IRA News Letter Project: Effective Website #1

Strickson Lenster Fredrick

ED638 Fall Intersession 2018

Dr. M. Rivera

IRA Newsletter Project: Effective Literacy Website

Literacy Online Organization (http://literacyonline.tki.org.nz/) is a site for primary and secondary literacy teachers in New Zealand and internationally. The website also contains images as well as important resources.  It’s mainly focuses on helping primary and secondary teachers develop teaching and learning programmes based on the literacy needs of their learners. On the website it also shows or stored the community mailing list. The community mailing lists provide a connection between teachers and the content of the websites. Satellite social network spaces, such as the VLN Groups and Twitter, offer a choice of connections back to the main community and websites.

Literacy Online Organization website proves the English-medium literacy instructional series support teaching and learning through years 1–8. They include: a). reading materials which are designed to support learning across the curriculum and students’ development of more complex literacy skills; b). targeted materials for students who are not yet meeting literacy expectations. Each series is designed for a specific stage in students’ learning, providing supports and challenges to scaffold their growing understandings, and to prepare them for the next stage in their learning. All series include student and teacher support materials, and many are accompanied by audio versions.

Moreover, the website also has a monthly newsletter on the front page so the community can easily access it. The monthly newsletter provides a summary of the activity across all 5 communities and directs subscribers to new content on the sites.  The principles that strengthen the website are based on 9 goals and objectives. These include: 1). all learners can achieve, 2). content and pedagogical knowledge is essential for effective instruction, 3). knowledge of students’ progressions is critical to meeting students’ diverse needs, 4). students need responsive and personalized instruction, 5).teaching decisions should be based on evidence of students’ strengths and needs,  6). Teaching and learning sequence tasks need to have a clearly defined pedagogical rationale, 7). Teachers’ ongoing inquiry into the impact of their teaching decisions is essential for providing effective differentiated instruction, 8). Ongoing inquiry into underachievement is a key to schooling improvement, 9).  Practice is informed by contemporary research and thinking.

The most important aspect of this website is the Learning about students' needs. The question is what is important (and therefore worth spending time on), given where my students are at? This focusing inquiry establishes a baseline and a direction. The teacher uses all available information to determine what their students have already learned and what they need to learn next. Whether Knowledge of the learner or Knowledge of literacy.