Many educators and researchers have reported a range of benefits that computer technologies afford in language and literacy education as a scaffold in pedagogical practices (Kamil, Intrator, & Kim, 2003; Kinzer & Leander, 2003; Laffey, Myers, Hammett, & Mckillop, 1998). Naming just a few, they noted increased motivation, multiple meaning-making resources in reading and writing, and the development of non-linear ways of thinking, increased collaboration among learners, and easy access to target language speakers. However, the benefits and opportunities computer technologies afford to educators and learners depend on material and cultural resources that one has in his or her social life. Computer-technologies and related intellectual expertise have often been inaccessible to low-income students and their teachers (Gee, 2004; Luke, 2003; Warschauer, 2006), a reality which holds great consequences for students’ literacy development in a rapidly changing technological world. By engaging in meaningful computer-mediated projects, students may develop mastery within a range of literacies, an outlook which is quite different from the traditional view of literacy development based on canonical texts.
Educational transformation through instructional technologies in the current digital era is to many school teachers a daunting task of not only having improved expertise in computer technologies but also solving the lack of computer resources. Especially in urban schools, challenges and constraints pertaining to using computer technologies for educational improvement are serious and few teachers are utilizing computer technologies in their teaching practices. In response to the issue of using instructional technologies in urban schools, the ACCELA project supports its M.Ed. teachers in teaching English language through content-based instruction with computer technologies. One instructional technology support that the ACCELA project made for its teachers is a project that a second teacher, Wendy Seger at Gerena Community School, conducted for a Language Arts writing project. Specifically, in the writing project, she incorporated a Web log (blog), a Web site in which one can post texts and images on a regular basis and posted items are displayed in chronological order. (Click here for more info.) The following describes how she stared the project and what her students achieved through the project.
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