Language Arts - Volume 89, Issue 4, 2012

Educators are increasingly using digital technologies, both for classroom instruction and for personal use. The question is, are we using these technologies to repackage old instructional techniques? Or are we truly transforming teaching and learning? This issue will explore the following questions: How are language arts teachers preparing students for a digital world? In what kind of professional developments are teachers participating? And how are educators rethinking literacy for a multimodal, multimedia, and hyperlinked world? This issue’s authors consider the possibilities, with true transformation in mind.

This article follows one teacher’s quest for integrating technology in the classroom. It also investigates the shift of classroom pedagogy due to personal experiences.

This article describes a project that studied 15 preservice teachers’ perceptions of and reactions to responding to children’s and young adult literature using a Ning blog. These perceptions and reactions provided insight into various practical aspects of using a social networking blog to facilitate literature response in a teacher education course. Further, the authors considered what these perceptions and reactions may mean for the larger field of teacher education and professional development.

This article documents how one middle school teacher’s everyday writing life on Facebook launched a professional inquiry and led to the development of a classroom unit of study on writing for networked audiences.

This column posits enhancing professional development through uses of digital tools to create professional learning communities (PLCs) designed to support collective inquiry and action research leading to schoolwide improvement. These digital tools include a social networking/discussion forum for teacher collaboration; teachers’ individual personal learning networks (PLNs); students' online work collected in blogs, wikis, podcasts, or e-portfolios; and a school online curriculum repository containing lesson plans and units addressing standards that are linked together to create a central “learning commons.”— Implementing this “learning commons” requires initial pilot testing of the uses of these tools prior to full-scale implementation. Research supporting the use of digital tools for enhancing professional development is also cited.

This article provides effective resources to help literacy teachers to shift gears from traditional to digital literacies.

The soul of the Notables is the unique and captivating use of language. This year's 30 award-winning books for children in grades K–8 continue that tradition.

This Conversation Currents features two scholars sharing ideas for how professional development can support teachers in working with today’s digital learners. As Cindy reminds us, “despite the fears that we might have with using digital technology at times, . . . teachers still matter.”