RASA conference highlights
On Saturday 15th March the Reading Association of South Africa held a conference called “Literacy Works: Best practices in literacy teaching and a focus on mew media: their place in literacy teaching” at the University of Cape Town. It was an informative day, with everyone there clearly enthusiastic and committed to improving the literacy levels of South Africa’s youth.
Texting and literacy
Kevin Sherman, an ICT Education Specialist at the Schools Development Unit, University of Cape Town, spoke about using text messaging to teach literacy skills. It was a fun session where various groups had to translate conventional English passages to txtspk and back again. Afterwards we thought of all the learning activities that we’d employed in the exercise — a list of about 20 points. When weighing up this list against the negatives usually associated with texting, e.g that it might be bad for spelling and grammar, the positives very much won.
Kevin Sherman, an ICT Education Specialist at the Schools Development Unit, University of Cape Town, spoke about using text messaging to teach literacy skills. It was a fun session where various groups had to translate conventional English passages to txtspk and back again. Afterwards we thought of all the learning activities that we’d employed in the exercise — a list of about 20 points. When weighing up this list against the negatives usually associated with texting, e.g that it might be bad for spelling and grammar, the positives very much won.
Primary school teacher, Fiona Beel, talking about how much her learners have enjoyed blogging (License: CC-BY-NC-SA)