Literacy Now

Listen to the soundscape around you right now. What do you hear? Perhaps the subtle buzzing of lights, distant voices in the background, or maybe you have music softly streaming on your computer. No matter where you are in the world, life is rich with sound.

Creating soundscapes has been a longstanding practice in cinema by foley artists. Most sounds you hear in a movie were not there to begin with and are made post-production. Just as music, sound effects, and ambience amplifies the experience for moviegoers, sound is important in students’ multimodal composition.

This New York Times piece highlights the power of aural environments in our lives, and at the same time illustrates the power that sound can play in multimodal composition. Composing with and through sound is often overlooked in the classroom. How might we engage students in thoughtful sonic composing to develop a stronger, more embodied sense of audience, cultural soundscapes, and emotional impact of tone and mood when digitally writing?

The #hearmyhome Project

Two digital trailblazers in the area of (re)imagining sound and sonic composing in classrooms are Jon M. Wargo, a doctoral candidate in Teacher Education at Michigan State University (as well as one of ILA’s inaugural 30 Under 30 awardees), and Cassie J. Brownell, a doctoral student in Teacher Education at Michigan State University.

Wargo and Brownell’s 2016 #hearmyhome project is a unique networked soundscapes inquiry that encourages people around the globe to share everyday soundscapes using the #hearmyhome tag on various social media. By hearing and listening to the community soundscapes collected, Wargo believes it may reeducate the senses and attune us towards cultural difference. Participants with geotagging services on will have their audio, comments, usernames, and locations generated on a live map on the #hearmyhome website, planned to go live late January).

You can follow #hearmyhome across multiple social networks (Soundcloud, Twitter, Instagram) and can join an up-to-date mailing list to learn about the list of participatory “sonic events” for your classroom to get involved in.

Using Booktrack Classroom to Soundscape Text

Booktrack Classroom is a free Web-based Chrome app (also available for iOS and Android devices) that combines written words and synchronized sounds into an immersive reading experience. This is not an audio book in which a recorded voice reads the text to the listener, but instead the reader reads the text on his/her own while hearing sounds that correspond with the print on the screen. Simply put: a soundtrack for the book!

To keep sounds in sync with the text, Booktrack can be adjusted to the reader’s pace. The reading speed and volume of sounds can be manipulated by the reader. When the text is paused, a setting gear appears which allows the reader to turn on/off the text tracking indicator and more.

To experience a Booktrack for yourself, scroll about halfway down the page and click on one of the free samples.

Not only does Booktrack Classroom provide students with access to a number of books with soundtracks, but students can create brand new soundscapes to books housed in their library or  create their own Booktrack with an original piece of writing that can be published for others to read.

Creating a Booktrack

Students can either type in their own story or select a book from the library. Next, they layer in sound–ambience, music, and sound effects–by highlighting specific parts of the text they want the sound to accompany (see screenshot below). As they soundscape the text, students engage in many critical skills: analytical listening, determining where to add sound and include sound effects, deciding what specific sound will create the right ambience, , understanding how to evoke the right emotion with music, and in the end, discerning whether their sound choices will enhance the overall reading experience for the intended audience.

There are a few considerations to be made before bringing Booktrack into the classroom, such as how can soundtracks and soundscaping assist students with comprehension? Furthermore, teachers will need to model and discuss with students how to efficiently search, listen, and select sounds from the more than 120,000 clips available on the site. Also, students will need headphones/earbuds for composing and listening. Some students might find these soundtracks to be a distraction; the sound can be turned all the way down to eliminate this issue.

Getting our students to tune in and become better listeners and producers of sound will help them grow as thoughtful digital composers, and #hearmyhome and Booktrack Classroom are just two of the many ways you can explore sonic literacy with your students.

Amber White is a reading specialist/literacy coach for North Branch Area Schools and a teacher consultant for the Saginaw Bay Writing Project. You can follow her on Twitter.

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

Revision can be such a grueling process for middle school students, so I am always on the lookout for ways to make it more fun and engaging. Technology motivates my students, and I have found that if I use it in the right way, it can inspire and transform students’ writing.  One way that I have used apps is to have students to transmediate, or change, one aspect of their writing into another medium such as art, poetry, or song. The process of transmediation can help students reenvision an idea, a character, or a conflict and in turn help them revise their writing.

One app I use to foster transmediation is Faces iMake. After students write a first draft of their personal narratives, they use Faces iMake to transmediate one aspect of their writing: character’s descriptions. We have all used the mantra “show, don’t tell,” but sometimes I wonder if students truly know how to do this well. I found that using Faces iMake helps students take a step back from their original writing and consider alternative, unique ways to describe their characters and make their writing more colorful.  With this app, students create face collages using a variety of materials such as fruits and vegetables, musical instruments, different textured cloth, sports equipment, and the like.

At the revision stage of writing, I invite students to create collages for the characters in their narratives. After they create the collage, they write similes or metaphors to accompany their collages. For example, a student might drag and drop a xylophone to be the mouth of their iFace and accompany it with the simile “her speech was as punctuated as the percussion section of the orchestra.” Then I ask students to reread their drafts and contemplate whether any of the ideas they came up with during their collage making could be incorporated into their writing. I am often amazed at how students transform their writing based on this activity.

Another app I use is Lark, by Storybird. Lark is a poetry app that allows my students to transmediate an aspect of their writing into poetry during the revision stage. Students can select a background image, change the colors, and select vocabulary from a finite set of words to create a poem—think magnetic poetry set. At the revision stage, I invite students to choose a conflict in their narrative and turn it into a poem using Lark. This gives students an opportunity to consider the conflict in more depth. Often the poems produced are much more riveting than the description of the conflict in their narratives. Afterwards I ask students to consider using aspects of the poem in their narratives to bring their conflicts to life. They often use key phrases and vocabulary from their poems and imagery conjured up through the poetry and image in Lark working together.  

Transmediation is the process of transforming writing into another medium such as poetry, music, or art. This process can inspire students see their writing in a new light. Using apps to facilitate transmediation is a fun and rewarding activity to enhance students’ creativity during the revision process.

Noreen Moore is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Professional Studies at William Paterson University.

Each day tweets, blog posts, and other digital media suggest a myriad of new notions and emerging possibilities for digital teaching, thinking, learning, creating, and communicating in 21st-century classrooms. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts our technological capabilities will frame the coming 25 years as one of the most exciting times in human history. This excitement, however, often loses its luster as teachers seek to integrate technology into their instructional practices with insufficient resources and aligned professional development.

What might be the factors or influences that encourage teachers to take risks involved not only to navigate the murky waters of technology integration, but also to put tech tools into the hands of their students? Across time and cultures, personal stories have transformed the minds, motivations, and actions of others. For this reason, our story of Maya offers inspiration and lessons learned for teachers with similar struggles. A fourth-grade teacher who sought to introduce her students to Web 2.0 research and publication, Maya persisted in challenging school administrative policies and was willing to learn to use an online publishing tool alongside her students (rather than teaching them how to use it), which were key factors leading to her successful efforts. Illustrating the evolution of emerging digital applications, the free online publication tool employed in her story was soon bought by a for-profit competitor.

So Maya and her students searched during the coming year for another online publishing option and their quest to navigate and publish together continued. However, the particular venue employed by this teacher and her students was not at the center of her story. Of greater importance was how Maya’s experiences aligned with guidelines for how teachers might use 21st-century literacies realistically in their classrooms, offered by eighth-grade teacher and framework guideline contributor, Sandy Hayes. They include the following:

• Do the usual work in a different way: Take a project or assignment you already do and use one tool to give the project a digital twist.
• Use the tools to learn: Don’t learn just to use the tools.
• Engage in meaningful assessment: Assess the work against skills and content learning, not by the finished product.
• Expect chaos: You are the nexus of chaos, so develop procedures to minimize the number of students clamoring for your help.
• Expect Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong probably will.
• Acknowledge your students as resources: You’ve heard the saying, “And the children shall lead you.” It’s truer than ever.

Meanwhile, as the spectrum of what was, what is, and what can be continues to broaden possibilities for literacy learners, motivated classroom teachers such as Maya persist and lead the way in implementing new literacies and pedagogies in schools. Savvy Media Education Lab professional developers such as Renee Hobbs are tuning into the power of such teacher motivations and how they shape digital learning. Using the Media Education Lab tool What’s Your Motivation?, made available via Powerful Voices for Kids, teachers gain better understandings of how their attitudes about and motivations for digital learning have an impact on instructional practices. Cutting-edge professional development tools like these have the potential to harness technology capabilities of the coming quarter century, leading to literacy teaching and learning that may dazzle the likes of Ray Kurzweil in years to come.

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.

I knew things were going to become interesting when I watched an animated dinosaur climb onto the chair in front of Dr. William Teale and then hop onto the conference room floor to wander among the legs of the other attendees. The dinosaur demonstration at the Literacy Research Association annual meeting in Carlsbad, CA, was a conference highlight. In a 90-minute session, Frank Serafini, Dani Kachorsky, Earl Auilera, and Elisabeth Gee offered an introduction to the changing world of children’s picture books that was insightful and entertaining and that raised many questions among the session participants. We wondered how new forms of picture books might have an impact on students’ understanding of the text. Does it matter whether students read an original print-based text or view the digitally enhanced version first? Conference sessions that leave the participants wondering and ready to explore new instructional and research possibilities are extraordinary—this was one of those sessions.

According to Serafini and his colleagues, today’s picture books are changing as they take advantage of the affordances of technology. Children’s books are offered not only in print-based formats, but also are available increasingly in digital formats, which allow youngsters to read text enhanced by audio, images, and embedded game-like elements. Picture books are benefitting from an increase in the use of augmented reality features that was predicted in the 2011 Horizon Report. As the report noted, mainstream use of augmented reality, or the overlaying of digital sensory information on the real-world environment, was only two or three years away. When looking at a picture book that is enhanced with augmented reality features, one would think one was looking at a normal children’s book, but once a mobile device or webcam is placed in front of the page, 3D elements, sounds, and games begin to appear on the device.

Serafini described an emerging typology for use as we consider the strengths and weaknesses of augmented reality picture books for instruction. The typology ranges from books, like those by William Joyce, that modify the print-based text by adding animation to existing objects, characters, and settings (The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore) to those that employ game-based augmentations by adding game modules to the story narrative (The Numberlys). In the five classifications of the typology, those books that provide story elements discernible only through the use of a digital device may pose a potential ethical dilemma or concern for educators. Because these forms of augmentation modify texts by adding information that is not visible to readers of the printed text, they may limit readers who cannot gain access to the additional information. For instance, imagine a text about a planet that does not share its image until readers activate an iPad app. This reliance on technology to access elements that support the text’s narrative seems inequitable. Educators must ask themselves whether this type of augmentation increases the chasm between the haves and have-nots in digital learning environments.

The Digital Divide is a continuing concern in the field of educational technology. Although an argument may be made that access is improving, a 2015 presentation by Lee Rainie, the director of Internet, Science, and Technology research at the Pew Research Center, shows that gaps in Internet access, especially with mobile devices, still exist. These differences, based on 15 years of Pew Research Center research data, demonstrate the significant impact of household income, educational level, race, age, ethnicity, and community type on access to the affordances of new technologies. The necessity of using mobile devices for interacting with some augmented reality picture books requires educators to consider student access when planning to incorporate this literature in the classroom. Although it is suggested that educators shift from examining the quality of individual augmented texts to how students experience content across the multiple available platforms of a picture book, the lack of access to the books and some elements within augmented reality books should not be ignored.

Joan Rhodes is an associate professor and interim chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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

When we gather as teachers, hearing classroom “war stories” tossed about as we share our successes and struggles is common. We often feel beat up by mandates and practices inside our schools along with negative opinions from outside school walls, and many of us are seeking validation for our hard work.

However, if we want the practices and opinions to change so that we can provide the educational experiences our students deserve, we must be the ones to speak up and be willing to facilitate that change.

Like many of you, I did not become a teacher to become entangled with politics. I wanted to be in my classroom working face-to-face with my students. However, as more and more mandates infiltrated my classroom and pulled my focus away from sound practice, I kept asking, “Shouldn’t someone speak up?”

I went in search of answers. What I discovered was that those who were not with students day in and day out were the ones who were making the decisions, and they did not see the impact that those decisions had on students. We are on the front lines, so we need to speak up for our students.

For years, I heard the word advocacy brandished about; images of angry protesters on a picket line sprang to my mind. That’s when a wise person told me, “You’re an educator, the expert. Just educate those around you on best practices. Share your stories from the classroom.”

Stories are told every day about schools. Unfortunately, a vast majority are told by individuals who have no idea what teaching and learning look like in today’s digital age.

The good news is that we know what good teaching looks like. We experience it every day. We could fill volumes with the stories of our students’ accomplishments—both their struggles and their victories—and these are the stories that need to be told.

So where do we begin? How can we reach decision makers effectively while fostering change for students? Here are three ideas that I have found to be effective:

1. Build a network. Look around the school community. Find the people who serve on city council, the board of education, chamber of commerce, or in their church. Find those who own businesses or write for local publications. Every community, even those in areas with low socioeconomic levels, has these leaders. Reach out and invite them to become guest readers or provide extra sets of hands for classroom activities. Get them into schools so they can see what learning looks like. This also sets you up as an educational expert in the community. When a question or issue comes up, who will they reach out to first? You.

2. Stay in touch. Once you have built a network, stay in touch. Often. Memories in today’s digital world fade quickly. Discover how these individuals stay updated. If it’s e-mail, create an e-mail group. If it’s through social media, connect your class with them and encourage them to follow you back. Then every time something notable occurs, send out an e-mail or a post. Share your students’ stories of success and triumph (or let your students share them). Share victories big and small. Include photos, videos, projects, and student writing. Make the members of your network feel like they are an integral part of your learning environment.

3. Reach beyond. Building your local network lays a strong foundation for change. However, decisions often are made beyond our community’s borders. We need to reach policymakers, and often that means legislators. They need to become a part of our network as well. They need to see what true learning looks like in our classrooms. This is the step that most often causes trepidation because most of us prefer to stay away from politics. However, connecting with legislators can have the largest impact. When legislation arises that could affect education, reach out. Make a phone call. Write a letter. Most legislators admit they will never open an e-mail, but a handwritten note will get their attention.

Does this take time? Yes. Is it worth the investment we make? Absolutely. Like anything else, we need to remember that everything we do needs to be for our students. It’s not about us, but what is best for our learners.

Julie D. Ramsay is a National Board Certified Teacher and the author of “Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?” Collaborating in Class and Online, Grades 3–8. She teaches ELA to sixth graders at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, AL. She also travels the United States to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog, eduflections.