A click on any face displays information about that character. The best way to learn language is to create it. A language arts classroom should be a work center where students create professional-looking language productions, from prose to poetry to plays. Computer networks link writers with one another, providing the real audience adolescent learners need, along with peer interaction for revision and conferencing. Through the network, students share comments or collaborate on the same document from computers in different places.
Telecommunications extends the network to others around the world.
In these ways, technology fosters exploration and production with words and ideas. Reading is also an important part of the middle school language arts curriculum. Telecommunications and multimedia technologies create functional language-learning environments where reading skills are developed in the context of accomplishing a task. Computer programs surround and support the act of reading with access to hypertext, graphics, sound, music, animation, and video. Click on a word and find out how it sounds, or what it means, in English or in Spanish.