New literacies refer to the new reading, writing, and communication skills that are required to successfully use information and communications technologies, especially the Internet.

Here's what you do when you're reading and writing on the Internet: you identify a problem you want to answer, and then you search for information related to the problem. How do you know where to go on the Internet? This question requires important new comprehension skills. Once you've navigated, searched, and found a useful resource, critical literacies come into play: you have to carefully evaluate the information. Because anyone can publish anything on the Internet, you don't know the validity of the information you're encountering. It could be incorrect, or it could be the best information possible. You need to know how to discriminate between the two.

Now another skill area kicks in-the synthesis of disparate sources of information. You've been to many different Web sites finding little pieces of information. How do you bring all the information together? Or, maybe the information leads you to another problem, and you start the process over. Now you have a wide array of information and need to integrate it and synthesize it to draw logical conclusions. Once you've been able to draw conclusions, you may want to communicate that information to someone else.

Traditional writing skills get transformed when using e-mail. How do we prepare students to use e-mail, instant messaging, and other electronic communication tools? The skills I'm referring to are not completely new. They're fundamental to traditional reading skills, just transformed. These transformations are what we refer to as the "new literacies." The new literacies are skills involved with identifying problems, searching for information, critically evaluating information, synthesizing it, and communicating it.

One of the challenges we face with research in new literacies is that so much of it is still coming out. We're still learning, and these technologies are not static. For 500 years, the definition of a book has pretty much remained the same, whereas these new technologies change every single day!

Another part of these new literacies is that we have to prepare students to learn not only new skills and strategies, but also how to learn. New technologies themselves will change, requiring new strategies and new skills. Students need to be able to learn from new technologies when they occur.

Whether young children should be supported in learning these skills with the Internet is debatable. My belief is that if we share books with very young children, there's no difference with sharing Internet technologies. We should expose children to these new forms of information communication, but in developmentally appropriate ways—just like we do with books.

We don't want children working independently on the Internet and navigating to places they shouldn't. But under supervision, and in the right context, I don't think it's ever too early to start helping a student understand this powerful and useful information tool.

The new literacies have their own forms in what I refer to as the foundational literacies—the foundational reading and writing skills. For example, we search for information in books and use an index and a table of contents. This is a foundational skill. But on the Internet, learning how to use a search engine requires new skills and strategies—they're related but different. We build on foundational skills as we expand the literacy skills and strategies of our students in all of these areas. The interesting thing about the Internet is that the skills and strategies it requires are actually what we traditionally refer to as higher-level comprehension skills.

These critical evaluations—for example, locating and synthesizing information—are higher-level reading comprehension skills. The Internet prepares students for these more challenging reading comprehension demands that transfer back and support them when they're reading books. Students will become more critical readers of books when they have been prepared by thoughtfully reading information on the Internet. They'll be better skilled at locating and organizing information, because that's what they had to do on the Internet. Skills and strategies in the new literacies are supportive and transfer back, helping students become better at reading books and other materials.

This is a really important issue because not only do students have to acquire new literacies and new forms of reading comprehension, but also teachers need to acquire them as well. We need to support teachers in becoming literate with navigation, searching, and critical evaluation skills.

Teachers need to rethink their relationship with students in terms of skill instruction, because sometimes students can teach teachers new literacies. For the first time in the history of education, we have students coming to school who sometimes have new literacies and are more literate in these areas than their teachers. Teachers need to manage classrooms so that students share and exchange information.

The new forms of reading comprehension that are defined by these new literacies are going to be central to students' successes. If students are well prepared, they will move out of the school context and into the job environment, taking full advantage of the information that's out there to help them.

In Spartanburg, South Carolina, I was in a BMW plant, a very high-tech automobile manufacturer. At every workstation, there was a computer helping to monitor quality. There were many robots doing the physical work, but employees managed the information on their computers. Screens showed production targets and what percentage of production the workers were achieving. When a problem occurred, information flashed on the screens so that everyone was aware.

These are the new forms of literacy, reading comprehension, and information that our students are going to be using in their adulthood. We can't even begin to imagine the new technologies that will emerge! Information use will define our students' futures and their ability to read and comprehend in these contexts will be central to their success.

Traditional assessments today measure practically no new literacies. For example, there isn't a single state that allows students to use a word processor on the state writing assessment. This seems puzzling to me because many students are doing more and more of their writing on computers.

Reading comprehension is assessed by reading paragraphs, often narrative forms and less frequently informational forms, but there's no searching for information. There's no (or very little) critical evaluation of information, and the critical evaluation often revolves around questions like character. For example, "Would you have done the same thing as this person?" That's not a critical evaluation of the validity of information or the accuracy of information—what students really need to master.

Teachers don't know how their students are performing in these new reading and writing skills without measurable objectives. This is why the teacher becomes even more important within the new literacies framework. Teachers are increasingly counted on to evaluate their students' ability to search for information and critically evaluate it and to support students every step of the way. Assessment is a problem in the new literacies area. We're going to get there, but it's going to take a while.

Reading within interactive digital environments often provides important support for students who are challenged as readers and as writers. The one thing we know about these environments is that they're more engaging for students. Teachers can use the new technologies to interest reluctant readers and bring them back into the literacy game. Interactive multimedia formats provide supportive contexts for learning.

Oftentimes, we fail to take advantage of these technologies to support our most marginalized students. These are students who might be learning English as a second language or struggling with their home lives. They could be struggling with reading or have a handicap. What we want to do with the new technologies is privilege those students who are in the margins of our classrooms—first! We want to teach them the new literacies, teach them a new software. Suddenly they are literate, and the rest of the class is illiterate. That switches the tables in powerful ways and brings those students who have struggled back to the center of classroom life. We should never send students out to technology-rich opportunities until after they have finished their regular work. Teachers should begin with their most challenged students and then have them teach other students these new skills and strategies.