Literacy Now

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. 

When February rolls around in Alabama, minds turn towards the big celebrations surrounding Mardi Gras. A little-known fact is that Mardi Gras actually began in Mobile, Alabama, not New Orleans, Louisiana—a fact that any Alabamian will gladly share with anyone who thinks that New Orleans is the birthplace of Mardi Gras in the United States.

p: andy castro via photopin

In spite of having been one of those who needed educating in the true origin of Mardi Gras, I find myself thinking fondly of travelling to New Orleans to attend IRA’s 59th Annual Conference. Even though Mardi Gras will be a memory for many by May, I can’t help but think of all the beads, costumes, and masks that are found year round.

The masks are masterful works of art that disguise the wearer while still allowing him/her to actively participate in festivities. As a classroom teacher, I am immediately reminded of how that parallels with what we want for our students in their online learning; we want for them to be present and actively engage in a world of possibilities for their learning while also learning in a safe environment.

Many ask, How can you include learning activities that include digital and social media when there are so many seemingly potential dangers lurking? The fact is that students are already engaged in these mediums with or without us. With us, they are in a safe environment where there are filters and safeguards put into place. If a student makes a poor choice, we have the opportunity to have a discussion where they can identify an unsafe practice and determine why they need to make a change. When in our classrooms, we are giving them the opportunity to build safe habits that they carry with them once those safeguards are absent, which for many of them is when they return home. It is not uncommon for students to come and express to me how unsafe they had been in their online profiles or practices and how they have immediately made changes to protect themselves.

Because safety is a topic about which I am most often asked, I thought I would share a few of the practices that I have put into place to help students develop an understanding of the rules in this digital playground.

Let them set expectations. Even though I teach middle level students, it surprises me how much they do not know about making good choices online. Quite often they express that no one has ever talked to them about digital choices. Sometimes learners may know not to do something, but they have no understanding as to the “why” of the discussion. I often write about the importance of students taking ownership over the practices in the classroom. They need to discover and understand how the choices they make could impact them or those around them. I do not believe in scare tactics, but I do believe that students need to have a clear understanding of the potential ramifications that something they put out in cyberspace can have, positive and negative (and yes, these need to be age appropriate).

At the beginning of the school year, I guide my students in a discussion about the world of possibilities available to them through digital mediums. We start with a beginning activity where they work in small groups creating a list of what they know about online practices and opportunities. Then they share their list with the class. A crucial part of this conversation is having the students share the “why” behind each of their ideas. They need to begin connecting the dots between their choices and the impact that they could have.

After a week of these conversations, my learners create a list of expectations for their online behavior; they are building their mask. Because we have discussed this over the course of several days, they have a clear understanding as to why each element is included on their list. Each year the list is a bit different because my students are different each year. You will notice that the list my students created this year includes a lot of positives. Yes, safety is addressed and each one of my students can enumerate in a very detailed explanation of each characteristic, but this is their list, not mine. They have complete ownership over this process and they hold one another to these practices.

Let them create a safe profile. So many of the tools that students use, from Voice Thread to blogging to Google apps have users set up an online profile. Since this is a part of connecting with other people, it is important that students have the opportunity to build a profile that gives them some individuality while still providing the protection that he/she needs.

One way that we create individuality while staying behind the mask is through various online avatar creators. Students have the ability to create an online avatar that is unique to them to use in all of their accounts. That becomes their mask where other students can identify them with just their profile photo while not putting their photo out for anyone to view.

My learners’ favorite avatar creator is Build Your Wild Self. On this site, users have the opportunity to select a cartoon version of different boys or girls and then add fun animal parts to their avatar. It is something that can be as unique as each of your students. And who wouldn’t remember a girl with peacock feathers and octopus tentacles?

If your students are into superheroes like many of mine are (and let’s face it, who wouldn’t like to be a superhero?) Marvel’s Create Your Own Superhero and Hero Machine are both really super options. Many of my learners are into Legos or Claymation characters. If they would like to become a Lego character, the Mini-Mizer is fun, while creating a clay version of themselves on ClayYourself (like the ones in the Hotels.com commercials) may appeal to other students.

Whatever their interest, there is a way for them to create a safe, fun, and memorable profile “photo” that helps them to connect and build relationships with a parade of learning opportunities from around the globe.

Let them communicate and collaborate through class accounts. When discussing social media, many teachers shy away from bringing these tools into their classrooms. There are students whose parents do not feel comfortable in having their students on social media. Once I explain that we will be using our class account where I am the only one with the login and I am the one controlling what content comes into and out of our learning environment, I have never had any students denied access to all of the learning opportunities possible through these tools.

One tip that I would suggest is that you set up accounts separate and apart from your own accounts. For example, my Twitter name is @JulieDRamsay while the class account is @RamsaysClass. The audience needs to know that the tweets, posts, or photos are coming from students, not an adult. It changes how individuals or groups respond to content put out through different feeds.

I’ve written in previous columns about the amazing learning opportunities that have resulted because my students are on Twitter, blogging, and Instagram, which are all done on our class iPad. An incredible amount of in-depth, real world, authentic learning would not have occurred had we not been actively involved with connecting with other students, authors, and experts through social media.

One more idea I’d like to share is that the purpose of social media is to be, well, social. That is what appeals to today’s students. They know they have an authentic audience; someone who will be reading, commenting, and questioning their thoughts and ideas. When you create a blocked account, you are extremely limiting the individuals who can connect with your students. If you are using a class account, you are already serving as the filter. You will quickly be able to identify those trolls who will offer no learning experiences for your students. Blocking them is a matter of a couple of clicks.

So as the Mardi Gras parades and festivities march on, let us remember that we can open up a world of possibilities for our learners through digital resources while providing them the protection they need from behind a mask of sound online practices. Until I see you in May, Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Are you a fan of Plugged In? Come see Julie D. Ramsay present “The Global Read Aloud: One Book to Connect the World” at IRA’s 59th Annual Convention, May 9-12, 2014, in New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Julie D. Ramsay is a Nationally Board Certified educator and the author of “CAN WE SKIP LUNCH AND KEEP WRITING?”: COLLABORATING IN CLASS & ONLINE, GRADES 3-8 (Stenhouse, 2011). She teaches ELA to sixth graders at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She also travels the country to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog at juliedramsay.blogspot.com. 

Today’s classrooms are filled with diverse learners each with their own unique needs and learning styles. Classroom teachers are continually challenged to find ways to engage learners in meaningful instruction. I found myself in this exact dilemma when I was a classroom teacher in an alternative education program for children (Grades 4–12) identified with emotional and behavioral disorders. Traditional “pencil and paper” school was not working for us, and I turned to digital reading and responding technologies to engage my students in meaningful literacy instruction.

photo credit: flickingerbrad via photopin cc

eReaders come in many types and styles, such as Kindles or Nooks, and are available as apps for other mobile devices. I used the free iBook app on the iPad2. With options to change font style, size, and background color, the reader can personalize his or her reading experience. Also, ereading devices and apps offer a variety of tools, such as highlighting/underlining text and typing notes, to assist the reader in constructing meaning during reading. In our first ereading experience, six readers recorded 211 annotations and typed 80 notes while reading Tuck Everlasting in e-book form. Larson (2010) points out that by examining students’ notes and annotations, educators can gain valuable insights to students’ reading behaviors and comprehension skills.

The Internet offers many options for creating online literature discussions with students. Wikispaces, Kidblog, and Nicenet are just a few. After each reading session, students were encouraged to post to the electronic discussion board housed at Wikispaces.com. My students posted on the discussion board 94 times, and I was able to monitor the discussion and determine the types of responses students were making—aesthetic, interpretive, cognitive, experiential, clarification, and/or off-task (Larson,  2007, Hancock, 2004). My students also favored the online discussion board because it gave them 24/7 access to the discussion. If they remembered something that night at home that they wanted to add, they could do it. They also liked that the discussion was archived. They were able to go back and reread discussion posts if they needed to. Moreover, I found the electronic discussion board an excellent tool for involving my quieter students in the conversation. They really liked that they were able to step back and think about their responses instead of being “put on the spot” in a face to face discussion.

Alvermann (2008) argues that despite the complex digital world surrounding many of today’s students, schools still favor traditional, print-based methods of instruction. She further observes that even though digital images, audio, and video are changing the way we read certain kinds of texts, “online and offline literacies are not polar opposites” (pg. 16). Teachers need to deliberately tap into adolescents’ natural engagement with digital content and consider a wider range of learning competencies that currently go unnoticed. An estimated 64% of children ages 12-17, for example, are already using the Internet to create their own content (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, & Smith, 2007). Perhaps when students have regular opportunities to show themselves competent learners in a medium they already enjoy, they will find schoolwork more relevant and worthwhile. To that end, teachers should also ask students for their suggestions on how digital literacies might become a part of the regular curriculum (Alvermann, 2008).

References

Alvermann, D. (2008). Why bother theorizing adolescents’' online literacies for classroom practice and research? The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(1), 8-19. doi: 0.1598/JAAL.52.1.2

Hancock, M. (2004). A celebration of literature and response: Children, books, and teachers in K-8 classrooms. Merrill.

Larson, L. C. (2007). A case study exploring the "new literacies" during fifth-grade electronic reading workshop. (Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy). Kansas State University,

Larson, L. C. (2010). Digital readers: The next chapter in e-book reading and response. The Reading Teacher, 64(1), 15-22. doi: 10.1598/RT.64.1.2

Lenhart, A., Madden, M., Macgill, A.R., & Smith, A. (2007). Teens and social media. PEW American Internet & American Life Project, October 28, 2012.

Kristin Webber is an assistant professor in the Early Childhood and Reading Department at Edinboro University and serves as program head for the Masters in Education Reading Program, kwebber@edinboro.edu.

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

The regular appearance of new literacies requires additional roles for teachers and students. 

- Don Leu, et al. (2013)

Recently, I heard a middle school teacher make this observation about what she called a “universal understanding” among her students:

…when using technology, students are perfectly happy to let someone else help them or offer to help others, whereas, in other learning situations, these same students may reject opportunities to receive or give help.

These words rang true as I pictured the many times I have surrendered the teaching floor to a student who possessed a more advanced technology skill set and an eagerness to share her knowledge not only with me but with her fellow students. Education Technology Specialist Alan November shared a similar sentiment in this address at URI’s Education Colloquium last year when he stated that “students prefer to learn from one another.” One reason he gave was the “curse of knowledge” phenomenon in which more knowledgeable individuals, such as teachers, find it harder to imagine a first-timer’s questions. Students who have recently grasped a concept or mastered a skill are closer to the “first-time” experience than adults, who may have learned the same concept or skill decades earlier and therefore may be able to convey information in a manner more accessible to their peers.

With these ideas in mind, I propose we reconsider the way that screencasts are used in our classrooms. We know from the success of Khan Academy and the rise of the flipped classroom model for instruction that, whether or not they are creating their own tutorials or using existing ones, educators are adopting screencasts as part of their teaching toolkit. However, the sole use of adult-generated screencasts position the teacher as the primary source of knowledge and, as passive receivers of this instruction, the student voice is absent from this stage of the learning process.

Screencasts for Students, by Students

Club Academia video on literary devices

Encouraging students to identify a learning need, recognize their own expertise in that particular topic or skill area, and create a resource to share with their peers to meet that need places students at the center of their education and fosters a collaborative learning environment. Furthermore, asking students to create their own screencasts to share with their peers is a task that activates multiple types of “Twenty-first century literacies” (Brown, Bryan, and Brown, 2005) including technology literacy, information literacy, digital literacy, and visual literacy. (See definitions here).

While teachers may wish to exercise “quality control” by checking students’ screencasts before uploading to the class wiki or an educational video sharing website, such an approach would remove additional opportunities for collaborative learning. The use of peer assessment for fact-checking the content, aligning the tone and vocabulary with the target audience, reviewing the production elements, and assessing overall usefulness as a learning resource are but some of the learner-centered activities that could follow the creation of student-generated screencasts.

To view some examples visit Club Academia, a website that promotes “education of the students, by the students and for the students” by creating video tutorials that emphasize the student perspective.

Getting Started

To gauge students’ skills in screencast production, you might like to start with a simple task such as the one below that can be done individually or in small groups:

Select your favorite educational website. Create a 90-second screencast during which you deliver a “tour” of the website’s features while you explain how it has helped you with your learning.

Software tools for creating screencasts:

• QuickTime
• Camtasia
• Screen-o-matic
• Jing
• ScreenFlow

Together with presentation software such as:

• Prezi
• Keynote
• PowerPoint

References

Brown, J., Bryan, J., & Brown, T. (2005). Twenty-first century literacy and technology in K-8 classrooms. Innovate, 1(3).

Leu, D. J., Zawilinski, L., Forzani, E., & Timbrell, N. (2013) Best Practices in New Literacies and The New Literacies of Online Research and Comprehension. To appear in Best Practices in Literacy Instruction. 5th Edition. Morrow, L. M., & Gambrell, L. B. (Eds) New York: Guildford Press.

November, A. Creating a New Culture for Teaching and Learning. University of Rhode Island Fall 2013 Honors Colloquium, 8th October 2013. Accessible here: http://www.uri.edu/hc/20131008_November_VIDEO.html

Nicole Timbrell is a high school English teacher at Loreto Kirribilli in Sydney, Australia. She has taken a year away from the classroom to complete graduate study in Cognition, Instruction and Learning Technologies at the University of Connecticut, nicole.l.timbrell@uconn.edu, @nicloutim.

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

One of the greatest impacts of having 1:1 mobile devices in my classroom has been the opportunity to change the way I approached teaching and learning. I realized early on in this journey that I had the chance to give my students an incredible educational experience in the year they spent with me—and that even a single year could have far-reaching impacts on their future as learners.

p: 21stCenturyEdtech

As I began to form new ideas about how I wanted to teach, I realized that project-based learning (PBL) was one of the approaches I was interested in bringing into my classroom. Implementing a new technology and a new learning approach at the same time, with little to no training, was a daunting undertaking that required a lot of time spent researching. One of the more time-consuming tasks was figuring out the right tools for allowing the technology to enhance the learning without overshadowing it. A lot of trial and error was involved, but eventually my students and I figured out how our devices could be most useful in facilitating our learning.

The PBL process begins with a driving, or "essential," question. Whether this question is teacher or student generated, a source for topic ideas can be highly useful. Technology gives both teachers and students immediate access to the happenings of the world at a level never known in years past. Apps such as Problem Based Learning Experience, Zite, and TED provide a deep reserve of real-world news and discussion points that can be developed into PBL experiences. These resources help keep PBL projects real and relevant for students, which is vital to creating an engaging learning experience.

Once a topic has been decided and students are beginning their projects, organization and workflow are two areas in which technology can provide valuable assistance. Task list apps, such as Wunderlist and WorkFlowy, can provide students with a place to plan their projects, track their own progress, and create reminders for deadlines. As an added benefit, many of these apps provide the tools to share and even collaborate on task lists, making them highly useful for use by student groups. Workflow is an ever-present challenge in any classroom using mobile devices, especially when students are too young for individual email accounts. Showbie, Edmodo, and Google Drive all provide options for sharing documents, assisting the workflow process immensely.

Another facet of PBL that can be greatly enhanced by technology integration is the research process. Students with internet access have a massive collection of resources at their disposal. General research apps, such as ArticleSearch and WolframAlpha, provide a rich variety of informational sources. For younger students, kid-friendly websites and search engines may prove most useful. Yahoo Kids, Internet Public Library's Kidspace, and Fact Monster are all excellent starting points. Along with finding information, an important aspect of research is citing sources—which can be difficult for any age group. Apps such as EasyBib and sites such as Citation Machine can ease this struggle and aid students in properly crediting their sources.

Of all the areas in which technology can enhance PBL, creation of a product and presentation to an authentic audience is perhaps where this pair shines the brightest. It is impossible to do justice to all the possibilities opened to students and teachers when technology tools are utilized for creative purposes. Students can create graphs, documents, cartoons, books, movies, podcasts, and interactive presentations—and that is just the beginning. I highly recommend browsing the resources on sites such as The Buck Institute that are devoted to PBL, as these are bursting with articles, videos, and blogs that can provide inspiration.

The ability to connect to authentic audiences is one of the most important pieces of PBL, and can be greatly enhanced by the use of services such as EduBlogs and Skype in the Classroom. Sites such as these allow both teachers and students the opportunity to connect with the world as they explore their ideas and present their projects.

The technology tools that can be applied to PBL are endless, as are the creative ways they can be utilized. These are just a starting point. The effective use of technology and PBL in combination with each other enhances both aspects, so it is worth taking the time to try different apps and programs with your students to see for yourself how they work out. The goal is to figure out what is best for your classroom, so you can create a unique environment that will engage students in significant learning and help them develop the skills they will use throughout the rest of their lives.

Lindsey Fuller

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like today’s students are being asked to read more nonfiction and compose more “informational” writing than ever.

The NCTE/IRA Standards for English Language Arts advocate for classrooms where students gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of print and nonprint sources (Standard #7). The Common Core College and Career Readiness Anchor Standard for Reading (#1) asks students to “cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” The CCSS Anchor Standards for Writing (#7-10) stress that students need to be able to conduct short and more sustained research using multiple print and digital sources and to participate in shared research projects.

If your students are like mine, most of them are doing the majority of their research online. And, if yours are like mine, they could use a little help. I’ve found that my students appreciate being introduced to tools that help them manage and organize the information that they’re finding. The good news is that there is a plethora of new tools available. Recent IRA TILE-SIG blog posts have touched on some useful applications for annotating online text. In “Using Apps to Extend Literacy and Content Learning,” Jill Castek discussed the app DocAS, as a way to mark up reading materials to show students’ emerging ideas. And in “Literacy Practices Through the UDL Lens, Part 2,” teacher Monee Perkins noted that her seventh grade students use Adobe Reader’s annotation feature to address complex text and provide them with another representation for text commenting.

I’d like to add a few online annotation tools that I’ve used in my teaching and in my own research that are worth a look.

Citelighter

My favorite new app to use with my students is Citelighter because it combines the ideas of social bookmarking, note-taking, and citation-managing with some promising teacher tools.

The students in my media production class used Citelighter to help them manage information they found while creating a Public Service Announcement about water use issues in our community. As each student in the group examined different perspectives on the issue, Citelighter’s browser toolbar allowed them to highlight, annotate, cite, and comment on important information as they found it. It even synced with their shared Google Doc so that their knowledge was constructed seamlessly (see graphic below). The students said that it made their collaboration easier. Additionally Citelighter’s citation feature formats sources in either APA, MLA, or Chicago style without the errors that happen on a lot of online citation formatting websites that my students have used in the past.

My students are excited about features that will streamline their own workflow, but there are some other things about Citelighter that interest me as a teacher. The student profile panel tells me not only the citations my students are generating in their research, but also how many sources they’re citing from. This helps me when conferencing with the students about ways that they might improve their research strategies.

Citelighter also creates a “Cognitive Print” of the students’ progress on a particular writing assignment. The image below shows the different ways two students approach the composition process while researching. Student 1’s Cognitive Print shows a more consistent pattern of copying from sources followed immediately by writing and annotating. Student 2’s Cognitive Print shows longer periods of gathering of information and then writing about that information in one bigger block of time. Neither approach to the research process is “right,” but this information gives my students and me something more to conference about, and provides more information for their own self-reflection.

Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking service based on the idea that when you bookmark a website on your computer, it’s only useful if you’re actually on that same computer. Social bookmarks, on the other hand, carry over to any computer as long as you’re logged in to a service like Diigo or Delicious. But even more powerful is the fact that you can share your bookmarks with others, and you can see what other like-minded people are bookmarking. Features like this facilitate social scholarship. Some colleagues in the National Writing Project and I have our students discuss their digital compositions on Youth Voices, and sharing bookmarks through Diigo gave us another way to collaborate (see graphic below). For practical ideas on how to implement Diigo in classroom settings, see Ferriter and Garry’s book, Teaching the iGeneration.

Crocodoc

Crocodoc converts Word or PDF documents to allow for collaboration via the web. Users can highlight key passages, share them with collaborators, and even send others the link to the annotated document. Crocodoc is similar to DocStoc or Scribd, but because it’s created with HTML5 (and not Flash) it works well not only with modern browsers, but also Apple’s iPads and iPhones. New York City teacher Paul Allison has his 7th graders use Crocodoc primarily to annotate readings and as another way to discuss course content.

Mendeley

When some members of my doctoral studies cohort and I were researching social media and civic engagement, we shared our findings with each other via Mendeley, a reference manager and PDF organizer. Mendeley is particularly useful for the kind of academic research done in graduate school. For example, when I would come across a journal article that I thought my collaborators would find useful, all I had to do was drag and drop the article on to the icon on my desktop; in addition to making it easier to share research, the program extracts the title, journal, keywords, and other relevant information. There’s a plugin available for Microsoft Word to make citing sources much easier in that application. Zotero also has many of these same features listed above. For an excellent example of Zotero in the college classroom, see Ballenger’s The Curious Researcher.

Educators have known about the benefits of active reading for a long time; reading research has shown what effective comprehension strategies can mean for learning. Some of the best pre-Internet teachers I’ve known had their students read with a “pencil in hand”—making notes in the margins of their pages, judiciously annotating key passages, composing their thoughts in dialectical journals, and then sharing their findings in classroom discussions. Students now are doing their research online, and the habits of mind that good readers have always brought to bear on text can be facilitated through the use of new applications.

Chris Sloan teaches high school English and media at Judge Memorial in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is also a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University. Join him on the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast every Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time at teachersteachingteachers.org.