Promoting Literacy using ICT

I’ve been experimenting with creative stratgeies to promote literacy within my lessons. I should point out that I’m not an English teacher, however, the promotion and reinforcement of literacy should be, in  my opinion a priority across the whole educational diet of every student at all ages.  Subject specific Key words/technical language/wordwalls aside, I’ve been exploring and trialing various interactive and free resources to engage and immerse all learners in improving their literacy awareness and in particular boys.

I’ve been working with my students to create their own Blog, check out my previous blog titled ‘Blogging with students‘  we have invested quality time initially to encourage a suatainable model whereby students can blog freely and support each other with creative writing on  range of topics. This contributes to the ‘flipped classroom’ approach as well. Here are my top 5 recommendations for supporting and promoting literacy:

• Synonyms.net  – A comprehensive thesaurus resource, you and your students simply type a word in the search box and click the Search button.  A list of synonyms and antonyms for the different word senses (audio & visual) will be returned, these can be translated into different languages.
• My eBook – Where you and your students can create, publish and share content online. A powerful, browser-based software, and a fantastic reader environment, so it’s never been easier for students to share their work with the world. You can upload, or create from scratch. This can be as simple or complex as you’d like. Students can publish a book with a click of a single button!
• Snappywords – Is basically an online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus. It can help your students find the meanings of words and draw connections to other associated words.
• Spelling City – Lots of free spelling activities to enjoy and all are online, such as: Parts of Speech, Alphabetical Order, Unscramble, HangMouse, Word Search, Crossword Puzzle, & Vocabulary Test. These are very motivating and are great for lesson starters and plenaries.
• Helloslide – This is a fantastic tool with many uses, making it ideal for deployment across a range of Curriculum subject areas. HelloSlide transforms your slides into an audiovisual format. To do this you need to register and then simply upload your presentation, type the speech for each slide, and HelloSlide generates the audio.

I sincerely hope this may be useful to you, I’d like to hear your views and ideas so please feel free to leave comments.