Literacy and Dance and How Technology Can Help

Today most young people understand the world through technology. They own iPods, Wii systems, have conversations over their phones via text messaging, and generally access information quickly and efficiently through technological means. We can communicate at a speed and distance unlike any other time in history and because if this we know more about the people in our world than every before. Although dance happens in the body and generally in real time there are numerous technological resources that can contribute to dance learning process. One of my favorite examples of this is through the website Joy to Learn (http://joy2learn.org/index.php). Here you can access a wonderful e-presentation focusing on the history, art, and study of tap dancing hosted by the late Gregory Hines. To support the e-presentation are teacher resources for lesson planning. Other websites of this nature can bring many different forms of dance into the classroom that the teacher might not otherwise be able to teach. Technology can also be used to present information in the form of power point presentations. One of the best tools is interactive websites where students can post reflections, questions, and set up teacher moderated discussion chat rooms about specific subjects learned in class. By encouraging students to use language to articulate their ideas about dance via the internet they are developing literacy.