Literacy Now

While sitting and waiting for a plane recently, I heard an advertisement for a Microsoft laptop suggesting it was better than a Chromebook. Among other things, the advertiser pointed out that because it opens into Chrome’s browser when it starts up, a Chromebook has to use the Internet to be able to work. In addition, you cannot use outside software such as Photoshop or Microsoft Office on a Chromebook. However, I’ve heard others suggest that the Chrome browser has most of the capabilities one might need in a computer. Students in schools who have adopted Chromebooks, for example, can access an infinite number of online texts and interactive tools as well as a range of dynamic web based applications such as Google Docs and Google Earth.

Given these differences in opinions, I decided to investigate further to see firsthand how teachers feel about using Chromebooks in the classroom. I visited a second grade classroom to observe their use of Chromebooks and talked to the teacher to see how she was using them to build reading and writing skills in her curriculum.

The school I chose to observe in had received their Chromebooks from a grant the year before. Even though it was already December when I visited, the class had only been using them for a short time because there was quite a bit of set up involved by their school’s technical support team before they could be used in the classroom.

The teacher explained how Google Apps for Education had provided the school with a unique domain. This enabled them to safely store all of their e-mail and student work in its own part of the cloud. After connecting the Chromebooks to this domain, each student classroom was set up on the school’s domain with a class email address. Each student was also assigned a unique login to access the system so each student had his/her own private workspace.  

As I entered the classroom, all of the students were sitting at their desks with their Chromebooks in front of them, writing an acrostic poem about winter for their English assignment. Students were using Google Drive to work on a word processing document (Google Docs), and the teacher was using an add-on script called Doctopus to send assignment prompts to each student (see the how-to guide for more information). She was able to create one document and then send it out so that each of the students received their own copy named with their own name. The teacher also had access to each of their drives and could monitor what students were doing in Google Docs from her computer. Other management techniques to increase teacher efficiency with Chromebooks can be employed with a tool called Hapara.

While I was observing, the teacher was sitting in the back of the room helping some of her students. At the same time, she was keeping an eye on what was going on in the rest of the room. She had arranged the seats so that she could sit in the back of the room and see all of the screens. If she saw someone who needed a reminder or additional support, she could quickly type right into their Google Drive document rather than taking time away from the students she was working with. 

I also noticed that these second graders were applying a broad range of skills to their work. For example, they had learned how to efficiently navigate into their account and then to Google Drive to access their document. Although their typing was slow, they were also learning how to use a keyboard. Since the document saved automatically, there was no time lost in redoing documents because of common mistakes like a student forgetting to save his work or inadvertently saving over someone else’s document.

Outside of using Google Drive as a main source of productivity applications, Chromebooks start instantly when they are turned on, as opposed to a more traditional laptop operating system that keeps users waiting for a number of applications to start up in the background. Another significant benefit is that unlike most laptops, Chromebooks hold a charge for eight hours, so there is no need to recharge them during recess or lunch. This reduces the amount of time teachers need to spend managing laptop power issues, and allows more time for meaningful teaching. Because their data is stored in the cloud, several students can easily share one Chromebook and keep their work separate; they simply sign in with their own account and password to access their personal files.  Students can even design their own desktop and icon or logo for signing in. Of course, a necessity for using Chromebooks in school is a robust Internet connection since the Chrome browser is central to every activity. 

At the time, most of the programs that were used in this classroom were available online, as shown in their Chromebook Classroom List. There are useful teaching guides for Chromebooks, such as this one by Kathy Schrock. Google Apps also has an Apps Document and Support page that’s incredibly useful for teachers. However, a few specialty programs at the school would not work with the Chrome system. The STEAM teacher, for example, could not use the Chromebooks with her students because her Robotics software could not be installed on them.

Overall, after my visit to this classroom, my conclusion is that Chromebooks can be an excellent way to teach most things in the classroom. In time, the Chromebook will become even more useful as more specialty programs like Robotics are made available online and the Internet becomes quicker and more robust at schools. If a school has a weak Internet connection or if it is often down, Chromebooks are not an ideal solution for a classroom.

Janice Friesen is self-employed as a Technology Tutor. Her company, I’m not a Geek.com, provides hourly one on one or small group training to people who missed bits and pieces of technology use and need to learn for various reasons. She has a teaching credential and Masters in Educational Technology. She worked for many years in Elementary Schools with teachers and students.

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

In the fall of 2012, during my first semester as a middle school language arts teacher, I taught my classes as a multi-player game (MPG). At the start of the year, I invited my students into a world I'd created and dubbed Veritas, and I asked them to take part in an adventure that would weave together tales from our literature study and narratives of their own making. I had a mountain of research to support my instructional choices, but truth be told, standing before them on that first day, I had absolutely no idea if it would work.

p: Tony Dowler via photopin cc

Then they started asking questions.

“I live on this island,” said one eighth grader, pointing to a tiny circular land mass on the map of Veritas. “What's it called?”

“What's the mail system like? How'd we get invites to come train in the capital?” asked a seventh grader.

“My family is from those mountains up north. Do I ride a donkey or something?”

They may seem like simple questions, but they showed me something incredibly important. In asking about the most basic infrastructure, my students revealed that they were buying in to this world, choosing to suspend disbelief, and taking on my challenge to be heroes in an epic story of our making.

My answer to all their questions: “You live there. You tell me.”

In the days and weeks that followed, my students added many points to the map. They invented family bonds, developed my skeleton of a narrative into a rich history, inhabited the texts we studied, and took on active roles within them. They spoke out in defense of their personal interpretations, researched extensively, and wrote pages and pages to tell their own stories.

They became world builders and engaged in powerful literacy practices along the way.

Why Games?

Play, and specifically playing video games, has been a part of my learning process for as long as I can remember. I fondly recall hours spent munching numbers and travelling the Oregon Trail in my elementary school computer lab, and online games like World of Warcraft have made me rethink both how we teach and how we tell stories.

However, we don’t have to be hardcore gamers to incorporate gaming principles into classroom learning activities. We simply need to be willing to take a few lessons that games have to offer. Good games get teaching right in so many ways.

Games offer personal choice and individualized pacing. When we play a game, it might take me multiple tries to master a level or figure out a puzzle. That’s okay. On any given day, I might focus on different areas of gameplay than other players I know. That’s allowed. How can we build similar opportunities for students to work at their own pace and make decisions about how and when they’ll learn our course skills and content?

Some of the best games out there immerse us in their worlds and the tasks at hand because they allow us to decide who we are and how we’ll conduct ourselves. How often do our students go through the points-grabbing motions because they don’t own anything that takes place in the classroom? Allowing my students to make decisions about the world we created together and to build that world for themselves helped them to take ownership of everything aspect of our class learning. The level of agency offered by games and the opportunities for developing identity and voice can be incredibly powerful when leveraged for classroom learning.

Gaming experiences often support teaming opportunities and collaboration. We want students armed with the skills to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and tackle problems together. Ideally, the classroom is a tight-knit community of individuals bound together by a common purpose and similar beliefs about how to get the job done.

Good games nail it when it comes to assessment. Gamers get constant updates about how they’re doing, what their teammates or opponents are up to, and what steps to take to accomplish the next objective. Feedback beyond just a grade is crucial for motivating students to improve their skills.

In games, we stand in fire, die, and learn not to stand in fire again. We fail spectacularly when fighting a boss, research and confer with group members, alter strategy, and win. Learning happens as a result of those failures, and we are okay with failing in games, yet we so often fear failure in the classroom.

However, if we’re looking for mastery of skills, risk-taking, and creativity from our students, failure—followed by reflection and growth—has got to be an option.

Ways to Incorporate Games

When considering making games a part of classroom learning, I believe there are a variety of ways to go.

• Playing Games Designed Specifically for Education
• Engaging Students in a Multiplayer Class Game
• Utilizing Commercially Available Games
• Designing Games

For my initial foray into games for learning, transforming our class into an MPG offered the most opportunities for addressing my students’ literacy goals. This means that students developed their own personas, or avatars, and continuously imagined themselves as characters in a story that I initially developed. Class activities addressing content standards were designed as quests within that imagined world, and completing these quests earned students experience points which allowed their game characters to level up, advancing through the game’s narrative and class content and growing stronger in their abilities over time.

To cap off our school year, and to provide a final method for students to demonstrate skills mastery, we built a final project in which students became game designers themselves. They chose specific content standards from one or more of their other core classes and worked in teams to develop a game that demonstrated those standards. Using the Learning Games Network’s Game Design Tool Kit as our guide for this project and Google Drive for collaborative writing allowed us to address numerous language arts standards, as well.
 
Tips for Getting Started

If you are thinking about using games or gaming principles as a part of your students’ learning, consider the following:

It’s not all about points, badges, and achievements. While these features may be some of the most commonly discussed aspects of gamification, they don’t necessarily lead to greater engagement or more meaningful learning. 

Check out online communities for educators interested in gaming. The folks at 3D GameLab have created a platform for turning any course content into an online game. They’ve also developed a supportive community of educators interested in learning more about the intersection of games and learning and offer both free and paid accounts, as well as a variety of teacher camps for learning more about gaming and other digital learning topics. Additionally, the Games MOOC offers an open online course designed to help participants explore how to use games for learning, and Twitter hashtags like #gbl and #gblchat provide access to ongoing conversations about similar topics.

Start small. My students and I dove immediately into the deep end of gaming implementation and got to learn from many mistakes along the way. Consider applying gaming principles to a single project or unit of study, then build from there.

Communicate with administrators, parents, and students about the learning goals attached to gamified activities. Though a class or project designed with gaming principles in mind may include many of the same learning activities as a more traditional class, those activities may look quite different. Help students to articulate that learning when it is different from what they have experienced in other classes, and help administrators and parents to understand that powerful learning is taking place via class work that looks like play.

Remember one of the best lessons that games have to offer: Be brave. If you’re willing to take risks and learn from failures, you just might achieve something epic.

Laren Hammonds teaches 8^th grade language arts at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her interests include media literacy, cross-curricular collaboration, and the design of learning spaces. Connect with her on Twitter where she goes by @_clayr_, or read more at her blog, Game to Learn.

THE CART THAT CARRIED MARTIN (Charlesbridge, 2013)
Written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Don Tate
Pre-K through Grade 4 

THE CART THAT CARRIED MARTIN is an easy to understand look at the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.  The story follows the funeral processions of King that happened in an unusual way. A man of great principles and convictions had a humble beginning and his funeral procession mirrored this fact. The story begins simply with a used cart that is for sale. The owner can never be found so the men wanting to purchase it for King’s funeral procession borrow it to return it. They fix it up, paint it, and use it to carry King’s body.

Each item on the cart had a very specific meaning. They painted it green for grass after a rain because Martin liked that. The mules chosen symbolized the fact that he was “ordinary” and were a symbol of freedom for slaves. As the cart was drawn through crowds, history is recorded in the text and illustrations showing the large outpouring of people who attended his funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church and the procession with the cart through Atlanta and to Morehouse College.

The crowds overwhelmed the college quad and a second memorial service was held. The illustrations are soft and inviting and pull the reader into the greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the great legacy left behind. The coffin was then transferred to a hearse to be taken to the cemetery. The mules were set back out to pasture and the wagon returned, to be later placed in the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. The cart that was old and unwanted became a holder of greatness.

This book can be used as a simple, yet moving, introduction to the life of King and his continued legacy that “could not be kept in a coffin.”

Cross-curricular connections: Math, Art, Social Studies, English

Ideas for Classroom Use: 

Route Mapping

The purpose of this activity is to use map and routing skills to determine the best ways to travel and study distances. This activity incorporates math skills into reading and history.

Use old road maps or an atlas and find the route the cart could have taken when King’s funeral happened. Could he still take the same route today? What is the difference in how he was travelling for today’s route? Be sure to include stops at the church, the capital, and Morehouse College and then on to the cemetery. How many miles, feet, inches, etc. would the mules have traveled? How many miles did the hearse travel? Draw a new route and calculate the distance for King to travel today to be seen by a maximum amount of people.

Finding Greatness

The purpose of this activity is to expand on the influence King had in American history and culture. Adjust the story to fit the age of children in the classroom for their best grasp of the material. Find books that tell about how King changed the culture of America and how he still affects life today.

After reading these stories, have students write a “dream” that they may have about how America can be stronger and better in the future. Have younger students dictate their story and illustrate what changes they would make for America. Share these in large groups or in classroom-made books to build exposure to print, and story processes.

Everyone but you...

The purpose of this activity is to encourage students to think about the difference that King made in America. Have students of certain color shirts only stand at the back of the line for a day, children with brown hair cannot use the water fountain, etc.  Discuss in large or small groups how that exclusion makes the children feel, and how things should happen instead.

After this discussion, have students write a list of conduct rules to help everyone feel included and post it in the classroom.

Additional Resources and Activities:

Interactive Maps of Atlanta
This site has several interactive maps of the Atlanta area that students can look at to determine routes and distances. The current transportation available in Atlanta is linked on this page as well.

Martin Luther King Jr.
This video created by Brain Pop gives a quick overview of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life. The video discusses the topics King worked to make changes for, his life, and his long term reach. The page includes links to famous quotes, laws that have changed based on his contribution to America, and many other items. A quick quiz for understanding is included on the video.

Eve Bunting Author Study
This page at ReadWriteThink.org is an overview of Eve Bunting’s work and biography. The page includes links to external sites giving more information including a link to Scholastic’s author study page for kids.

Kathy Prater is a Reading Specialist who works with students with dyslexia, an Adjunct Professor at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi, and a full time pre-kindergarten teacher at Starkville Academy in Starkville, Mississippi. Her passions include reading, writing, tending her flock of chickens, and helping students at all levels to find motivation for lifelong reading and learning. She believes that every child can become a successful reader if given the right tools and encouragement. 

As with most folks, when the New Year strikes I reach down deep, look into my heart and make commitments to the twelve months ahead that I hope won’t implode by Martin Luther King Day.

p: thomasstache via photopin cc

This year is no different. And being that we are now in Annum Comminus Summa (that’s Latin for Year of Common Core, btw…or so says Google Translate), here’s a list of a few things I hope to gain mastery over before the clock strikes twelve ending the twelve months which will comprise the year 2014.

1. I resolve to deepen and expand my ability to deliver non-fiction content to learners of all stripes. Of course this will mean I am going to need to check my sources, do a ton of research, carefully select grade appropriate texts and try to harmonize them with both cross-disciplinary aims as well as within intertextual, multi-media, appropriately scaffolded and differentiated units. But it’s still early in the year so my faith is strong that I will be up to the challenge. (At least more up to it than I am when it comes to eliminating my egregious need to soothe myself during trying times with chocolate.)

2. I resolve to remain steadfastly committed to literature. Fiction still matters a GREAT deal. Classic books, YA fiction, stories of all types, and even though I can already foresee ill-informed checklist checkers sweating me for not chronically pimping non-fiction, as research shows (and as my teacher’s heart/mind knows), the benefits of reading fiction for young minds is irrefutable and irreplaceable.

3. I resolve to help develop strong, competent writers. Yes, Common Core is placing an unprecedented premium on writing, but as a thoughtful educator I have always felt that our schools have needed to place much more oomph on a student’s ability to write well (and much less oomph on a kid’s ability to choose A, B, C, or D in order to get credit for knowing things).
   
   By MLK Day my diet might already be shot (but that’s not due to willpower; biology has cursed me with a scientifically provable chemical infatuation with chocolate) and might already be on life support (I did walk to the fridge for the chocolate brownies, after all, as opposed to simply asking someone else to go get it for me, but the caloric expenditure probably didn’t balance out the caloric intake) yet doubling down on building better writers in 2014 is one that I believe has a lot of gas in the tank.

Okay, so I have three goodies. However, it’s time for the million dollar New Year question: Do I dare expand the list? To add more things builds more pressure on me. After all, I can swear off chocolate and vow to exercise, but if I take on meditation, philanthropy, learning Chinese and joining a crochet club (y’all do know how hard the crochet circuit parties, right?) then I am setting myself up for trouble.

Yet, when I look at the Common Core I know I also really need to deepen and expand my skills in areas such as:

• Amplifying Text Complexity for Low Achieving Readers
• The World of Essential Questions
• Building Authentic Student Engagement
• Closing the Close Reading Gap
• Providing Bulletproof Textual Evidence
• Elevating Visual Literacy
• Speaking and Listening (ten times over)
• Refining Argumentation and Rhetoric

Gulp…it’s a lot to tackle. And that’s not even all of it by any stretch. But yes I do. I will go for it.

Why? Because while I know obscene amounts of chocolate are bad for me I also know owning a wide variety of skillsets in the world of literacy instruction is good for me.

Thank goodness Annum Comminus Summa is also going to be the year of Annum Lorem Ipsum Auxilium, the year of intense professional development.

Alan Lawrence Sitomer is a California Teacher of the Year award winner and the founder of The Writer’s Success Academy. In addition to having been an inner-city high school English teacher and former professor in the Graduate School Of Education at Loyola Marymount University, Mr. Sitomer is a nationally renowned keynote speaker who specializes in engaging underperforming students. To date, Mr. Sitomer has authored 16 books with works ranging from hard-hitting YA novels like HOMEBOYZ, THE HOOPSTER and HIP-HOP HIGH SCHOOL to humorous and warm children’s picture books such as DADDIES DO IT DIFFERENT. Alan has two new books hitting the shelves in spring 2014: CAGED WARRIOR, a gritty tale about the underground world of teen mixed martial arts fighting, and DADDY AND THE ZIGZAGGING BEDTIME STORY, the next in his series of beloved children's picture books.