gail dyer » statistics http://gaildyer.edublogs.org We cannot always build the future 4 our youth, but we can build our youth 4 the future. FDR 1933 Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:28:15 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 A taxi ride to literacy http://gaildyer.edublogs.org/2009/07/02/a-taxi-ride-to-literacy/ http://gaildyer.edublogs.org/2009/07/02/a-taxi-ride-to-literacy/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:57:06 +0000 gaildyer http://gaildyer.edublogs.org/?p=106 We had intended to walk from dinner to the hotel in the cool of the evening. The evening turned out to be a hot, wet and stormy night in Washington DC. After dinner we caught a cab.

We were chattering away in the back about the Conference and things we’d been doing.

The Cabbie was a middle aged Afro-American. Part way through the trip he asked “is there a teacher conference or something happening?” We told him of the NECC 2009.

He became really chatty. He believes technology is really powerful and proceeded to tell us that the ipod shuffle had totally changed his life. How so?

He discovered you could listen to books and they were freely available from a variety of resources to be downloaded to an ipod shuffle. He has “read” 200 books in the past year. He had never read anything before then. His spoken language and vocabulary indicated he was a deep thinker. His voice was light and proud when he spoke of his books.

How many more people like him are there out there?

An educated, articulate, intelligent and informed “illiterate”.

When are we going to look beyond testing and statistics as a measure of our students literacy?

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