Literacy Now

As a person in the technology field, I have seen adults missing incredible opportunities to connect with their children using technology. So I was thrilled to learn about the success of Pokémon Go. Aside from reading about the game, I knew it was a big deal when I heard a waitress complaining about it in Las Vegas recently during our family trip. She told me how ridiculous it was for her to see adults glued to their phones trying to catch the ridiculous-looking creatures. I shared with her that I play the game with my boys. By the end of our conversation, she expressed interest in getting the game to play with her children for its numerous benefits.

The success of Pokémon Go represents the inclusive nature of technology. The game blurs the boundaries between subjects such as literature, geography, history, and even physical education. The game informs players of the name of the landmarks, provides numerous opportunities for players to learn about the history of such landmarks, and encourages players to move about in the real world. Furthermore, players learn to negotiate group dynamics as they battle each other in teams. In essence, it truly augments the real-life experiences of players by adding literacy skills of being able to read the world around them. When our students can read the world, we know they are truly literate. Pokémon Go allows students to read the world they live in.

What’s fascinating to me is that the game is inclusive of all types of players! Clearly, adults and children alike play the game. Many of my colleagues and friends report playing the game with their children. Even as a school administrator in charge of discipline, I have used my experience with the game to create positive connections with my students. When my students know that not only do I play the game but also am willing to seek their advice as to how to play the game better, it creates an interesting power dynamic beneficial to both parties.

By being able to teach me how to play the game, students have shared more about who they are and what they know. I observed my own children using a more authoritative voice with me as they instruct me on how to improve my game. Even as they excoriated me for being an incompetent player, I could see their pleasure in their ability to coach me in the gameplay. As a high school teacher, I often capitalize on the desires of my students to help me become more technologically proficient or improve at playing digital games. By allowing the students to become the experts in a situation, teachers can help students to learn better. After all, when you teach something to others, you can learn more.

Most important, I think Pokémon Go illustrates what we know of teaching and learning. Teaching and learning have always been a form of augmented reality. Teachers have been able to help the students to augment their reality without technology. For decades, if not centuries, students get a sense of what it was like for Michelangelo to create the murals in the Sistine Chapel beyond the painting itself in an art history class. In an English class, students learn what Shakespeare meant when he said, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” with proper assistance from their teachers. Now with digital tools, a teacher can augment such reality more efficiently. It is no surprise that Apple is doubling down on augmented reality.

At the end of our Vegas family trip, we visited Hoover Dam. My boys and I caught numerous Pokémon while learning about the historical landmarks around us. I like to think I improved my eye–hand coordination skills, which my younger boy might disagree with as he was the one tasked to assist me every time I missed a creature. I also learned more about the features of my smartphone as my older boy showed me. And how about the number of steps I took while attempting to catch as many creatures as possible with my boys? But, most important, I was able to talk to my two boys during the entire vacation, which was an augmentation of my reality as a mother. Wouldn’t you agree?

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.

As an assistant professor whose interests in literacy intersect with technology and mobile media, I get a lot of questions from aspiring teachers who wonder how to support students as they learn to write with technology. My experiences have helped me realize the importance of emphasizing process and experience over product.

Collaborative writing with wearable technologies

This summer, I cotaught a creative writing residency for rising third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students as part of a larger camp sponsored by a local National Writing Project site. The camp’s goals were (1) to cultivate the writerly life within our students, and (2) to flex our own muscles as English language arts educators by deeply reflecting on the process and experience students were having as writers rather than the finished product they composed. From haikus to transmodal graphic novels, we watched our students develop a fluency for writing that was fueled by engaging the “what if” question. This resulted in a collaborative piece the group composed to illustrate what happens when intermediate writers remediate a classic picture book with wearable technologies (a GoPro, in particular).

Apart from individual journals, pieces, and projects, fostering a collaborative spirit and culture among our budding writers was important. We also wanted to transform their thinking about revision away from something that involved “red marks and right spellings” and toward revision as the process of adapting and rethinking a message. To do this, we developed what Robert Yagelski calls a culture of writing as experience—as a way of being. Arguing that texts function as experiences, we highlighted how meaning could change significantly through the act of remediation, or the re-presentation of material in one medium through another. With my own interests in cultivating a disposition for sonic composition with writers and the liberty to play with composing under the guise of creative writing, I engaged the class with The Listening Walk Project (TLWP).

This project involved a collaborative piece of writing whose goal was to remediate Paul Showers’s famous picture book, The Listening Walk, by using audio and video to highlight the group’s collective experience of walking through the campus community.

Modal memoirs of remediating digital writing

In the earliest stages of TLWP, we introduced students to Showers’s book, discussed the process of remediation, and then voted on focal elements from The Listening Walk that we wanted to highlight as important in reimagining our own piece. Sound, video, and perspective were those most voted for by the group. Sound would provide coherence across Showers’s piece and ours, video enabled us to explore the features of wearable writing with the GoPro, and perspective became important to our young writers and the process of collaborative composing. The larger group disliked that Showers’s text presented us only with the young girl’s perspective. Some argued, “We never get to see what the dog sees!” whereas others asked, “What does the Dad hear, is it different?” These lines of questions continued to inspire our thinking and writing as we collectively embarked on our own listening walk.

TLWP process for remediation

Capturing over two hours of video, with each student as “lead author” and wearing the GoPro for 10 minutes, we came back to our classroom to debrief the experience of wearable writing. One of the first comments students made in watching the larger video was the need to fast-forward moments of whole-group walking: “That’s boring to watch.” Using FinalCut Pro, I acted as lead reviser to speed up travel between locations. Then, in groups of two, we cut the larger video down to a manageable 60 minutes. I worked with each group to have students note individual spots for revision. Some wanted text overlaid, adding figurative language to highlight the perspective their GoPro and wearable writing captured.

Others wanted to include some narration, using audio as an orienting device in between frames. These “notes to the director” were taken together to revise the larger video as a group. After we collectively revised, we watched the film in its entirety, now down to 11 minutes total. At this point, the collaborative revision was less about individual frames and monuments captured along the walk and more about coherence. Are transitions similar to one another? How do we account for shifts in perspective? Taken together, these small moments led to larger conversations, indicative of what I call a modal memoir. Alongside my coteacher, we used modal artifacts from the cutting room floor, the b-roll if you will, to highlight the rhetorical choices students made concerning audience, delivery, and purpose.

Later, when students reflected on the process, many shared how the GoPro felt on their body as part of the writing experience. As Goldie, a fifth-grade girl wrote, “TLWP wasn’t about the video, it was about the group walking together. The experience. We felt writing together.”

Listening to everyday implications

As their teacher, I realized that collaborative composing with wearable writing (in this case, translated through the GoPro technologies) fostered the ability to focus on process over product. It cultivated the experience that is inherent in all forms of composition. Whether through swiping, clicking, and tapping a tablet or physically shifting your body so as to capture new perspective, emerging digital technologies offer new opportunities not only for remediation, but also to cultivate a writerly identity.

As you seek to engage your students in their own writerly lives, consider how remediating forms, genres, and projects through a digital lens may offer new insight into who and how they are as writers. Encouraging students to draw, write, and compose their own modal memoirs throughout the year inspires them to consider revision not as a list of skill steps but as an experience well worth having.

Jon M. Wargo is an assistant professor of Teacher Education and core faculty in Reading, Literacy, and Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

As a K–12 literacy supervisor who also serves as a literacy coach, I work closely with teachers in grades 2–6 who teach from Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study Series. In line with our district’s mission to give learners more voice and choice, teachers frequently incorporate technology into writing workshop, in order to differentiate approaches to writing, to add depth to informational and argumentative writing, and to support conferring with writers. As an administrator, I have found this to be a huge benefit to both our writing instruction and achieving the district mission.

Across district classrooms, writers enjoy choice, facilitated through technology. Helping to overcome some writers’ reluctance to physically write and rewrite, word processing has given writers the opportunity to efficiently make changes to their pieces and improve how our youngest writers approach the revision process. In the words of one second grader, “I like when I don’t have to erase. I can just backspace.” A fifth grader said, “It makes [writing] more efficient. Even if I don’t have the best handwriting, people can understand my writing when I type.”

Technology also enables writers to engage in learning about new topics through safe digital resources. Writers in grades K–3 access PebbleGo and, through their school libraries, conduct research for their writing. They also use Wonderopolis to explore topics and then write about their wonders.

At the primary level, writers have researched a range of topics, written scripts, and then published their work through ChatterPix, an iPad app that allows learners to record themselves reading their writing while making their artwork come to life. Here’s a great example of how a kindergarten class used ChatterPix to publish their research about sharks. In a similar way, fifth graders across our district used Blabberize to present their informational writing about explorers. Writers across the grade levels appreciate opportunities to use technology to present their writing in different formats. Administrators are grateful that students are learning about the research and writing process in an engaging manner.

Sixth-grade teachers in my district ask students to incorporate digital tools into their writing to publish more interactively using Discovery Education’s BoardBuilder. The results are two-fold: this technology allows writers to create pieces that look like the writing they see on the Internet (e.g., the real-world writing that Kelly Gallagher recommends in his book, Write Like This), and encourages writers to analyze photographs and videos to determine which elements best support their writing purposes.

Integrating technology also allows writers to see writing as a creative process. For their narrative writing projects, secondary writers participate in the National Novel Writing Month. Last year, writers in sixth grade published their books independently, and each writer took a published version of his or her novel home. Students were thrilled at having become published authors. 

Where I have seen technology support writing workshop the most is with the use of Google Docs. In as early as third grade, when writers draft in Google Docs, teachers can provide feedback electronically and more quickly. I have observed teachers with iPad in hand, roaming the room, reading writing students shared with them, and then sitting down at a writer’s conference to discuss what they read or what the writer flagged as a trouble spot. The ongoing digital feedback allows teachers to comment alongside writers' flash drafts.

Finally, these digital conferences can occur between peers. Conferring is a powerful means for supporting writers’ growth, and technology provides teachers and students more accessibility and formative feedback. One seventh grader shared that he likes highlighting part of the text and using the comment feature in Google Docs to pose a question for his writing partner to consider. He also reported that comments from his classmates about his own writing have helped him make useful revisions.

Writers who use digital tools to actively engage with the research and creation process value opportunities to enhance their messages with multimodal elements. They also appreciate extending their writing time and their opportunities to confer with and receive feedback from peers and teachers outside of actual writing workshop time. Overall, I have seen technology enhance the outstanding teaching and writing that is taking place within the writing workshop model.

Aileen P. Hower is the K–12 Literacy/ESL Supervisor for South Western School District. She also coordinates the Eduspire and Penn State York Summer Literacy Institutes and teaches graduate level reading courses for Cabrini University and Eduspire. In addition to teaching, she is the vice president for the Keystone State Reading Association and conference chair for the KSRA 50th Annual Conference in 2017. You can find her on Twitter or on her blog.

When you look across almost two decades of the 21st century, you can see how much the curriculum has been modified to include digital literacy and digital skills, and it becomes clear that students need to be responsible digital citizens. This concept can be introduced in tandem in the classroom, but students will likely need plenty of practice in and out of school to really master them.

One strategy to increase students’ awareness of how to use social media appropriately is to prepare case studies generated from the news that illustrate common misuses of social media by celebrities or even regular folks. By examining other people’s behavior in relation to their own, students can learn to think more critically about what it means to be a responsible digital citizen and how to identify the contradictions involved. Cases like these can prove quite valuable because young people tend to look for models in society and then emulate what they do.

There are examples all over the world that can be used as teachable moments for students.

During sporting events such as the Summer Olympics, multinational companies often advertise their products with inspirational messages, for example Proctor & Gamble’s video showing the sacrifices athletes made to become an Olympian and the unconditional support they received from their families.

On the flipside of that coin during the Summer Games in 2012, the Switzerland soccer team lost against North Korea. One of the Swiss players was furious and decided to vent on Twitter. He insulted the players of the other team with racist comments. The next day, he was expelled from the Olympic team.

After learning about these real events, ask students to draw connections between what the video showed and the efforts each athlete took to be part of an Olympic team. Yet, even after all of this work, a young athlete is no longer able to compete professionally because of his reckless actions and misuse of Twitter.

A second example took place during an official visit to China in 2015. The former president of Argentina made a sarcastic remark via Twitter mocking the Chinese accent. The diplomatic community was appalled by this president’s behavior. Yet this behavior was applauded among her mass of followers who would never dare to question her actions because the great majority did not exercise critical thinking to analyze the connection between what she did and the negative international diplomatic implications. The message for students here is that respect should be expressed, even in cyberspace.

Offer students newspapers, articles, or videos about events like these and encourage them to infer what repercussions a leader’s digital actions may have had on internal and external affairs.

Digital citizenship is a concept requiring respect for others and oneself, reflection, and lots of practice. Our students need opportunities to discuss and reflect on the inconsistencies between the digital citizenship skills they learn about at school and what they see others do with social media outside of school. Case studies can offer a wide range of different examples to make these discussions memorable and meaningful.

M. Carolina Orgnero is an assistant professor at Universidad de Río Cuarto where she teaches Education and Technology courses in the English language program (TESOL) to undergraduate and graduate students. She also teaches EFL Pedagogy to preservice teachers at ISFD Juan Zorrilla de San Martín in Córdoba, Argentina.

Lately I have been reflecting on the disconnect between educational initiatives about the role of technology in literacy and learning and the realities that exist in some schools.

The past five years or so have been characterized by major educational shifts brought about by new policies and educational initiatives. A common characteristic of all of these initiatives is the importance of pedagogy for preparing 21st-century literate students, not just for integrating technology in the classroom. Tools alone do not teach, teachers do.

The Common Core State Standards include expectations about using media and technology and developing students’ digital skills. Embracing multimedia, reading multimodal texts, and using digital tools in classroom instruction are necessary for students to become college and career ready.

Future Ready Schools, a recent U.S. Department of Education initiative, is designed to provide guidance and support to school districts about making technology infrastructure, technology integration, and professional development decisions.

The 2016 National Education Technology Plan provides a framework for reimagining the role of technology in transforming student learning. It calls for equity, accessibility and connectivity as well as resources that can make learning for all students possible all the time, anywhere. The plan also promotes active use of technology and highlights the role of technology in assessing student learning.

The 2016 ISTE Standards position technology at the heart of teaching and learning. The standards also call for the development of an educational framework that redefines learning in a connected world; prepares students to become literate, creative communicators and digital citizens, critical and computational thinkers, collaborative problem solvers, and lifelong learners; empowers students to take ownership of their learning and construct knowledge; and equips students to compete in a global economy.

In terms of sample realities, these are perspectives of four educators I have been working with about their experiences with digital literacies and learning:

• “I am an assistant principal at a Title I elementary school. Although summative assessments require the use of a computer, most of what happens in the classrooms involves paper and pencil and very little technology. I have two concerns: (a) How can I close the digital divide for students who do not have access to technology and the Internet at home? The digital divide affects the literacy achievement gap. (b) Many students struggle with navigating the digital environment when taking assessments online. How can we best prepare students both in content and in digital literacy skills?”

• “I am a writing coach at an elementary school. For the past couple of years, I have been supporting teachers’ and students’ writing needs. I know that digital literacy involves one’s ability to use a variety of tools for reading and writing. But how can we help teachers integrate technology in their writing instruction in strategic ways? I think we need protocols for best technology integration use. Digital tools can help students brainstorm, share and evaluate each other’s writing, and collaborate in project-based learning.”

• “I am a literacy coach at an elementary school. I struggle with how to help teachers to be digital readers and writers. Literacy coaches play a key role in shaping teachers’ literacy practices and creating a common language about literacy. We can model innovative literacy pedagogies but we cannot do it alone. We need principals and teachers to collaboratively create a vision for future-ready teaching and learning.”   

• “I teach seventh-grade intensive reading at a digital school. My students and I are using a digital curriculum. All students at my school have a tablet they use at school and at home. Although technology is present throughout our day, many of my students struggle with reading and comprehending digital texts, navigating digital contexts, and developing critical thinking skills. The digital curriculum provides me with strategies and resources but I need professional development on how to develop my students’ digital literacy skills and abilities. The curriculum alone is not enough for teacher and student success. I have a lot of questions about what teaching and learning looks like in other digital schools.”

Leading, teaching, and learning in the digital age require engagement at many levels. We have to come together as literacy educators, researchers, policymakers, and community members to collaboratively problem solve about making digital literacies and learning a priority in preservice and inservice teacher education and in digital leadership. To impact student learning, we will need to collaborate with all stakeholders to develop digital ecosystems that support innovative pedagogies for preparing 21st-century learners.

Vicky Zygouris-Coe is a professor of reading education at the University of Central Florida.

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