Literacy Now

I looked at the pile of Chromebooks on my desk and wondered how I had gotten to this place. I had spent the period remotely closing tabs students had opened, mostly related to Fortnite or some other addicting game, and eventually got to the point where I was taking Chromebooks away from my seventh graders.

I had waited so long for my school to embrace the 1:1 concept. Providing each student with a Chromebook would solve a lot of problems. No more wheeling the clanky cart down the hallway to my classroom and no more students dashing out the door without plugging their computers back in. With Google Classroom and Chromebooks, we could now be a paperless classroom. Teaching global competencies, creating authentic projects, and reaching an audience beyond our classroom would be so much easier once they had their Chromebooks.

So why was I now taking Chromebooks away from my students? The short answer is that they were playing games, but upon further reflection I realized it was a result of my own lack of preparation. Because I had been using computers in my classroom for decades, I thought that I was prepared. I hadn’t considered the unique issues that arise when each student is assigned his or her own device. As the new year begins, I’ve realized I need to make a few changes.

Set clear expectations

It seems so obvious, especially for a teacher with over 30 years of experience, but I failed to do this with the Chromebooks. Because the devices were already in students’ hands as they entered the room, they saw no problem in opening them at the beginning of class to play a game or listen to music before the lesson started. The problem, of course, was getting them to stop the game when I was ready to begin teaching. Setting clear expectations will help alleviate this problem.

Don’t forget about paper

I love using online annotation tools and having students submit assignments through Google Classroom. I have learned, however, that some students really do need paper copies, and that everyone benefits from a balance of digital and paper assignments. Even middle school students get tired of looking at screens all the time.

Digital doesn’t mean better

This summer I visited several schools in Germany as a participant in the Transatlantic Outreach Program. One thing that struck me was the lack of technology in German classrooms. In conversations with students and teachers, I learned that German students are just as addicted to their phones as students in the United States, but technology use in the classroom is limited. There were computer labs and other places to use technology at school, but the typical classroom had just a whiteboard and desks. This reminds me that 1:1 does not mean students should be on their devices all the time. Good teaching can happen without a computer.

Not every student is ready for the responsibility of 1:1

Although I’d like to blame my Chromebook woes on Fortnite, I know that the issue is much bigger than one game. Some students really do struggle with having access to a device that offers so many tempting distractions. On one message board of parents who were opposed to 1:1 programs for their children, an anonymous parent wrote, “The school is giving a piece of technology that is inherently hard to resist to children with impulse control issues . . . and then expecting the impulsive kid to resist one of the most seductive drugs out there.” We need to listen to parents when they tell us that the laptop we just gave their 12-year-old is not in their child’s best interests.

Despite the challenges of the past year, I am still a strong advocate of using technology in the classroom and 1:1 programs. I believe it is our responsibility to teach students how to use technology to research, collaborate, solve problems, and engage with the world. By preparing properly for a 1:1 program, setting clear expectations, and considering individual student needs, a 1:1 program can help achieve these goals.

Tim Flanagan is a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Pawcatuck Middle School in Stonington, Connecticut. You can read more on his blog, The Alternate Route: Teaching, Traveling and Learning Across the Globe, and follow him on Twitter @tflanagan01.

Digital citizenship skills are an important part of today’s teaching and learning culture. Our students are growing up in a fast-paced, technologically advanced world, where the integration of digital safety needs to be a priority. As an educator with a background in elementary education who works with future teachers, I love starting every class with a read-aloud. Each course I teach has its own unique collection of read-alouds that integrate class topics. Following are some favorites from my course, “Technology for the Elementary Classroom.”

• Narrated by main characters Monkey and Jackass, Lane Smith’s It’s a Book (Roaring Brook) is a fun but poignant story about storytelling in the digital age.   
• Paul A. Reynolds’ and Peter H. Reynolds’ Going Places (Atheneum) underlines the critical importance of 21st-century skills such as communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, and curiosity and illustrates how thinking outside the box is conducive to personal growth and fulfillment.
• But I Read It on the Internet! by Toni Buzzeo (Upstart) walks readers through the process of conducting online research and evaluating websites for integrity. 
• Julia Cook’s The Technology Tail: A Digital Footprint Story (Boys Town), sends a powerful message about digital citizenship and offers includes tips for parents and educators who want to reinforce values of kindness and respect in a technology-inundated world.
• Chicken Clicking by Jeanne Willis (Andersen) is a cautionary tale about what happens when Farmer Brown leaves his computer password unprotected.
• When Charlie McButton Lost Power by Suzanne Collins (Puffin) follows computer game-addict Charlie McButton’s outrageous reaction to a power outage.
• Margaret Wise Brown’s classic Good Night Moon (HarperCollins) inspires lessons on comparing and contrasting when read alongside Good Night Lab, a scientific parody by Chris Ferrie (Baby University) and Good Night iPad by Ann Droyd (Blue Rider).
• Once Upon a Time…Online by David Bedford (Parragon) is a clever story about what happens to fairy tale characters when a laptop falls from the sky, with it landing a lesson in online safety.
• Unplugged: Ella Gets Her Family Back by Laura Pedersen (Tilbury House), Doug Unplugged by Dan Yaccarino (Dragonfly), Unplugged by Steve Antony (Scholastic), and Dot by Randi Zuckerberg (HarperCollins) all impress the importance of managing technology use.
• If you’re looking for a book on coding, How to Code a Sandcastle by Josh Funk (Viking), with a forward by Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code, may help you get the conversation started.

The picture books on this list are engaging read-aloud choices that offer a launchpad for discussing responsible technology use. Happy reading!

Mary Beth Scumaci is the associate dean for technology education and an associate professor at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY. She has a passion for children’s books and working with teacher candidates to help prepare them for the excitement of today’s classrooms. Scumaci instructs technology and literacy courses, is an online courses designer, and facilitates technology trainings for students, faculty, and staff.

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Today’s schools, libraries, museums, and communities are creating learning spaces for engaging in hands-on activities such as makerspaces, innovation labs, or fab labs. These spaces have evolved to be interdisciplinary centers that personalize learning for individual, diverse learners working in collaborative settings (for more background, explore my previous articles, “Learn By Doing: Exploring Values, Networks, and Genres” and “Making It Social: Considering the Purpose of Literacy to Support Participation in Making and Engineering”). When designed well, these spaces contextualize learning around participants’ goals and offer rich opportunities for exploratory learning for novice and expert technology users alike.  

Despite their potential, makerspaces often struggle to create a sense of inclusivity for diverse learners, language learners, and diverse cultural groups. With funding from the National Science Foundation, educators from around the United States will gather face to face and virtually to develop methods, tools, and resources to tackle this issue.

From February 25–28, 2019, the University of Arizona will host this unique synthesis and design workshop for 80 participants. It will take place at Biosphere 2, a unique learning environment dedicated to researching global scientific issues. The facility serves as a laboratory for controlled scientific studies, an arena for scientific discovery and discussion, and a far-reaching provider of public education.

This broad national group will draw interdisciplinary participation from both practitioner and researcher groups. Participants will identify issues, discuss possible solutions, and create prototypes and materials that address equity and inclusion in technology-rich learning environments.

Focus areas for collaborative work include developing the following:

• Design principles and practices that promote the inclusivity of learning spaces
• Methods for documenting learning in ways that are linked to outcomes and impacts for all learners
• Opportunities to use new technologies in diverse settings for diverse purposes
• Structures and tools for facilitating and promoting dialogue and peer-to-peer learning
• Design features that maximize the intersection between diverse learners, the learning environment, and new technologies

This workshop will encourage the exchange of innovative ideas, surface challenges and opportunities, connect practical and research-based expertise, and form cross-institutional and cross-community partnerships that envision, propose, and implement opportunities that support our collective understanding. Outcomes will address equity and inclusion for all learners.

If you are interested in getting involved in this effort or attending the workshop, contact Jill Castek, associate professor at the University of Arizona, at jcastek@email.arizona.edu. Scholarships for travel and accommodations are available.

Jill Castek is an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Arizona. Find her on Twitter @jillcastek.

People around the world have used Wikispaces since 2005. Until this past June, Wikispaces was a free host for technology in the classroom loved by those who knew what blended learning was before it became a buzzword. As of September 30, 2018, many classroom teachers and educational focus committees will have to say goodbye to a trusted collaborative resource. Now educators are engaged in conversations about where to host their collaborative learning networks.

For those of you who loved Wikispaces, similar options include Mediawiki, TikiWiki, or PBWorks. However, many teachers are getting comfortable with the ease of new platforms such as Moodle, Canvas, or Google.

When our TILE-SIG committee began conversations about a new website to replace Wikispaces, we spent hours discussing and researching the best options. We finally decided that starting our own Google account would allow us to set up everything we needed and provide free membership to our members. Not only do we now have a Gmail account, we have also archived our previous content in Google Drive, which can be shared just as collaboratively as Wikispaces once was. All of this is now easily linked to our Google Site.

So if you are also interested in “promoting technologies as tools for improving the quality of reading/language arts instruction and enhancing children’s interest in recreational reading,” then complete a membership form, check out our latest newsletter,  and explore our archives on our website. You too may find that trading Wikispaces for Google will be much less drama than a TLC episode.

Meg Rishel is an instructional ELA coach for Eastern York School District and the TILE-SIG newsletter editor. You can follow her on Twitter.

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

I have long advocated that our literacy classrooms would do well to design instructional opportunities that connect students with online writing communities. Doing so gives students authentic audiences for their creative work, helps them develop important digital literacy practices, and bridges in- and out-of-school literacies in meaningful ways. In particular, I have argued that fanfiction spaces such as archiveofourown.org and fanfiction.net, where writers post creative works based on their interest in storylines, settings, characters, and worlds from existing books, television shows, and other media, offer important scaffolds for writers and allow teachers to meet literacy standards as they guide youth to write for online audiences.

My continued research in this area and my role as a literacy teacher educator have also helped me grapple with the myriad challenges that teachers face when trying to incorporate online communities into their writing instruction. For example, I have written about the privacy concerns that teachers face when they consider whether to recommend that youth participate in a particular digital space.

In an article published in the October 2017 issue of Literacy, my coauthors and I shared about our experiences with bringing digital spaces into more formal learning environments. We pooled the lessons learned from Alecia Magnifico’s work with preservice and inservice English teachers who participated in the #walkmyworld project, Deborah Fields’s use of Scratch-based collaborative design challenges in an elective computing class, and my experience teaching a three-week high school elective class that guided students in publishing their fanfiction and other creative writing in online communities.

Our collaboration helped us better understand the tensions that arise when educators seek to take advantage of informal online spaces within their classrooms. We recognized that, although much of the research about online communities highlights success stories, when all students are required to participate in an online space, experiences will be mixed. Not every student will feel comfortable sharing his or her writing with strangers. Not every student will receive constructive feedback from the online audience. Although many online communities welcome the posting of works-in-progress, not every student will want to share such projects when they know their teachers and classmates might also see this unfinished work. These and other tensions emerged when we examined our experiences.

I offer the following tips for teachers to consider as they design opportunities for students to share their writing in online communities.

• Guide students in examining a variety of online communities. Rather than mandating that all students share their writing on the same site, scaffold students’ evaluation of many different sites and empower them to choose whichever one best suits their expectations as well as genre and interaction preferences.
• Tap into students’ expertise about online communities. Although it may be beneficial for teachers themselves to have some familiarity with sharing writing in an online community, it is not a requirement. Learning who among your students might already participate as readers or writers in online communities allows a teacher to leverage that experience. Give knowledgeable students roles as mentors or guides who introduce their classmates to the inner workings of their preferred online community.
• Explore authentic assessment opportunities. Online writing communities have their own ways of assessing quality, often through narrative reviews and less descriptive rating systems (including giving “likes” or “favoriting” a piece of writing). Rather than assessing their contributions to an online community using school-based norms or rubrics, students can submit evidence of community engagement. 

I offer these suggestions to help interested literacy teachers connect their students to online writing communities in ways that begin to navigate the tensions revealed in our research.

Jayne C. Lammers is an associate professor and director of the secondary English teacher preparation program at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education in New York. She can also be reached on Twitter.

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).