Literacy Now

This year began differently. Every year is unique: new students, new preps, new schedule, new rooms, new colleagues, but this year, after only a few days, I sensed something in my freshmen students I had not yet experienced—quiet. I joked for the first couple of days about “dream students” and plowing ahead more quickly through the Common Core scope and sequence. However, after the first week or so, I grew uneasy because while the students were quiet, they were also unexcited and uninvolved—almost inert. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was happening with them, and then I read “Engagement With Young Adult Literature: Outcomes and Processes” (Ivey & Johnston, 2013), which questions the validity of current engagement models. Ryan Rutherford and Jo Worthy wrote about this study in a previous Literacy Daily post.

I realized engagement had come to be viewed as teachers manipulating students or “hooking them” to capture their attention. There was little emphasis on students’ concerns, emotion, and sense of agency. So, time for a revolution. Or maybe less a revolution and really a reclamation of what I have always known and believed to be good teaching and of what I have always valued—the learning process.

First, I reflected on both my students’ and my own engagement. Second, to support my observations, I surveyed my students about their sense of behavioral, emotional, social, and agentic engagement in my classroom and the school. Unsurprisingly, about 80% admitted they felt little to no agency anywhere in school, and those who “succeeded” actually aimed merely for a grade. Third, I prioritized student-selected young adult literature and time to read in the classroom—all necessary factors according to Ivey and Johnston (2013) for engaged reading. Fourth, I sought approval for this curricular change. I addressed the school’s improvement plan, and argued passionately to my head principal that I could balance my school and district’s demand for aligned skills in the areas of research, academic writing, and speaking and listening, with student freedom. I wanted my students to choose what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it without a whole-class text or one-size-fits all instructional model. Finally, I culled lists of texts that appeal to students and that inspire conversation, pulling from a variety of sources such as the Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers lists from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), ordered books thanks to grants, had students unpack their library, and we jumped in. We haven’t looked back since.

Class sessions now largely involve authentic discussions between students about books, writing, researching and more, as we now view reading and learning as social events of shared experience. I also regularly confer with individuals in order to build relationships and to push cognitive growth. To finish a text and to ace a summative assessment are no longer the foci; rather, relationships and learning for learning’s sake rule, as students teach each other more than I ever imagined possible. Everyone has read, written, researched, spoken, been listened to, and listened, and much as Ivey and Johnston found, I have found that students’ academic achievement continually meet or exceed the Common Core standards.

One of my students put it best: “Choos[ing] my own books and their content has been a very liberating and opening experience . . . . Being allowed to choose my books has help[ed] me live.” Well, the changes Ivey and Johnston’s research have inspired in my classroom have helped me live, again.

Teresa Lesage teaches English at West High School in Madison, WI.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

In the classrooms I support, students are more than happy to share their ideas and opinions with the class. However, writing persuasive pieces and having the opportunity to convince a reader of something can be daunting for some students, which leaves teachers to search for motivating ways to engage students in persuasive writing.

I recently introduced a fourth-grade class to Blabberize, a web-based tool that allows users to add audio to a photo and make it appear as though a mouth in the photo is talking. In one persuasive writing piece, my fourth graders used a turkey to try to convince a farmer not to serve him for dinner. To make the writing unique and motivating, the students were going to record themselves reading their finished persuasive writing and, using Blabberize, they would make it appear as though the turkey were talking directly to the farmer.

Once students drafted and edited their writing, they searched for the perfect turkey photo on iClipart for Schools, a royalty-free clipart website. The image is central to the persuasive writing activity, and students knew they needed to find a turkey that had a prominent beak so the viewer would be able to tell it was moving when the turkey talked. When the perfect picture was selected, students uploaded it to Blabberize and shaped the mouth to the turkey’s beak. Next, students recorded their plea to the farmer, either recording it within Blabberize or by using a different audiorecording platform and then uploading the MP3 file to Blabberize. Finally, students watched their product and shared it with the class.

These students had a great time creating their own talking turkeys with Blabberize and, on the basis of their arguments and evidence, the farmer decided to spare the turkey from being dinner’s main course.

Stephanie Laird is an instructional coach in the Southeast Polk School District in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, where she works alongside teachers to affect student learning through the areas of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and community building. She holds an MEd in Curriculum and Instructional Technology from Iowa State University.

It’s easy for teachers to become overwhelmed by and get caught up in the latest new technology gadget. In spite of all the new technologies that appear almost daily, it is important to remember that “our focus must remain on the act of reading,” as Frank Serafini stated in Reading Workshop 2.0. As a university faculty member, I am always looking for ways to model meaningful technology integration for my undergraduate and graduate students so that the focus remains on literacy instruction and not on the technology itself. I want to provide experiences for my students to take and use in their (future) classrooms to enhance and transform literacy learning.

 

Adobe Voice is a free app available for the iPad. It allows users to record their “stories” in their own voice with a touch of a button. In addition to being able to narrate their stories, users can add images, icons, and text, as well as select music that is already integrated into the app to create beautiful visual presentations of their content.

One of the most appealing features of Adobe Voice is its ease of use. Once the app is opened, Adobe provides several templates for content creation. Using the templates, users can write stories, teach a lesson, explain a concept, or promote an idea. Once a template is selected, Adobe then provides prompts to help the user create their content. Users may also opt not to use a template and make up their own.  This feature is great to promote differentiated instruction. The app also offers multiple content layouts and options to add multiple images or icons, as well as text. A tutorial is available online.

I recently introduced Adobe Voice to my undergraduate Literacy Foundations students. Their assignment was to use the app to create a reflection on their recent field experience at a local elementary school. Only one student was familiar with the technology prior to our session, but within one class period they were all successful users. I asked my students to write a brief reaction after using Adobe Voice and they said overwhelmingly they liked using it and found it very easy to navigate.

Both Jillian and Maggie said Adobe Voice could be used successfully as assistive technology for students with special needs. Jillian also saw the benefit of this app as an assessment tool and a means to communicate with families. Lyndsey said she would have loved to have had this technology available when she was in school because she didn’t like to talk in front of people, and this would have given her another option for communicating in her classes. The majority of my students stated they would use Adobe Voice in their future classrooms. In just one class period, my students realized the value and versatility of this technology tool.

The possibilities for using Adobe Voice in the classroom are endless. The youngest learners who have not yet developed writing skills can use this technology to tell their stories. Students of all ages can show their learning in the content areas of math, science, and social studies, and it can serve as a tool for reader response. Teachers can use this as a tool for creating flipped classrooms and providing individualized instruction for their students. Adobe Voice is an extremely versatile tool that can be integrated easily into classroom instruction to transform literacy learning.

How will you use your Voice?

Kristin Webber is an assistant professor in the Early Childhood and Reading Department at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania where she also serves as program head for the masters in education reading program. Her latest article “From Reluctant to Engaged” appears in the May 2015 issue of Educational Leadership.

English language arts teachers have long recognized the critical role meaningful feedback from peers has in process-writing classrooms. However, one limitation of traditional face-to-face peer response I noticed in my own teaching is that I never knew who was engaged with others and at what level. I didn’t have an efficient way of knowing who was giving (and who was getting) good feedback.

 

Over the past few years, peer feedback has been integrated into learning management systems like Canvas, Blackboard, and Turnitin. Stand-alone applications like Peerceptiv and Eli Review are online peer review systems that provide data never possible in traditional face-to-face settings. I’ve recently begun incorporating Eli Review into my teaching and am excited about the potential for learning and literacy development.

Once students submit a draft of their writing in Eli, reviewers add comments and rate the draft on the basis of the assignment’s goals. During the next phase, student writers indicate the helpfulness of the feedback they received in two ways—by rating it and by stating whether the reviewers’ suggestions were incorporated into the revision plan. Here, a student writer rated the comment by Student #39 as being more helpful (four stars) than one by Student #37 (three stars), so Student #39 will have a higher helpfulness rating for this particular task. However, the writer has indicated he will add both suggestions to his revision plan; this will have a positive impact on both students’ helpfulness rating.

Teachers can endorse feedback, which would also raise students’ helpfulness score. So far in my use of Eli Review, I haven’t endorsed any comments because I want students to take more ownership of the process. Bill Hart-Davidson, cocreator of Eli Review, advises teachers to use the endorsement feature judiciously, such as by telling students from the beginning of an assignment they will endorse certain types of feedback that support particular learning goals. For example, in an argumentation unit, teachers might endorse a reviewer’s comment on a peer’s use of counterarguments.

With each subsequent assignment, helpfulness ratings and other data aggregate and after multiple reviews, a student’s overall helpfulness index is quantified.

As a teacher, I can use data from Eli in a number of ways. For example, engagement data can be used as formative assessment. The helpfulness score category can be sorted in descending order, and this information could be used to make groups of equal or mixed ability. That same list also identifies students who have the lowest helpfulness scores, which says (at least) two things about those students: Either they are not engaged in the activity, or the kind of feedback they’re giving isn’t considered useful by their peers. I can discuss with students ways they could provide more valuable feedback.

In the article “Learning by Reviewing,” Kwangsu Cho and Charles MacArthur found that students who read and reviewed peers’ papers outperformed students who read but didn’t review those same papers. Peerceptiv’s Christian Schunn cites a decade’s worth of research describing the numerous cognitive gains students get through the act of online peer reviewing.

Teachers have long known that students become better writers by reading and reviewing peers’ work. Data generated in online peer feedback systems make that learning more visible.

Chris Sloan teaches high school English and media at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, UT. He is also a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University. His article The Relationship of High School Student Motivation and Comments in Online Discussion Forums was published in March 2015 in the Journal of Educational Computing Research.

The new digital technologies, granting storytellers the ability to combine text with audio-visual, ludic, and hypertext elements, are not a death toll for the novel. Rather, like film, they present new frontiers for storytelling.

—R. Lyle Skains, “The Shifting Author—Reader Dynamic:
Online Novel Communities as a Bridge from Print to Digital Literature,” 2010

The emergence of new forms of digital texts blurs the lines among short film, journalism, documentary film, website, memoir, blog, short story, and novel. This cross-pollination of textual forms highlights the engaging new ways through which fiction and nonfiction stories can be told. A beneficial result of this development is new opportunities for teachers and adolescents to achieve reading and literacy standards using the lure of digital devices.

Here in Australia, our National Curriculum recognizes that literacy development is supported by the study of language in all its forms. Therefore, in addition to traditional texts types such as novels, short stories, and plays, students are required to “interpret, appreciate, evaluate and create literary texts in spoken, print and digital/online forms.” The multimedia features of digital texts enable students and teachers to cover a range of reading, viewing, and listening outcomes. For example, the use of a Web documentary–style digital text allows students to respond to the aural components of voice-over narration, background music, or audio interviews with subjects; print components of the written text on the screen; and visual components of video, photographs, or the graphic design elements of the text’s digital interface. In addition to these components, digital texts differ from traditional texts in that they often allow a self-paced, self-directed, nonlinear navigational pathway through the stories, enabling readers greater agency in their experience of the narrative.

Two nonfiction digital texts have been used recently with grade 11 students in my English classroom to analyze a range of literacy modes and meet the literacy requirements of the Australian Curriculum: “Firestorm” from The Guardian newspaper and “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” from The New York Times that features journalism, documentary film, and memoir to tell the dramatic survival stories resulting from both an Australian bushfire and a Washington state avalanche. “Firestorm” employs looping background video of the rural Tasmanian setting, and a rotating slideshow of photojournalism images deliver an “as it happened” sensation when the reader scrolls through both the text and interviews with the surviving family. The coupling of these videos and archival photographs with ambient noise—the rustling of wind through the trees and the local birdlife, the crackling of flames in burning bush land, and the quiet chattering of local residents in a teahouse returning to normality after the fire—further enhance the reader’s sense of vicarious experience.

Likewise, “Snow Fall” makes innovative use of multimedia to convey the story of the Tunnel Creek avalanche that claimed the lives of three experienced skiers. A rotating three-dimensional model of the alpine setting, a time-lapse sequence of the meteorological map showing the storm cell present on the day of the disaster, and a graphic model demonstrating the deployment of a skier’s protective air bag are all multimodal elements that sit alongside the extensive prose, slideshows and film interviews with the survivors and the victims’ families. Even the most perfectly composed passage of descriptive prose or the most in-depth investigative reporting of these events would struggle to compete with the engaging and aesthetic presentation of these two stories in this digital form.

The study of “Snow Fall” and “Firestorm” with my digitally connected adolescent readers has resulted in some rich discussions about emerging modes of representation, robust debates about what it means to be a reader, and the ways storytellers in the 21st century use technology to appeal to a range of audiences. From reluctant to avid readers, technology experts to newcomers, the adoption of digital storytelling texts in your classroom will enable all students to think about the future of reading in their lives.

For an uninterrupted reading experience of both “Firestorm” and “Snow Fall,” teachers and students should seek out a high-speed Internet connection. Although both texts can be accessed on a tablet, a laptop or desktop computer will better enable all features to function to their full effect. Both texts are suitable for grades 10 and above; however, teachers of younger students may consider Inanimate Alice as an alternative digital storytelling text for grades 5–9. Inanimate Alice is also accompanied by a set of educational resources.

Nicole Timbrell is a high school English teacher and e-learning integrator at Loreto Kirribilli in Sydney, Australia. She is completing graduate studies in Cognition, Instruction and Learning Technologies at the University of Connecticut where she worked previously as a research assistant in The New Literacies Research Laboratory. Find her on Twitter.