Sara Kajder examines ways in which teachers and students co-construct new literacies through Web 2.0 technology-infused instructional practices.
This book isn't about technology. It's about the teaching practices that technology enables. Instead of focusing on where to point and click, this book addresses the ways in which teachers and students work together to navigate continuous change and what it means to read, write, view, listen, and communicate in the twenty-first century. Sara Kajder (a nationally recognized expert on technology and literacy) recognizes that students are reading and writing every day in their "real lives." Drawing on ideas found in Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, Kajder offers solutions for connecting these activities with the literacy practices required by classroom curricula. Through extensive interviews and classroom experiences, Kajder offers examples of both students and teachers who have successfully integrated technology to enrich literacy learning. As part of the Principles in Practice imprint, Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students offers critical consideration of students' in-school and out-of-school digital literacy practices in a practical, friendly, and easily approachable manner.

Sara Kajder is an assistant professor at Virginia Tech whose teaching has been anchored in assisting middle and high school students to connect out-of-school literacies with in-school literacies-including helping students create multimodal texts (such as blogs and digital stories), communicate their meaning-making through podcasts, and engage in Web 2.0 learning spaces, such as wikis, Twitter, and other tools. Regardless of the tool(s) we use, Kajder focuses on the uses of new literacies to affirm the literacies students bring into our classrooms, to produce knowledge, and to put students' knowledge to work. Recipient of the National Technology Leadership Fellowship, she is the author of Bringing the Outside In (2006) and The Tech-Savvy English Classroom (2003).