Removing Obstacles to Learning
Removing Obstacles to Learning
The invention of the printing press changed the world. By the end of the fifteenth century, this technology produced ten million copies of more than forty thousand book titles. Marshall McLuhan proclaimed that the medium is the message–the printing press, as an extension of human kind, displaced the ear and auditory stimuli with the eye and visual stimuli as the predominant sense. “From that point on, Western man was Gutenberg man (The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine, March 1969. Retrieved October 24, 2007). The printing press shaped and transformed the entire human environment: psychic, social, political, and educational. Even the school was conceived of as ‘a machine for learning.’
In the twenty first century, it is still taken for granted that the book is the pathway to knowledge, and print media (textbooks, worksheets, etc.) dominate contemporary education. Research identifies reading difficulties as the major reason that students struggle in school. This has dire consequences because the ubiquitous book becomes a barrier to accessing curriculum, participating in learning activities, and achieving outcomes across the curriculum. If we are serious about inclusive education we will take up the challenge of creating learning conditions where all students can be successful. We can begin by removing the barrier of inflexible print media and exploring more flexible pathways to learning.
Unlike fixed print media, there is unequaled flexibility with digital media. The same content in an inflexible printed book can be displayed in multiple ways in digital format: still image, moving image, sound, American sign language, Braille, sound in text, video in text, text on video, etc. Information and communication technologies are restructuring literacy
WiggleWorks (Gr. K-2) and Thinking Reader (Gr. 5-9) are sophisticated examples of learning environments with built-in flexibility for instruction, learning and assessment. The programs are computer-based (stand alone or networked) programs, designed to improve reading comprehension. WiggleWorks has been the mainstay of the primary program in my Learning and Enrichment Centre at Cougar Canyon and I am excited to be adding Thinking Reader for the intermediate students. Thinking Reader combines the research-supported techniques of strategy instruction and reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984) with versatile technologies, digital versions of high-quality children’s literature embedded with tools and prompts that can be adjusted to respond to learner differences in decoding, comprehension strategies, vocabulary, knowledge, visual acuity, and many other abilities. Features such as text-to-speech capability; age-appropriate, appealing literature; built-in logs for monitoring progress; and flexibility in visual or oral presentation of text all ensure that students are supported in ways that help them learn.
http://www.tomsnyder.com/products/product.asp?SKU=THITHI#
WiggleWorks and Thinking Reader are two universally designed literacy programs.
