Literacy Now

In our earlier blog post we introduced the idea of a monthly quiz to give students opportunities to regularly practice their evaluation skills. To maintain students’ interest, educators need to create different tasks and provide a variety of lenses that enhance critical thinking.   

As professor Julie Coiro points out, students rarely attend to source features, such as author, publisher, or publication type, to evaluate the credibility of information. And, if they do so, their evaluations are often superficial. One main challenge for students is to evaluate both content and source information in relation to each other—to read content in light of the source information, and vice versa. Educators can use the step-by-step guide we present below to walk students through this practice.

Step one: Teacher Preparation

Select a piece of website content that may represent commercial, ideological, or personal interest. One example is this blog post on CocaCola's website, which references a report concluding that aspartame is safe for consumption “at current levels of exposure.” We selected this website for our lesson because CocaCola sells products that contain aspartame and therefore has a vested financial interested in promoting the ingredient’s safety.

Reading the blog post without knowing who has published it may influence how readers receive the message. Our intention is not to say whether the blog post is true or false; we selected this site to give students experience in understanding how the content shifts when they know who has authored/published the information and discussing how that relationship influences their interpretation, as readers.

Copy relevant text from this website and paste onto a presentation slide, being sure to blind all source information about the publisher (e.g., logos and names).

Step two: Content evaluation

Let your students carefully read the text on the presentation slide and discuss the following questions in pairs.

• What is the main message?
• What kind of evidence supports the main message?
• How credible is the information? Why do you think so?

Step three: Make an educated guess

Ask your students to guess who could be the author or the owner of the content shown on the slide, based on the underlying message.

Step four: Revealing the source information

Reveal the website to your students. Ask them to write a few sentences reflecting on their own understanding of the content after seeing who wrote/published the text, Then, ask students to share their thinking and responses to the following questions with a partner:

• Has your understanding of the content shifted, and if so, why?
• Did the source information change your perception about the credibility of the information?

Ask the pairs to briefly summarize their discussions with the class. Together, discuss why it is important to attend to source information.

Step five: Corroborating with additional sources

Encourage students to search for corroborating evidence. As a class, discuss with students what they find and whether or not this additional information influences their thinking about the overall credibility of the content.   

We hope that you will find this blog post helpful for expanding your repertoire of teaching critical evaluation of online information.

Eva Wennås Brante and Carita Kiili are both postdoctoral fellows at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo.



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

If we want to make students better readers, how much they read matters.

To foster students’ interest in reading, teachers can use interest and motivation inventories as well as online resources—such as book trailers and YouTube videos—to entice students and to empower them to choose their own texts.

In the context of reading, interest is a person’s willingness to engage with specific content. Capturing students’ reading interest is important, as interest can impact students’ motivation to read. In The Reading Teacher, Springer, Harris, & Dole (2017) present four research-based principles of reading interest. The first research-based principle is individual interest, which is self-directed and tied to a student’s personal interest in a topic. The second principle, situational interest, occurs when teachers create exciting instructional activities. The third way teachers can affect reading interest is by choosing texts that are interesting in terms of organization, design, and storytelling. The fourth principle is interest regulation, when students learn how to read and comprehend texts that are not interesting to them. Using these principles, teachers can help students to develop a lifelong motivation to read. 

One way to create reading excitement is by sharing book trailers—short, promotional, often animated videos designed to introduce a book and to “hook” readers’ interest.  Examples include Geek Girl by Holly Smale and Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. Students can browse YouTube channels, such as Scholastic’s Book Trailers playlist and the Children’s Book Council’s Picture Book Trailers and YA Book Trailers playlists to gather ideas.

Students can also find book summaries, reviews, recommendations, read-aloud channels, and more on YouTube. For example, if a student wants to listen to Mem Fox’s Whoever You Are, he or she can choose from a long list of video readings, including a musical version. Robert Sabuda, pop-up book designer, has adapted books such as The Little Mermaid. These videos provide a multisensory reading experience to help make the story more engaging and enjoyable for students.

Teachers can also explore free, high-quality, audiobooks and e-books for children ages 12 and under here. These stories can be accessed anywhere and anytime, in different languages, and on many kinds of devices.

When teachers choose literature to add to their curriculum, they must also provide students with options that reflect a wide range of gender, racial, ethnic, cultural, and language diversity.

A great source of diverse literature options is the International Literacy Association’s (ILA) Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group, which publishes weekly book reviews on ILA’s blog, Literacy Daily. Other popular lists include ILA’s Choices Reading Lists, Caldecott Medal Winners and Honor Books, Newbery Medal Winners and Honor Books, The Coretta Scott King Book Awards, American Indian Youth Literature Awards, Arab American Book Awards, and Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Although browsing these lists is a time-consuming task, I believe that enriching classroom and school libraries with interesting books for all readers is vital.

The following is a list of my own recommendations for high-interest, children’s and young adult reading in a diverse classroom.

• All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook by Leslie Connor (HarperCollins)
• The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak (Penguin)
• A Boy Called Christmas by Matt Haig (Penguin)
• Fall Is for School by Robert Neubecker (Hyperion)
• Full of Fall by April Pulley Sayre (Simon & Schuster)
• Geek Girl by Holly Smale (HarperCollins)
• The Girl Who Saved Christmas (Knopf)
• Iggy Peck, Architect by Andrea Beaty (Abrams)
• Inside Out & Back Again by Thanhha Lai (HarperCollins)
• The Lion & the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney (Little, Brown)
• The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka (Viking)
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (Penguin)
•  Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto (Puffin)
• Whoever You Are by Mem Fox (Houghton Mifflin)

 

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



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

Learning a new language takes a long time. According to the United States Foreign Service Institute (FSI), English speakers may need to spend approximately up to 720 hours to reach elementary proficiency in a foreign language. This means that just taking classes is often not enough. In this blog post, I will introduce several apps and websites that foreign language teachers and learners can use to continue learning beyond the classroom.

Classting is an example of social media platform and learning management system (LMS) that works much like Edmodo, Schoology, and Canvas. The free app allows teachers, students, and parents to share class-related notices, conversations, and materials on the virtual classroom pages. A unique feature of Classting is the Class Exchange. By exchanging with other Classting classes, students can have extra opportunities to practice using the target language with native speakers.

Quizlet is another useful app to learn vocabulary and expressions. The app includes five study modes (learn, flashcards, write, spell, and test) and three gaming modes (match, gravity and live) that learners can use to check their understanding of vocabulary and expressions in a target language. Students can use the free version to create sets of vocabulary or expressions that they learned in class. Once they type words or expressions in their native language as well as a target foreign language, the app automatically records their pronunciations. Students can also use images that are saved in the Quizlet.

Using Quizlet Teacher, educators of foreign languages can facilitate and manage students’ learning. For example, I created at least one set per week for adult, native English-speaking students in my Korean teaching class. Each week, completing one of the five study modes was a basic assignment. Using the app, I could record my voice to teach proper pronunciations of Korean expressions and upload relevant images. I also could monitor which words and expressions were answered correctly or should be reviewed more by each student. Another great feature of Quizlet is the sets of publicly available flashcards. If creators of sets keep them open, any Quizlet users can use them for their own study, which saves time for teachers and students.  

The final platform, Edpuzzle, is an effective tool for learning from videos. Teachers can search and upload videos about the target language from nine websites including YouTube, Vimeo, and Kahn Academy. They can then create interactive videos by trimming the original video and inserting questions, answers, and comments into the trimmed video. Teachers are also able to turn off the skipping function, which helps students to actively engage in the video.

The apps and platforms introduced above have worked well in my classrooms, and my students have enjoyed learning with them. You can choose other similar apps that you have access to and feel more comfortable to use. Remember, no matter what programs you use, the key is to be well-organized and consistent.

Sohee Park is a doctoral candidate specializing in literacy education at the University of Delaware. She was a former Korean language arts teacher in South Korea. At the University of Delaware, she has taught several courses related to teaching literacy in elementary grades and has participated in several research projects integrating technology to language learning. She also has voluntarily taught Korean language to native English speakers.

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

In the year that has passed since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, my video production students have grappled with how to voice their opinions and concerns in a meaningful way. They want to talk about LGBTQIA rights, hate crimes, marginalized communities, and more. 

To elevate civic engagement, I worked with Jon Wargo, assistant professor at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, to develop a 10-week curriculum where students engaged in participatory politics by producing both a public service announcement (PSA) as well as a short documentary. When completed, many of these videos aired on our daily morning announcements program. Based loosely on a C-SPAN video contest called StudentCam, we wanted students to focus on local issues that personally impacted their lives and, as Julie Coiro and Renee Hobbs suggested in a recent presentation, “advance [their] agency with more time to talk through their interpretations and share meanings together.” We named our curriculum, Reel Communities: My City My Story.

Learning to tell a story

Because many of my high school students have difficulty telling a story from any style other than first-person narrative, Jon and I emphasized the importance of learning how to tell a story from multiple points of view. We started the unit by viewing The Danger of a Single Story, a TED Talk in which novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells how she found her authentic cultural voice. We wanted to empower students to disrupt narratives in mainstream media.

For instance, in a PSA produced on the Flint water crisis, students went far beyond the superficial story of pipes that needed replacing. They dug deeper, addressing uncomfortable questions such as, What if the same crisis took place in a wealthy area of Michigan instead? Would the timeline for repair be different?

Another PSA focused on the rights of the LGBTQIA community. In this project, the audio track was the highlight of the video. Student producers focused on audio by integrating four different narrators. Additionally, they used the sound of a school's dismissal bell to signal the narrator’s call to action.

Tough topics and surprising conversations

With greater confidence in their storytelling abilities, students moved onto documentaries. Several were specific to the black community, including Black-On-Black Crime, Gun Violence, and Driving While Black. In some instances, storytelling was more difficult than anticipated because the story involved their own painful experiences. Driving While Black elicited a wide range of discussion in students’ classrooms, and among our administration. As a result, our school resource officer (who happens to be white) is working with the video production students to create a series of videos on how to keep all parties safe during traffic stops.

While some of the videos were focused on tough issues, especially in a public school setting, most have resulted in positive discussions. At a time when discourse happens in short posts on social media, I believe Reel Communities: My City My Story successfully opened doors to communication on difficult topics from a high school student's perspective. If we can get students to discuss what's happening in their world and how it impacts their communities and schools, maybe we can transform apathy into engagement.

Kara Clayton is a media studies educator at Thurston High School in Michigan.

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

When educators think of technology, they most often think of digital tools—computers, iPhones, and the Internet, for example. Students need these technologies to learn, but they can also learn from technologies behind (or on top of) the school building and around the grounds. 

In this TILE SIG post, we invite you to meet some courageous teachers, students, and volunteers, who, through a desire to learn and serve their communities, transformed a single school into a thriving community of educational energy, cultural celebration, and purpose. Welcome to Maya Jaguar Center for Education.

These protagonists teach, study, and volunteer at Maya Jaguar—a rural school high in the mountains of Guatemala. Among the first technologies installed were solar panels that continue to power lights, internet connections, and computers. With the school lit and connected to the world via the internet, students can read, write, and create in ways they could not before. Many students come from villages without access to electricity. Moreover, the twin technologies of electrification and internet aid students in mastering Spanish, their second language, and the language of the school curriculum. (Most of the students speak an indigenous first language, Q’anjob’al, a Mayan dialect). Technology further allows the students to develop critical thinking skills while bringing the best practices of the world beyond northern Guatemala to their villages. 

Teachers assigned to bridge the world of school and the surrounding communities guide students in their internet searches to consult with agronomists in Guatemala and the United States to identify the most sustainable gardening practices. One project offers outreach to village schools and families to grow amaranth, a source of protein that is desperately needed in this region.  Because of the success of this program, Maya Jaguar Center staff and village mothers are considering a move forward to add peanuts, a high-protein crop, which is not grown in the region. It will supplement the nutrition initiatives already in place.

Although students reside in a rain forest at Maya Jaguar, potable water is hard to access. By building on local knowledge, eco-technologies, and the skill of faculty and students, the school now boasts a reliable rain catchment program that provides safe water to the campus. Because Maya Jaguar teachers and students have deep roots throughout the villages, the sustainable technologies of school gardens, solar energy, and other green or eco-friendly practices every step forward is multiplied ten-fold.  

Technology means tools, the implements that humans use to improve their lives and connect with other human beings. Though the tools of electrification, gardening, and access to potable water may seem fundamental, they are ultimately relevant to the literacies of life found in every aspect of reading the meaningful texts of the world. Texts may be words on a page, but they also include knowledge of how local resources may be used to best meet the fundamental needs of a population. Technology serves to help individuals critically evaluate the vast network of expertise that is available through digital environments beyond the community. It can also help build bridges that preserve indigenous cultures and helping village leaders and community members to look to a future that belongs to them.   

At schools where students face the challenges of healthy water and food supplies, Maya Jaguar’s teachers and students have found the right combination of new literacies, cultural traditions, and global citizenship.

Photos courtesy of The Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala Foundation.

Thomas DeVere Wolsey is an educational consultant who focuses on literacy and technology development at home and internationally.

 

Frances Dixon is the founder and president of Adopt-a-Village in Guatemala, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to education, nutrition, and agriculture for indigenous populations in Guatemala.

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