ABSTRACT
In order to use IT on an ongoing basis in your lessons, it is important to become familiar with your own students’ familiarity with technology. Most students will readily text message a friend on their cell phone, or know how to access a social networking site such as www.myspace.com or www.facebook.com, or download music to their iPods and MP3 players but this does not necessarily mean they are technoliterate. Students sometimes have an unhealthy aversion to anything that smacks of education, so one cannot assume students will automatically know how to make a PowerPoint, a podcast or a website even though they may have happily downloaded podcasts and surfed the internet. One way to gauge students’ computer literacy levels is to conduct a needs assessment at the beginning of the year. Teachers can easily construct a short survey or adapt one found online such as the one located at www.mccsc.edu/survey.html. e results of the needs assessment will enable a teacher to better judge how much technology to infuse into a lesson and how much scaolding a teacher needs in order to support student learning.
