There are spaces that are mixtures of the real and the virtual, such as a meeting in which some people are physically together in a room and others are interacting with the group via the Internet or over a video conferencing system.

let me collect together here in a list some of the learning principles that are built into RoN and reflected in my interaction with the game.

Children play games early in life to prepare themselves for real life.

arning to read in a way that allows people more than a literal understanding, that does not fuel the fourth-grade slump and create poor readers, requires that people “play” in a domain in such a way that they can give situation-specific meanings to the styles of language associated with that domain.

Research has long shown that people with poor vocabularies are poor readers.

they learn through action and talk with others, not by memorizing words outside their contexts of application

Technologies are tools that allow us to do certain things.

instruction is a much less efficient process (in all sorts of ways) than learning to play video games via a cultural process (i.e. via becoming a member of the games culture).

Most children learn to read, regardless of what instructional approach a school adopts

Figure 3.3. A Tool for Evaluating Your Fostering and Teaching of Reading Comprehension

Results showed that students in classrooms in which teachers administered the assessment showed greater growth as measured by the comprehension assessment as well as by an assessment of informational writing; this transfer effect is important because it sug-gests that what students learned was not driven by narrowly teaching to the test.

Vocabulary impacts comprehension.• It is learned incidentally while reading and listening to books.• Repeated exposure, especially in different contexts, is the key to learning word meanings.• Prereading instruction of keywords can be helpful.• Computerized programs seem to increase vocabulary knowledge

When phonics rules or strategies become their own goals, the system runs amok.

if taught, they improve reading comprehension

Think of interest as a compensatory factor, one that can get the job done when the text is extra challenging or the stu-dent’s skill level is not quite up to the task

When stu-dents read on the topic of reported interest to them, whether working animals or robotics, they employed a greater number and range of com-prehension processes. This tells us that if our goal is to stretch students’ comprehension muscles, we should provide them with texts of interest.

Reading motivation is fostered by complex interactions of text topics and text characteristics, classroom social norms, and instruc-tional practices (

the model must correspond with their relevant prior knowledge of how the world works. In short, read-ers must integrate information from the text base (i.e., words, sentences, paragraphs) with available and relevant prior knowledge retrieved from long-term memory and fold it all into an emerging situation model of the meaning of the text at that point in the process.

We must understand how skilled comprehenders con-struct meaning, so we can help students learn to construct meaning in the same way.

then teachers are the tour guides, ensuring that students stay on course, pausing to make sure they appreciate the landscape of understanding, and encouraging the occasional diversion down an inviting and interesting cul-de-sac or byway.

challenge #2: Learning content like math and science at any age must always include language learning. We must more proactively integrate approaches to teaching content, language, and literacy in the early grades

Even our best students can no longer compete.

Because digital media easily, perhaps uniquely, can combine action in relationship with environment, this technology can generate situated meaning — vocabulary used in actual situations, which makes meanings clear and easier to remember — in myriads of settings. Thus digital media, whether in a format custom-designed to be educational or, in some cases, in off-the-shelf products, have the potential to increase the “book” vocabulary, and the concepts attached to such words, for children whose families are unable to do so

Word study is active, and by makingjudgments about words and sorting words according to similar features, students con-struct their own rules for how the features work.

It is not the case that students abandon sound once theymove to the more efficient use of patterns, or abandon patterns once they move to themore efficient use of morphology.

One of the easiest ways to know what students need to learn is to look at the waythey spell words.

when they read good stories, write purposefully, and are guided by knowl-edgeable teachers in word study.

so students have littleopportunity to manipulate word concepts

By using students’ invented spellings as a guide, teacherscan differentiate efficient, effective instruction in phonics, spelling, and vocabulary.

phonemic awareness instruc-tion should be intentional, not incidental (evenaccidental), in classrooms.

Finally, the research activities of this period demonstrated that students’knowledge could be significantly modified through direct intervention, training,or explicit instruction (Paris & Winograd, 1990; Pressley, Goodchild, Fleet,Zajchowski, & Evans, 1989; Weinstein, Goetz, & Alexander, 1988).