Literacy Now

To be fully engaged citizens in a world of local, national, and global events, our students need to be informed and able to sort critically through the ubiquitous flow of news and information. Growing up in Washington, DC, and having a father, grandfather, and uncle in the newspaper business, the news, particularly in print, largely influenced my perspective of the world. Remember “News Fridays” when we were challenged to find, cut out, and bring a newspaper article to class to be shared? Things were so simple then!

I write this article amid a flurry of news events that come to me not only in the newspaper but also as alerts on my phone, iPad, laptop, and digital reader. News about Supreme Court decisions on the affordable care act and marriage equality, news of tragedy and human triumph in Charleston, of a manhunt in New York, attacks in Paris, Tunisia, and Kuwait stream in with discussion and commentary online and on air. We need to equip our students to critically evaluate the flood of information, to make sense of the range of viewpoints, and to gather knowledge to build and support their own perspectives. Of the many resources featuring current events, there are two websites that offer classrooms tools to continue to do the critical thinking necessary to comprehend multiple perspectives.

Newsela offers nonfiction daily news across disciplines. High-interest topics are organized in categories: war and peace, science, kids, money, law, health, arts, and sports, with most recent articles featured on the home page. Each article is available at five Lexile reading levels (3rd–12th) to differentiate learning while having the whole class work on the same content. Advertisement-free articles are updated each day and can be read by students for free using an access code that is given when teachers “create a class.” In this open online version, students can annotate articles, take quizzes, and view their progress. The subscriber version, Newsela Pro, allows teachers to see who read the story, made notes, and took the quiz, tracking individual and class results aligning with Common Core Standards organized in an electronic binder. With Newsela Pro, teachers can customize and review writing prompts.

Other resources include the Newsela Learning and Support webpage to answer questions about the site and to provide resources and teaching ideas. “For Teachers, By Teachers,” a section within Classroom Resources, offers lesson plans and related materials submitted by teachers using Newsela. A Write Toolkit and a Text Sets Toolkit extend the possibilities of using Newsela articles. The text set is a collection of articles about a theme, topic, or related standard that teachers can use or create. Included are teacher-submitted lessons and connections to larger units. A “Pro/Con” text set offers articles that present multiple viewpoints where students could annotate and make comments in gathering notes to compare and contrast perspectives. The Write Toolkit guides teachers to insert writing prompts, offering rubrics and examples.

ProCon.org is an independent nonprofit organization founded to “promote critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship—and to educate without bias” as noted in their mission statement. Founder Steven Markoff provides extensive background information on the about us page. Varying perspectives on 53 controversial issues are presented in readings across content headings, including education, elections and presidents, health and medicine, and media and entertainment. Each issue contains a core question, background information, and specific pro and con arguments. The exploration of issues is student oriented, presenting text along with video, infographics, and political cartoons. The pro and con arguments include excerpts from major newspapers and quotes from experts and politicians. One issue raises the core question “Are Cell Phones Safe?” then offers “Did You Know?” facts from medical and science sources before presenting the pro–con arguments, the evolution of the cell phone science, and some videos related to popular culture. Sources are cited with links, often full-text PDFs.

Teachers can introduce students to the site’s approach to evaluating credibility of sources with their 1–5 star “theoretical expertise ranking.” A “Teachers’ Corner” offers lesson plans with related handouts and suggestions to make the activity easier or harder. Lessons are connected to Common Core, NCTE/IRA, and NCSS standards. Resources are provided that address teaching critical thinking. A collection of 50 illustrated quotes from Aristotle to Howard Zinn offers insights on critical thinking to be used to inspire students to continue to think deeply.

Consider ways to integrate Newsela and ProCon into your efforts to support students in thinking deeply and developing an informed voice. I have used both sites as resources for a class activity in building perspectives on cell phone use in the classroom. We start with a discussion web: “Should cell phones be allowed in the classroom?” We generate our own ideas, then jigsaw several articles, including those from these two sites that further inform on the issue, and then revisit the discussion web. This leads to further discussion and then more group work as we simulate a school board meeting, with each of six groups using what they have read and learned to perhaps step into the shoes of an opinion they may or may not hold and create a speech for or against cell phones in the classroom from the student, teacher, and parent perspectives. By thinking critically, reading, discussing, and evaluating ideas in text and beyond, students have improved their argument as informed citizens in the world.

Denise H. Stuart is a professor in the Curricular & Instructional Studies department at the University of Akron, Ohio. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

The International Literacy Association’s position statement on new literacies and 21st century technologies includes students’ rights to standards and assessments that include new literacies. The focus of this article is to look at how digital technologies can support literary instruction relevant to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). CCSS for English Language Arts lists three categories of reading standards: (1) Reading: Literature, (2) Reading: Informational Text, and (3) Reading: Foundational Skills.

Giving students practice in wide reading

In Reading Today,Elfreida Hiebert reported, “The inclusion of a standard on text complexity represents the most unique of several distinguishing features of the CCSS for English Language Arts.” She further reports that because of the strong relationship between vocabulary and comprehension, teachers need to conduct vocabulary lessons of critical vocabulary prior to reading.

In collaborative work with my colleague Dana L. Grisham, resources for integrating technologies into vocabulary and comprehension instruction were described in the California Reader (2014). Some recommended digital resources include the following:

• Many e-books have text-to-speech (TTS) features to enhance key content.
• eVoc Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary can be fostered using digital tools such as Wordle and Wordsift; both tools develop visual displays through word mapping.
• Electronic children’s magazines such as Weekly Reader and National Geographic Kids are great sources of informational text about current events.
• Other useful portals for research-based lesson ideas include ReadWriteThink and Reading Rockets.

A 2015 list of diverse books, as well as lists from 1996–2014, can be found at www.clrsig.org. All of these books were selected by the International Literacy Association’s Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group. The collection includes theme-based books involving characters from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and a range of family structures, as well as story lines that deal with identity issues related to gender and sexuality.

Focusing on comprehension

In their chapter about comprehension in the Handbook of Research on New Literacies, Bridget Dalton and C. Patrick Proctor write, “To read with understanding, the reader must be able to decode the words with a sufficient number of words automatized to allow for the fluency essential to comprehension.”

If the learner doesn’t understand a passage, the following digital tools and instructional strategies may help to enhance comprehension:

• TTS and Synthetic Voice with which text is read aloud at the word, sentence, or passage level.
• Vocabulary links provided in digital novels can lead to a graphic, video, or animation that elaborates on the meaning of a word.
• Vocabulary supports on the Internet such as an online dictionary, thesaurus, or encyclopedia extend opportunities for students to explore word meaning.
• In their The Reading Teacher article entitled “Internet Inquiry: Fundamental Competencies for Online Comprehension,” Tara Kingsley and Susan Tancock outline several instructional supports to help students select a topic, sort through a variety of media formats (text, graphics, audio, tags, bookmarks, and hyperlinks), build understanding across these formats, and communicate what they’ve learned to others.

Giving students practice in collaborative writing and Common Core assessments

Writing is also an important component of literacy, especially argumentative writing and writing about texts students have read. Online resources providing information about the two consortia that have created new assessments of these skills include Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

In addition, in her article entitled “Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards”, Bridget Dalton identifies multimodal composition as a digital written product that includes printed word, images, sound, and movement. She gives examples of how teachers can use multimodal assignments to help students develop skills that CCSS identify as important to 21st-century literacy.

CCSS encourages teachers to focus on reading texts deeply, writing for digital environments collaboratively, and reading and writing nonfiction texts. The digital tools and texts in this article help teachers foster new literacies as well as prepare students for the demands of CCSS assessments.

Marilyn E. Moore, EdD, is a professor at National University in La Jolla, CA, and serves as faculty lead for the Reading Program.

One significant challenge I encountered as an early career teacher was student engagement. My subject area, history, is notorious for creating disengaging, passive learning environments filled with dry lectures and hand-cramping pages of notes.

However, concerns about student disengagement are not limited to just history. Increasingly, disengagement characterizes much of a student’s experience in school. In fact, reports from Institute of Play and the Gallup Student Poll suggest that the Gallup Student Poll suggestwhile 80% of elementary school students feel engaged in their work, only 60% of middle school students report feeling engaged and a mere 40% of high school students are engaged. Importantly, research also suggests that high school students are more likely to feel engaged when the work they are doing has personal or social meaning attached to it.

Work by John Guthrie and Gay Ivey suggests that allowing students a choice in their reading material is critical for engaging readers in both informational and literary texts, respectively. The Connected Learning report also offers compelling examples of youths using digital media and online networks to learn more about topics of interest, to share ideas, and to take action in their communities. One recent teaching method that integrates text choice and technology is Genius Hour (aka 20-time), consisting of sustained, in school, interest-driven student inquiry projects, which culminate in a public presentation of learning. I worked recently with a middle school science teacher, Michele Austin of King Philip Middle School in Massachusetts, as she and 24 students embarked on a 20-time program.

Process

We framed our work loosely on Joy Kirr and Tom Driscoll’s 20-Time in Education model along with AJ Juliani’s helpful infographic, putting an emphasis on inquiry projects that would improve the community. We drew inspiration from Chris Rosati’s Big Ideas for the Greater Good initiative in which local students developed projects to improve their community and videotaped their process. We allowed students to choose their topic and refine its scope as necessary.

Our 20-time project was scheduled for one period per week over 12 weeks, with presentations to take place during the 13th week. Class periods ran approximately 50 minutes during the students’ study hall/lunch block, and all students had access to desktop computers. Students were not required to participate in the 20-time endeavor, but nearly 90% opted in to the program and even brought friends from other study halls to collaborate.

We began by giving students time to explore and search for websites to construct their own understandings of 20-time. From there, we broke up the program into three four-week segments: brainstorming, researching, and action. Although student autonomy was a primary feature of this project, we provided graphic organizers to help students organize their ideas and push into deeper inquiry, plan out logistics, and aid them in getting unstuck.

Students took on a wide variety of projects. Three groups chose to run events, including a lip-sync contest, a baseball clinic, and a baseball league Opening Day Walk for charitable foundations, which raised over $4,000 combined. Other groups chose to focus on the process of creating clubs in school, such as a peer tutoring club and a nursing home collaboration club. Others wanted to research how to make things such as Scratch video games, a slinky toy, and even a human hamster wheel. We held the presentations on May 8 to a crowd of more than 50 community members, and several of the projects were highlighted in local newspapers.

Takeaways for practice

From these experiences, four important observations emerged:

1. Students find 20-time to be an engaging learning experience
   Students thoroughly enjoyed the 20-time process. After ending the program in early May, some students wanted to start a new project while others carried on with their projects into the end of the school year. Students valued the opportunity to choose their learning topics and the ability to receive peer feedback and support when they made their work public. The vast majority of students worked on their projects outside of class time, although they were not asked to do so. One particular feature students enjoyed was receiving feedback instead of a “score” because “messing up” was perceived as an opportunity to fix a problem rather than a path to a lower grade.
2. Internet navigation + reading + communicating = work in progress
   Students entered into the project with some background in Internet navigation and critical evaluation of sources. They were taught the differences in top-level domain types (edu vs. com) and the importance of finding the author of Internet texts. However, locating the author of a website and identifying his or her perspective on an issue was still a challenge for students. Furthermore, professional e-communication norms such as e-mail inquiries were relatively new to students, compared with informal methods such as texting that they were used to. Minilessons on observed challenges along with just-in-time modeling to meet student needs effectively addressed some common gaps in digital literacy.
3. Mentors make a big difference
   Make no mistake about it—it is a challenge for the teacher to help guide students through all of their projects. The teacher’s role is especially tough when the action takes place outside of school or if the teacher has a limited background in the student’s area of interest. We found the most successful projects were those where students actively sought out adults to help mentor their projects, as these adults could help the students navigate unforeseen logistical issues.
4. Genius Hour can be discipline specific
   While we and many other teachers have made 20-time or Genius Hour open ended, they do not necessarily need to be that way. Brian Hodges, a history teacher in the Public School system in Massachusetts, also runs 20-time in his classroom. His class has the caveat of tying their inquiry to a topic in social studies. Despite the constraint, Brian’s students reported positive experiences with 20-time because they had the autonomy to choose both their topic and presentation method. These two tweets (tweet A and tweet B) offer additional examples of the types of 20-time projects possible within different content areas.

Dave Quinn is a doctoral student in URI/RIC PhD in Education program. Previously, he was a history teacher at King Philip Middle School in Norfolk, MA, and a member of the Seekonk School Committee.

Chromebook is a laptop computer that is dependent on the Google Chrome Internet browser. In other words, a Chromebook is used by connecting to the Internet through Google apps such as Google Classroom, Google Docs, gScholar, and WeVideo. Many school districts are integrating Chromebooks because they are cheaper and easier to maintain as compared with laptops using Windows or Mac software. In addition, students and teachers can access their work (e.g., documents, presentations, photos, and e-mail) through any computer just by using the Chrome browser and signing into their Google account.  

During the 2014–2015 school year, I worked with educators from a small public school in a rural area in the northeastern part of the United States. The school district had received a grant to purchase six Chromebooks for each classroom. The faculty noticed a large portion of its literacy instruction was focused on print text and paper-and-pencil literacy practices. This was a cause for concern because the recommendations outlined by the Common Core State Standards Initiative emphasize a balanced instruction with both print and digital media literacy practices. For example, the Common Core indicates students should be able to use technology thoughtfully and digital media strategically “to enhance their reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language use. [And that] they are familiar with the strengths and limitations of various technological tools and mediums and can select and use those best suited to their communication goals.” As a result, Chromebook integration was meant to support the notion that digital media are blended throughout daily literacy instruction rather than used as an add-on special assignment.

Three-week integration framework

In order to give teachers consistent support and freedom to play with the Chromebooks, professional development was broken into three-week intervals. During the first week I met with third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade teachers in a face-to-face environment. The second week was conducted through an online environment. The third week involved a classroom application environment. This three-week integration framework rotated 16 times during the school year.

Week One: The face-to-faceenvironment allowed me to introduce an instructional method using a gradual release model. For example, I would model how to plan and conduct a close reading of a print and digital text. Then, I would invite the teachers to share their process for close reading. Next, we experimented with different reading paths: linear (top-to-bottom and left-to-right) and nonlinear. Finally, working in pairs, teachers took turns practicing explicit instruction of close reading. The session always ended with time for teachers to discuss the benefits and challenges of the instructional method. They also collaborated in small grade-level groups to integrate the method into their literacy instruction.

Week Two: The onlineenvironment gave teachers the opportunity to continue to build their technological pedagogical content knowledge, also known as TPACK. Using a Google Classroom platform, I posted one or two relevant professional journal articles written for practitioners; short video segments that modeled the instructional method within the classroom; and discussion questions for teachers to share their thoughts. For instance, Bridget Dalton’s article in The Reading Teacher entitled “Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards” provided a bridge between theory and concrete examples. As teachers used the Google Classroom platform for their own learning, they began to feel more comfortable using this tool in their classroom.

Week Three: The classroom application environment held teachers accountable for adjusting their weekly lesson plan to include a hybrid model of literacy instruction. As defined by this school district, a hybrid model contained direct, collaborative, and individual instruction using both print and digital texts. As teachers took risks and explored integrating Chromebooks, I created a Google Doc where teachers could post feedback on their successes and challenges. This document allowed teachers to receive immediate support from administrators, teachers in other schools, and instructional coaches.

Challenges

Despite the success of the three-week integration framework, there were a few challenges to keep in mind. First, some teachers lacked basic technology skills and became overwhelmed. However, the face-to-face and online environments could be differentiated to meet the needs of the teachers. Being able to offer different levels of professional development may have provided better support to meet each teacher at his or her comfort level.

Regardless of proficiency, most teachers struggled to envision a hybrid classroom. They continued to use familiar print text and paper-and-pencil literacy practices instead of adjusting their instruction to include online inquiry and multimedia text sets. Without consistent instructional support from literacy coaches, technology staff, and administration, teachers may not have changed their instruction.

Even though teachers suggested that Chromebook integration increased student engagement and motivation, there were also digital citizenship issues to address. For example, while providing revision feedback on a Google Doc, one student disagreed with a peer and deleted those comments. Likewise, another student was writing inappropriate comments in a collaborative writing assignment. Finally, students were clicking on videos that were off topic. Fortunately, the cloud storage saves all of this activity and provides evidence when talking with students about what they might do differently in the future. From these experiences, teachers realized the importance of also teaching digital citizenship in the 21st-century classroom.

This three-week integration framework could be applied to any topic or any type of technology integration. I would love to learn more about the integration framework your school district uses for professional development. Feel free to send an e-mail to the address linked below.

Julie B. Wise is a doctoral student at the University of Delaware. You can follow her on Twitter. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

In today’s world, the topic of using technology in the classroom can be intimidating. In this monthly column, join one teacher on a quest to discover the best way to meet the needs of her digital-age learners…moving beyond the technology tools to focusing on supporting each student’s learning. 

For many of us, summer is a time when we can clear our minds and truly think about our teaching practice. Questions like “What was successful?” or “Where can we grow?” ring in our minds even when our bodies may be engaged in fun summertime activities. Like many of you, my mind also delves into thinking about the possibilities for the upcoming school year. We peruse Pinterest or other digital mediums for new ideas or practices. With new ideas often come the questions that begin with “What if…?”

What if students didn’t sit in a desk all day listening to teachers talk? Learning is an action verb, so shouldn’t students be active to truly learn? How actively involved are students if the teacher is doing all the work and the students are passive? We know that our students become experts at playing school: appearing to be engaged in class when a teacher is talking while being a million miles away mentally. Wouldn’t that change if students had the opportunity to work with their peers, both locally and globally?

Students could share their strengths for the benefit of others while developing in an area of their weaknesses by collaborating with their peers. They could ask questions of one another and get many more perspectives beside the one that a teacher might have. If students are actively involved in learning, they won’t be able to go unnoticed and slip between those proverbial classroom cracks.

What if learning weren’t a “one-size-fits-all” proposition where every child is doing the exact same things at the exact same time? What if students actually had a choice in how they learn content?

We know that students have different learning styles; they learn best across different modalities and learning environments. Some students may learn best by reading and writing a reflection while others may learn best by creating something new to show their learning. Others may benefit from creating podcasts, videos, or interviews.

What if students were given the opportunity to share their mastery of learning standards in a way that was meaningful for them? What could happen if we let students create their own rubrics, break down standards, and assess one another?

Students would become experts at understanding standards while understanding where they stand on the learning continuum. Instead of every student creating the same teacher-directed project with very little variety or ownership, students can build an entire interactive digital world in Minecraft while others publish an anthology of writing or create a board game for peers to play. They learn how to take what they have learned and apply it in a way that is meaningful to them and impactful for those around them. With these opportunities, students gain a much deeper understanding of the content and how it fits within the framework of their lives.

What if students became their own advocates for learning? What if, while they are with us, they learn how to articulate their learning?

Students need the tools to communicate successfully with educators and other adults how they learn best. They need to be equipped with the terminology and research to argue for the types of learning experiences they need to get the most out of their education. If our students spend a school year discovering themselves as learners—their strengths, weakness, and goals—they build the confidence and the ability to explain to anyone not just what they need as learners but also why they need it.

So the question that may be ringing in your head is whether this works within a regular classroom of a diverse population of students. What does it look like? How can it be managed with everything else we juggle as teachers? I would love to show you what happens when students take the driver’s seat in their own learning. Be sure to join me on Sunday, July 19, at 9:00 a.m. at ILA’s Annual Conference for my session, “License to Learn: Putting Students in the Driver’s Seat of Their Own Learning.” I’ll be sharing many of my students’ stories, their projects, and our adventures down the “what if…?” path. I hope to see you there.

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 country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog, eduflections.