This study describes an information/digital literacy project that was conducted with kindergarten and second-grade students and teachers at a university-assisted school. The study centered on the I-LEARN model--a learning model that blends research and theory from information science and instructional systems design--and investigated how the model…

This study explores how ELL students' parents participated in a blog-mediated English language arts curriculum in a second grade classroom at a U.S. urban school, and how they supported their children's learning of school-based writing. Adopting ecological perspectives on technological affordances, this study views digital literacy as discursive…

Some electronic portfolios (EPs) developers are proposing that EPs are suitable for implementation in primary education (i.e. kindergarten to grade three). Yet, empirical research evaluating the implementation and efficacy of EPs used in primary school settings at both the teacher and the student level is scarce. In this research, the authors…

This study explores a second-grade English language learner's literacy development and ability to use blogging for social and academic purposes, in the context of learning academic writing genres in a US urban school. Grounded in sociocultural theories, it conceptualizes learning as appropriation, and language as a dynamic and functional system of…

This study analyzes how a teacher in the United States used systemic functional linguistics to design a blog-mediated writing curriculum to support second grade English language learners' (ELLs) literacy development and abilities to use computer-mediated communication tools for social and academic purposes in and out of school. The questions posed…

This dissertation examines the academic and social goals that three second-grade English language learners in a U.S. urban school bring to their blog-mediated academic writing practices, and the interrelated nature of those goals. This study aims to bridge the dichotomy between approaches to studying computer-mediated language and literacy…