To use technology effectively, at least you and, hopefully, your students should have both email accounts and Internet connectivity. It is most beneficial for students to be able to publish to a class or school web site, giving them valid reasons to polish work for authentic audiences.

The Internet has excellent assets to help you develop literacy capabilities. Using Internet resources, you and students can make presentations live. In addition, students can interact with key-pals, engage in cross-classroom projects, and interact with mentors online. Students can interpret and construct messages because of the polysymbolic capabilities of multimedia. They can respond to and construct messages using online audio, video, graphics, animations, photo or other images as well as electronic text materials.

It is fairly easy to integrate technology into those classroom collaborative or research projects you want students to experience. Collaborative projects include interpersonal exchanges, information collection and analysis, and problem solving. Your examination of a web site should help you think of several ways to use that site to help students develop their visual and verbal literacy capabilities. Multimedia projects and engaging students in WebQuests are widely activities used in many classrooms today as are dozens teacher-created strategies that practicing teachers are gladly sharing with others.