Literacy Now

In thinking about the upcoming school year, we believe most teachers would agree that our students, especially tweens and teens, have been using technology all summer long: reading and writing posts to Instagram, texting, watching videos on YouTube, or scouring the Internet for information about Zendaya or Tom Holland. This would be consistent with a recent Pew Research Center study that found 92% of teens are online daily. It has also been reported that tweens and teens actually use screen media for an average of over four and six hours per day, respectively. While a large percentage of that time is spent on television, the report identified distinct patterns of use. While both groups indicated a preference for watching online videos, tweens were more likely to play mobile games, and teens engaged with social media daily.

Leveraging technology for learning

Despite students’ inclination to informally use technology to read, write, and communicate, a recent survey found a large percentage of teachers use it for drill, review, or practice exercises. Given our roles as teachers, it is important we move beyond drill and practice and look for ways to leverage the skills and engagement exhibited by students with instruction incorporating authentic uses of technology. In other words, potentially leveraging technology for higher level thinking or to produce an artifact—something that is still not widely practiced. This requires moving beyond simply incorporating technology into our instruction to thinking about how it can be transformative. Doing so will effectively prepare students for success in the digital world.

We know many of you are already planning activities for the students that will soon enter your doors. Yet, the last few weeks (or hours) of summer may offer opportunities to reflect on the ways students use technology for creation, rather than consumption. Both Bloom’s (Revised) Digital Taxonomy and the SAMR model are helpful in this process. Thinking about how you create opportunities for higher level thinking or transformative instruction will likely lead to authentic applications of technology that involve your students in reading, writing, and communicating for real purposes and audiences. Considering the two simultaneously may help rejuvenate previous lessons as you consider both the level of thinking, as well as the related purpose of technology (see discussions of this here and here).

Once you have thought about the “big picture,” it may be time to revisit the tools you are currently using. While there are many tools that remain relevant, including Padlet, VoiceThread, and Storybird, this site presents resources directly applicable to Bloom's and SAMR. Given the popularity of Instagram, here are a number of uses for the popular social networking tool in the classroom. Pablo allows students to add a phrase over a picture, which can be useful in creating pictures or memes to share on Instagram or Snapchat. For the YouTubers in your class, Biteable is a tool (similar to Voki and others) students can use to create animated videos from scratch or from an editable, premade template. Willing to try Twitter? Check out this presentation that provides a number of authentic, creative uses.

Join the conversation

Rethinking our use of technology is not always easy, but social media can be helpful. If you are on Twitter, check out @JenRoberts1, @techlearning, @wiobyrne, and @Alex_Corbitt for a few ideas. We’d also like to hear from you: How will you use technology in your classroom this year? Which apps or tools do you plan to integrate? Share your thoughts on Twitter using #newtechthisyear. We look forward to seeing your questions and ideas!

Kimberly Lilly is a seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher in the Onslow County School System of North Carolina. She has nine years of teaching experience, holds a bachelor's degree in middle grades education, and is currently pursuing her master's degree at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

S. Michael Putman, PhD, is a professor and the chairperson of the Reading and Elementary Education Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His areas of research include the impact of teacher preparation and professional development on teacher self-efficacy; student dispositions toward online inquiry; and the effective use of technology within teaching practices.

Summer is the time when teachers recharge and set priorities for the next school year. As a teacher educator and digital literacies researcher, I’ve been using my “downtime” this week to synthesize a set of recommendations, grounded in evidence, that seem most important to share with the inservice teachers, graduate students, and teacher candidates I'll be working with during the 2017–2018 academic year.

I hope this list helps you to set priorities and reflect on what you can do to support digital literacies learning in your classroom this year.

• Use definitions of (digital) literacies to guide pedagogical design: There are many definitions of digital literacies to guide instructional practice (see definitions by Lankshear & Knobel, Spires, Bartlett, Garry and Quick, and the British Columbia Ministry of Education for three helpful examples) and in this TILE-SIG blog, authors have written about conceptalizations of digital literacies many times (see recent posts by Maha Bali, Ian O’Byrne, Paul Morsink for examples). For me, ILA’s recent definition of literacy is a helpful instructional touchstone. If literacy is “the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, compute, and communicate using visual, audible, and digital materials across disciplines and in any context,” then instructional planning should include activities that teach skills (e.g., identifying relevant information in a range of texts or critically evaluating trustworthiness on the search engine results page), social practices (e.g., using hashtags in social media messaging) and communications mediums (e.g., blogging and podcasting) with digital technologies.
• Plan for online: Online inquiry projects driven by students’ own questions about a topic are ideally suited to scaffolding development of many digital literacies skills, strategies, and dispositions through iterative cycles of information seeking, evaluation, synthesis and creation, research shows. Importantly, much of the preparation for successful online inquiry happens before students touch the keyboard. Students need time to develop researchable questions, to generate lists of helpful search engine keywords that they predict will return relevant, reliable results, and to discuss how the questions and their communicative purposes will inform their choices during online research. Preparing students to stay focused on their inquiry and communicative goals can frame their online inquiry, equipping them to quickly skim and scan for information that is most likely to meet their needs. 
• Integrate making: According to research, when students learn to design and create digital and physical products (e.g., 3D designs for printing or laser cutting or e-textile projects) they develop new understandings of how digital systems work and begin to see themselves as powerful digital creators. For ideas and resources on how to integrate digital making into your curriculum, check out resources from Agency by Design, Make Magazine and those developed by range of research labs and nonprofit organizations dedicated to coding, making, and digital innovation in classrooms.
• Integrate video production: Work by many scholars including Suzanne Miller, Jason Ranker, and Diane Watt shows that video production can be a powerful instructional tool to empower youth and encourage creativity. When students produce videos about themselves, or about an issue that is relevant to their lives, they (re)write their own stories, show the world who they are, what they believe, and what they can do. 
• Plan for multiple projects on multiple topics for multiple audiences and purposes over time: A single project is never enough. Don’t assume that students’ out-of-school social networking and Internet use activities necessarily develop the complex literacies skills that students need to use, create and communicate via digital texts in any context. To see evidence of students’ growth in digital literacies skills and practices, you will need to create a range of opportunities for students to use digital information, create digital texts and to participate in a range of digital literacies contexts over time. This year, your students could create screencasts in which they describe a problem-solving process, create multimodal posters on a topic of curricular relevance, collaborate to develop and maintain a resource-filled classroom hashtag on a social networking site, design infographics, create a computer program using Scratch, or produce a website or a vlog. 
• Encourage an evaluative stance: Evidence from offline and online reading research suggests that students who understand knowledge as a human construction, who know that information serves ideological or economic interests, and understand how messages are constructed to influence, persuade, or further an ideological position are better equipped to question the trustworthiness of a text and to hold information as contingent as they seek out other evidence. Recent work by the Stanford History Education group suggests that even students attending elite colleges may not be able to detect fake news. Plan for activities that emphasize evaluation to prepare students to question authorship and the interests driving information this year.

Michelle Schira Hagerman is an assistant professor of educational technology at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada where she also directs the Canadian Institute for Digital Literacies Learning. 

Some of Erin Kessel's fourth graders have never left their rural North Carolina hometown, or even ventured to the nearest beach just an hour-and-a-half away. This fact is a major motivator for their participation in the Global Read Aloud (GRA), which allows “Kessel’s Crew” to connect virtually with students in faraway classrooms to read and share their ideas about the very same book. Conceived by seventh-grade teacher, author, and blogger Pernille Ripp, the Global Read Aloud has grown from its 2010 start with 150 students to among more than one million K-12 readers in 2017. In her September 2015 ILA chat, Ripp discussed the project’s beginnings and its continuing evolution.

Erin, a four-year GRA veteran, has connected her students with classrooms in three Canadian provinces and in Sunbury, Victoria, Australia to share their ideas about Marty McGuire, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, Fish in a Tree, and The BFG. She and her students will join Global Read Aloud 2017 this October. After selecting a book study that's best suited for her students, Erin will connect with another teacher with similar interests through GRA’s Edmodo network. Together, they will decide how and through what venues their students will communicate. 

As a tech innovator in her school, Erin’s early GRA interest was linked with a grant-funded 1:1 Chromebook project meant to integrate global awareness, digital literacy, and technology within her literacy block. However, one of GRA's strongest assets is that teachers can employ whatever tech tools fit their comfort levels. In fact, her maiden voyage relied only on Edmodo, Skype, and “old school snail mail” to deliver a North Carolina-style care package to their classroom partners.

Erin and her students report huge payoffs from connecting with classrooms across the world, echoing benefits documented by expert sources such as the Center for Global Education. In addition to learning about tech apps and programs from other teachers, Erin signed on to GRA with the main goal of opening doors to the world for her rural students. “I want to ensure my students have an open mind about all people in our world and not just a stereotype based on what they see on TV or hear on the news. Allowing students to actively communicate and even see students from around the world and realize the commonalities that they share allows my students to create their own opinions of other's cultures and allows them to realize that although we may be different in some ways, we are all humans with the same purposes in life.”

 Autumn, a student who had not traveled outside of her hometown, said “The kids we talk to have the same interests as me…they even like Barbies and play video games! I thought since they spoke another language that they didn't do the same things as us.”

As these examples illustrate, using literature to forge connections across cultures has huge potential to promote empathy and unity, foster cross-cultural friendships, and help students gain greater understandings about the global community by looking more critically at the world.

Ready to take the leap? Erin encourages other literacy teachers by sharing her experiences and mentoring teachers who are new to GRA. Her first-time suggestions include:

• Setting attainable tech expectations
• Trying GRA with a small group of students before launching with the whole class
• Partnering with another grade-level classroom in your own school
• Being mindful of international time zones if you wish to connect live with international classroom partners
• Collaborating with only one class partner (GRA allows collaboration with multiple classrooms reading the same book)
• Considering the demands of adhering to the six-week timeline involved

Terry S. Atkinson is an associate professor in the Department of Literacy Studies, English Education, and History Education at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.

As a mother, teacher, and administrator in charge of student discipline and safety, I cannot emphasize enough about the importance of digital citizenship among young people. I already wrote a post about the importance of personal branding. I wrote another post about the digital natives myth. This time, in light of the Harvard’s recent decision to rescind admissions offers to 10 freshmen, I want to talk about what adults can do to protect children from themselves.

It surprises me that so many parents I work with tell me that they have no idea what social media accounts their children have. Having been a high school teacher for over a decade, I have seen so many of my students post and share inappropriate things online. Many of them have told me that their parents had no idea.

I recommend that the parents learn what type of social media tools their children use. Just as you would want to know who your children’s friends are if they were to physically visit your home, you would want to know who your children are communicating with in the cyber space. Consider the case of Conrad Roy III (an 18-year-old who committed suicide after receiving texts from his girlfriend urging him to do so) and Michelle Carter (the girlfriend who sent the offending texts and is now convicted of involuntary manslaughter).This tragedy demonstrates the destructive power of words, as well as the need for parents and educators to maintain an open dialogue with young people about their digital presence.  

I also encourage parents to teach their children what to post and what not to post. For example, I taught my children that they shouldn’t post anything online unless they are okay with it being on the homepage of Yahoo, Bing, or CNN. I ask them to consider whether the post promotes a positive and professional self-image. We talked about how every post contributes to a narrative of their own creation.

Finally, I ask the parents to have a serious conversation about online humor. I taught my children that the humor doesn’t quite translate as easily on Twitter or Facebook as it does in-person. I showed them how I could take a screenshot of something they posted and forward something to another person. I talked about the possibility of someone starting an online conversation without them while using their own words against them. I asked them how defenseless they would feel if what they thought was funny was misinterpreted and misconstrued by others. I told my children over and over again that the freedom of speech doesn’t guarantee the freedom from consequence.

So what can teachers and administrators do? First of all, we can educate ourselves better. We need to make sure we are setting good examples when using social media accounts. We can also educate parents about the importance of digital citizenship and social media literacy. I know of several districts that hold parent education nights on such topics, which is a great way for schools to partner with the community to keep our students safe. We can encourage all parents to establish common sense rules in their homes when it comes to digital device use. Finally, we can continue to help our students to take control over their personal digital brand. 

Kip Glazer is a native of Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States in 1993 as a college student. She holds California Single Subject Teaching Credentials in Social Studies, English, Health, Foundational Mathematics, and School Administration. In 2014, she was named the Kern County Teacher of the Year. She earned her doctorate of education in learning technologies at Pepperdine University in October 2015. She has presented and keynoted at many state and national conferences on game-based learning and educational technologies. She has also consulted for Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning and the Kennedy Center ArtsEdge Program. Her Purposeful Tech column looks at how classroom teachers can think critically about today's instructional technologies.

Take film to the next level in your classroom by moving your students beyond comprehension through active viewing, to critical thinking through discussion. Thanks to digital technology, there is a stock of creative independent film shorts from all over the world that can be used support students’ development of multiliteracies.

The resources and examples in this article will provide teachers with turnkey lessons on how to use film shorts as short stories for students to analyze, and discuss. These resources, along with tips on how to use video effectively in the classroom from Common Sense Education, will give you the tools you need to adopt this new approach with confidence.

I learned about the world of children’s independent film through my work on the Media Smart Libraries grant, an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded project awarded to the Library School at the University of Rhode Island. The mission of the Providence Children’s Film Festival,  a partner on the grant, is to bring the community together to watch, learn about, and discuss independent and international cinema.  A great resource is the PCFF FilmHub, which includes a directory of films that can searched and filtered by subject area, film type, and age group. PCFF provides film discussion guides for specific films, as well as a generic guide that can be adapted to any film. The film guides give background information about the content and techniques, sample discussion questions, suggested follow-up activities, and lists of book tie-ins.

One film I have used in class is Just Breathe, a documentary about kindergarteners learning how to control their anger. The film guide helps students analyze the film through discussion about the narrative, characters, and setting. Students also learn how film techniques such as close-ups and sound are used to create a message that has an emotional and physical impact on viewers.

Another popular choice is PESfilm, a creator of stop motion animation films. Western Spaghetti is an entertaining way to get students thinking about story line sequencing and procedural writing as well as inference and symbolism. Fresh Guacamole, an Oscar-nominated short, and Human Skateboard, a 30-second commercial, will amaze and inspire your students to create their own stop motion films.

Autumn Leaves is a story about an Iranian girl who stops to play with a leaf while setting off to school. The film warrants several close viewings to give students time to identify details from the text that support their interpretation. This is a great way to introduce or reinforce argument writing skills.

Suzanne Jordan, an elementary school librarian, took film discussion a step further. She was inspired to develop the Francis School Fifth Grade Film Festival to give her students the opportunity to be film critics. She had minimal film background and will vouch that the PCFF FilmHub resources gave her the materials she needed to get started. 

Not all of the films in the PCFF Film Directory are available for free. One solution is to work with school and public librarians to build independent short film collections that support the development of literacy competencies. Another option is to find free educational films on sites such as Global Project Oneness. Help your students actively develop their literacy skills by using film shorts in the classroom. “Enjoy the show” will take on a whole new meaning!

Mary Moen is an assistant professor and coordinator of the School Library Media Program at the Graduate School of Library Information Studies at the University of Rhode Island.

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