To quote the current Tasmanian Curriculum document for English-literacy:”In addition to making meaning from traditional spoken, written and visual texts, and learning language skills, students now need to understand and use new and emerging text forms, including those made possible by information and communication technologies (ICT)”. (page 5)

Teachers in our schools are addressing this aspect of literacy learning in a variety of ways, and highlighting a few examples can be useful in identifying some of the possibilities for us all.

Kindergarten digital book
Last year, a kindergarten teacher doing some work with her class to explore the idea that ‘Numbers are everywhere’, identified one of her learning objectives as: “To illustrate to the children that there are other ways of making and reading a “book” other than the paper page variety.” Further detail is available in the planning: numbers-are-everywhere.doc

She and her students used a digital camera to record how numbers are used in familiar environments (classroom, home, playground) and then worked together using Photo Story 3 (a free download)  to create an electronic book that captured their shared understanding.

The finished product (see below; slightly edited for the web) was able to be shared with the class and the school (… and now the world through this blog! ) and the teacher reported that “Viewing was enthusiastically undertaken as the children had ownership of the story and it related to their recent experiences of number hunting. Most importantly they came away from the experience with a more heightened awareness of the differences between numbers and letters.”

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