacy in the following way: students may interpret the text in a different way than I do. I need to let them connect in any way that they can before I try to help them to the efferent public understanding of the text.


9) Lea and Street helped me learn that students need to be taught the academic literacy of each subject we teach them. This helps them to switch their writing and reading styles between one setting and another, “to deploy a repertoire of literacy practices appropriate to each setting , and to handle the social meanings and identities that evoke each”.

10) Rosenblatt's transactional theory has taught me that the relationship between the reader and the text is much like that between the river and its banks, each working its effects upon the other, each contributing to the shape of the poem.