Literacy Now

Recently there’s been a renewed emphasis on media literacy education, especially in the United States. This revival is critical as a 2017 Common Sense Media survey found that 40% of students said they preferred to get their news from social media. Sixty percent of those students cited Facebook or Twitter as their preferred source for news. This structure may be problematic as research suggests that students of all ages do not actively scrutinize the content that comes across their social media feeds.

Sponsored content is often mistaken for legitimate news while research-based infographics from advocacy organizations are taken at simply face value. Although newsfeeds may appear chronological or unbiased to students, they are actually the result of algorithms that are carefully designed to share what keeps people clicking, regardless of the quality or the accuracy of the source or content. Given the growth of access and interest in social media, students need heuristics to navigate the new media landscape.

In school contexts, educators will often provide students with tools like the WWWDOT Framework or the CRAAP test to aid them in their evaluation of web texts. However, these academic processes do not always transfer to informal learning contexts. Additionally, as Mike Caulfield, the inaugural civic fellow for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities' American Democracy Project Digital Polarization Initiative, points out, research from the Stanford History Education Group suggests that applying these frameworks may not work as well as desired. In some instances, web designers have adjusted their layouts or web addresses to master these “tests.” In others, the conflicting answers to the extensive questions in these protocols results in an inability draw a definitive conclusion.

Given the negative consequences resulting from a poorly informed citizenry, we need alternative approaches that can help expedite the fact-checking process. Thankfully, Caulfield offers some practices to help mitigate these challenges which he calls “Four Moves and a Habit”:

• Check for previous work: Often, trusted sites—including news sites or fact-checking sites like Politifact—have already investigated this claim and documented evidence. It’s important to note to students that they do not have to agree with the author’s conclusions, but at least they’ll get a better sense of the landscape.
• Go upstream to the source: Many of the links on social media are secondary sources of information with an embedded link to the primary source. A good practice is to teach students to locate and read the original source before drawing any conclusions.
• Read laterally: If the “upstream source” seems suspect, open one or several other browser tabs to conduct secondary searches to see what other sources say about the topic and the source providing the content. Caulfield suggests that the knowledge isn’t in one source, but rather in the collective network of sources.
• Circle back: Sometimes reading laterally disproves the original source or provides conflicting information on the claims. In other instances, reading laterally can produce more questions than when you begin. If that’s the case, students should try to reframe the claim and circle back to start a new search based upon the new information.

Caulfield’s final piece of advice is to develop the habit of checking one's emotions. Web content that sparks a strong reaction is unlikely to receive much scrutiny as it either validates existing beliefs or causes us to automatically reject it. We’re also more likely to click and/or share these types of sources, which in turn causes them to appear on the news feeds of our connections. By helping students to pause when they read these types of headlines, we can lower the likelihood that they and others will become misinformed.

In addition to posting these four moves, Caulfield has a host of social media posts and thinking prompts for teachers and students to explore on his blog, Four Moves. His free e-book, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers provides further details on the moves. Regardless of whether educators use the links provided here or a different set of resources, it’s critical that we help students uncover strategies to enhance their media and information literacies for real-world contexts. The future of our democracy depends upon it.

David Quinn is the director of technology integration for the Mendon–Upton Regional School District in Massachusetts. You can connect with him on Twitter @EduQuinn.

Our experiences as educators in study abroad programs have led us to recognize and appreciate the vast and beautiful array of different cultural traditions, experiences, languages, and perspectives. Likewise, the shifting sociopolitical climate playing out across international news outlets and social media has prompted us to look beyond our own perspectives and beliefs and contemplate the importance of developing global thinking and dispositions in our students. We wondered, what does it mean to be globally competent and how do we develop those competencies in ourselves and our students? As technology advocates, we considered how we might harness digital tools and develop media literacy skills to help students understand, investigate, and connect with the world beyond their classroom.

For years, scholars, education advocates, and the National Education Association have stated the importance of fostering global citizens who understand the world around them and are prepared to engage responsibly in problems of international significance. According to the Partnership for 21^st Century Learning (P21), “global competence is critical for innovation” and students need to develop the “sensibilities” for advancing solutions that will impact later generations. One way this can be accomplished is through intentional teaching practices with digital and media literacies. Improvements in digital innovations, combined with increased access to connected devices and tools have improved the possibility of engaging with people and places beyond our immediate borders. As stated in a recent Literacy Daily blog post, educators need to “rethink their teaching approaches” and that includes considering and promoting new ways of connecting, collaborating, thinking, and creating beyond the classroom.   

Since technology can be a powerful tool for cultivating global perspectives, we offer a few ideas about how we imagine teachers “rethinking” their classroom practices, according the Global-Ready Teacher Competency Indicators. Although we have investigated other frameworks, we found the teacher expertise framework for developing 21st century skills (P21) to be a useful tool for thinking about the teacher’s role and responsibility for creating environments and utilizing classroom practices that develop global awareness and cultural understanding.

Using innovative communicative technologies to ensure global collaborations with other classrooms

Communication technologies are rapidly evolving and a number of digital platforms are geared toward connecting students globally and encouraging them to collaborate in new ways. A current tool available for free to classroom teachers is Flipgrid. This resource allows teachers to instantly connect asynchronously with classrooms around the world to understand, investigate, and discuss global issues. For example, Global Classrooms used the Flipgrid Connections platform to facilitate cross-cultural conversations on Global Collaboration Day 2017. Topics ranged from “What do you see when you first walk out of your house?” to “How can you make a difference in your community?.” These conversations are still growing as children continue to amplify their voice and investigate the world.

Other video platforms, such as Skype, also accomplish this goal. Skype offers a plethora of virtual field trips and guest speakers that open opportunities for students to explore the far reaches of the world and ask experts questions about global issues. As an example, classrooms can schedule to virtually meet with Katie Petrole, a Steinmetz Family Foundation Museum Fellow in Ancient Corinth, Greece to learn more about ancient Greek civilization and artifacts. Aside from video platforms, teachers can also connect their students through virtual global pen pals with ePals. ePals takes the work out of finding ways to connect and collaborate with international classrooms and provides a private workspace for students to use once they are connected.

Engage in critical and complex discussions about cultural representations in print and digital media

Part of encouraging global awareness and cultural understanding is through the development of critical media literacy skills. This can occur when teachers invite “learners to engage in critical and complex discussions about cultural representations in print and digital media.” Examples include website evaluation for imagery and symbolism as well as literature analysis. Assistant principal Adam Schoenbart created a lesson plan in which his students consider not only the graphic novel Maus, but also concepts of visual storytelling as they create digital products to analyze the multimodal text.

For younger students, Meg Jones envisioned a lesson in which students critically analyze The Lorax by Dr. Seuss and expand their understanding of global environmental impacts through a range of digital texts and media. In order to access student thinking and create a space for continued dialogue, we recommend screen annotation tools. Screencastify is a free Google Chrome add-on that enables students to record their screen, annotate over multimedia, and narrate analysis of media content. Teachers can listen to and better understand student thinking in processes of analysis and evaluation.

These ideas not only support the two indicators listed, but also cover a broad scope of global competencies and teacher indicators on the P21 document. Although brief, the examples underscore the need for teachers to seek professional growth opportunities in order to understand how to best integrate digital tools and media in order to support and foster global competencies in the classroom.

Stephanie Branson is a PhD candidate at the University of South Florida, pursuing literacy studies and elementary education with a special focus on digital literacies and teacher development. She is an avid traveler and literacy coach for the Cambridge Schools Experience. Connect with her on Twitter @blusksyb.

Megan Jones is a technology integration coach in Citrus County, Florida, supporting in-service teachers with digital literacies and classroom technology integration. She is a doctoral student in Literacy Studies at the University of South Florida and is also currently enrolled in the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy. Meg is also a literacy and technology coach for the Cambridge Schools Experience. Follow Meg on Twitter @MrsMJ1218.

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

Many years ago, I sat down with a fourth-grade student to review one of her papers. We discussed the comments and suggestions I had written and established shared goals. At the end of the conference, I asked her if she had any questions, to which she responded, “You tell me what you do, but will I be able to do it?” The content of this blog post reminds me of my former student’s question. 

Both in research and in practice, “we” (i.e., federal and local policymakers and researchers) “tell” educators, parents, and others about the importance of teaching and learning in the 21st century and about developing our students’ abilities to comprehend, communicate, and evaluate information in digital forms. On the other hand, it appears that what we know about the need to develop students’ 21st-century literacy skills conflicts with the realities of everyday teaching and learning and other literacy-related and educational goals.

Top three requests related to digital literacy

Over the years, I have been involved in school-based professional development, collaborative projects between my university and school districts, and funded projects that have focused on the language and literacy needs of teachers and students across grade-levels and content areas. I have conducted several workshops on digital literacy, disciplinary literacy, and online reading comprehension, among others.

These are the top three requests (related to digital literacy) I hear from teachers:

• Digital content they can incorporate into their curricula for differentiated instruction purposes
• Instructional ideas about how to develop students’ digital literacy without sacrificing content
• Guidance on how to communicate to their principals, and to others who evaluate them, the role of digital literacies in supporting students’ overall literacy, content knowledge, and skills

Digital literacy is more “hot” than “important”

These situated teacher needs support ILA’s 2018 What’s Hot in Literacy survey findings, which rank Digital Literacy No. 1 among all hot topics but No. 13 in terms of importance. Respondents expressed concern that digital literacy is being presented as a quick fix for complex teaching and learning issues and that it is “crowding out a focus on basic foundational literacy skills.”

Although I both recognize and understand the challenges of adopting a 21st-century instructional and pedagogical digital literacies framework, I also wonder what would happen if digital literacies were conceptualized as a common “thread” that both supports and develops within each one of the top five important literacy topics ranked in the findings: Early Literacy, Equity in Literacy Education, Teacher Preparation, Strategies for Differentiating Instruction, and Access to Books and Content.

Recommendations

The 21st-century literacy skills students need to develop are far greater than the sum of their parts; literacy is given meaning by the cultural discourses, practices, and contexts in which it is surrounded. Young readers need to develop their reading and literacy skills using print and digital texts in ways that are developmentally appropriate. In my view, the reported disconnect between digital literacy’s trendiness and importance also highlights the need for more supports that specialized literacy professionals and digital literacy researchers can provide to teachers and parents about the role of digital literacy during the early literacy, intermediate, and adolescent years.

For example, when I teach my students how to locate, read, comprehend, and evaluate information about the Great Migration movement from the History Channel and how to analyze primary sources from the National Archives, I am accessing content while demonstrating digital literacy knowledge and skills. I spend time over the course of the year modeling, providing feedback, and creating opportunities for my students to collaborate with peers, discuss, and apply what they learn in my classroom in a variety of learning spaces.

I also use a variety of digital and print texts and resources (e.g., The Great Migration: An American Story by Jacob Lawrence (1993); This is the Rope: A Story from the Great Migration by Jacqueline Woodson (2013); and relevant Newsela articles—e.g., “Jim Crow and The Great Migration” and “Songs of African-American Migration were Influential Across the Land.” Furthermore, I differentiate my instruction, the texts, and the supports I provide to help all students construct meaning.

Digital literacy is neither a quick remedy for the complex demands of literacy teaching and learning nor a substitute for the expert classroom teacher. In closing, I choose to view the results of ILA’s 2018 What’s Hot in Literacy Report as a call for new, teacher-centered, collaborative, relevant, and strategic discussions among specialized literacy professionals, K–12 educators, researchers, and teacher educators.

Vicky Zygouris-Coe is a professor of reading education at the University of Central Florida. 
 
This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

For educators trained in traditional literacy, the idea of becoming proficient in—and teaching—digital literacy might be overwhelming. When I propose teaching coding to my fellow educators, the common reaction is to assume that they must have a science or mathematics background. The misconception makes sense when schools continue to teach coding as an elective and to emphasize its importance to only those interested in computers.

The past decade has given rise to a campaign to teach coding as a fundamental literacy in all schools. Some might see the movement as part of a political or cultural resurgence from the previous decades. In the late 1950s and early 1980s, many feared that the United States was losing its edge in business and scientific achievements. Educators responded with a renewed emphasis for teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Indeed, STEM and the addition of the arts (STEAM), are still perceived as a critical pathway to college and career readiness. I have spoken with literacy colleagues who believe STEAM is trend that draws attention away from core instruction in literacy.

As a longtime educator of secondary literacy students, I understand this concern. There are few universal rules or grammar to the various modes of digital content. Writing, for instance, is guided by syntax, formatting, and style. We can examine text with accepted standards whereas digital grammar is still evolving. Instead, we have to rely on research in other fields.

I challenged myself to develop a digital literacy curriculum where students produced projects focused on their interests. My goal was to focus on information and media literacy with some elements of digital production. In developing the digital literacy curriculum, I had to borrow ideas from the fields of computer science, engineering, and business. During this time, I encountered the vast untapped resource of coding for experiential learning.

Today’s generation has unlimited access to videos, apps, and readily available content. Just two decades earlier, curating information required significantly more time and skill. Now our broadband access and mobile devices expedite these processes with greater ease.

This is the critical point of digital literacy: learners have to engage in the creation of content in order to fully comprehend its messaging. My students practiced decoding through the process of coding, learned syntax as a new vocabulary, and became fluent in a global language of programming. As an educator, the exhilaration of observing students bring creativity to problem-solving is empowering. Students, families, and fellow educators want to share in the excitement of innovation.

The expectations placed on technology have not kept pace with our level of understanding. Educators can bridge this gap by introducing coding. Students who become knowledgeable in the design process learn the value of understanding a problem, researching effective practices, and prototyping methods for achieving greater success. I have seen firsthand how this models literacy instruction. The gratification is unparalleled when a learner breaks the code needed to move the process forward.

Anyone can start coding without a background in computers. Websites such as code.org provide outstanding resources, lesson plans, and projects for all ages and skill levels.

Moreover, it is encouraging to see the interdisciplinary connections that can be made; often I see an increase in motivation among teachers and students after engaging in coding. Many of my colleagues were willing to engage their students in coding because they realized how it supported core instruction and produced higher-order thinking. The products could be distributed to families and communities to offer a showcase of project-based learning at its best.

If you’re not yet convinced to integrate coding into your curriculum, I hope you might at least consider the merits of a digital literacy framework that includes coding as an essential learning process. Seek the support of collaborator and see what can be created. You might find that coding improves not only what you have taught, but also what you have learned. It’s not glamorous or mysterious; coding is just another way to empower ourselves in the digital age.

Mark Davis is a former reading specialist and current middle school computer technology educator. He is a doctoral candidate in the joint Ph.D. in Education program at the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College and holds a graduate certificate in digital literacy. You can find him on Twitter @watermarkedu.

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

Students live in a world saturated with media, influencing how they consume and produce information and develop the social skills and cultural competencies they need to engage in conversations about democratic and social issues. To fully embrace civic participation, students need to be able to access, analyze, and evaluate digital media, as well as effectively communicate their beliefs and ideas using digital media, according to The Alliance for a Media Literate America. This requires students to become both critically and media literate, so they use their resources to foster “social communication and change.” When students are empowered to be producers of digital media, they learn to “create their own messages that can challenge media texts and narratives.” 

Creating digital documentary shorts

To explore instructional projects that might foster students’ critical media literacies, we worked with a high school social studies teacher and his class as they produced digital documentary shorts, or 8–10-minute videos that present research findings on a chosen social issue. The goal of digital documentary shorts is to help students make learning visible, communicate their findings, and take informed action as citizens. Here are the steps they followed:

• Students selected a contemporary social issue. Topics included: kneeling for the National Anthem, Examining the word “feminism,” the border wall, cultural appropriation, police brutality, LGBTQ rights, terrorism, bullying, healthcare, and immigration.
• Students worked individually and in pairs to develop a research focus and at least one research question.
• Students researched their issues and found evidence to support their ideas. This included textual evidence from digital media (e.g. videos and pictures), interviews with other students and community members, and print sources.
• Students developed storyboards, which is a way to graphically display images in a sequence so students can visualize an animation or video.
• Students used Windows Movie Maker software to create their digital shorts. We used Windows Movie Maker because it was on the computers in the school media lab, however, iMovie, Animoto, Prezi, and Powerpoint are all tools that could be used for students to produce their digital documentary shorts.

Benefits

In follow-up interviews, the students expressed some of the benefits of participating in this project. Students explained that selecting their own topic of interest gave them the opportunity to examine their positions on the topic in an in-depth manner. They had to wrestle with their personal beliefs as well as beliefs held by others. They recognized that their identities were incorporated into aspects of the project and they expressed how using media to produce digital documentary shorts could be considered a form of activism. Students also discussed the intentional decisions they used to inform and persuade their audience. They discussed how they used popular media images, music, and text as evidence and the decisions they had to make so that their evidence best represented their knowledge, beliefs, and ideas about their particular topic.

This project has helped us recognize the benefits of using digital documentary shorts to teach students to be critically and media literate. We see this assignment as a gateway into conversations about social issues, students’ positions and identities tied to contemporary social issues, and how digital media projection can be used to empower youth’s voices.

Kristine E. Pytash is an associate professor in Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies at Kent State University where she co-directs the Integrated Language Arts program.

Todd S. Hawley is an associate professor of Social Studies Teacher Education and the coordinator of the Curriculum and Instruction Program at Kent State University.

Kate Morgan is a doctoral student in the Curriculum and Instruction program at Kent State University.



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