Literacy Now

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).

Online attendance registers. Email messages. YouTube videos. Cloud storage interfaces. Social media feeds.

For digitally connected educators and students in schools with 1:1 device programs, this litany of screen-based daily tasks will be all too familiar. Any learning strategy that taps into the four C's of 21st-century learning while also enabling learners some screen-free time is highly enticing. Enter “sketchnoting," or purposeful doodling.

In her 2011 TED Talk, Doodlers, Unite!, Sunni Brown recasts the humble doodler from a time-wasting dreamer to a focused and reflective learner.  Brown argues that of the four ways that learners take in information—visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic—deliberate doodling engages all modalities simultaneously, leading to a deeper understanding of new information. Given the propensity of some students to doodle rather than to write notes, especially during direct instruction, the idea that this behavior can be harnessed to leverage, rather than to distract from, learning is most welcome. According to a 2014 study in Psychological Science, students who take notes by hand are more likely to develop greater conceptual understanding and retention of new information than students who take notes using a laptop.

Fortunately, there exists a community of educators who have long known the power of representing learning through sketchnoting, visual note-taking, and graphic recording. Sylvia Duckworth, Mike Rohdes, and Doug Neill have all published books, websites, videos, and online courses for educators to help students use drawing and illustration to demonstrate understanding.

Recently I attended an EdTechTeam Singapore Summit Featuring Google for Education, where Sylvia Duckworth was a featured presenter. She encouraged the delegates to see the value in sketchnoting to help students to “retain information, increase focus and engage in creative thinking.” As I sketched and doodled my way through the two-hour session, I planned this list of classroom activities to try with students in my English class:

• Use only visuals to represent the protagonist’s transformation in a well-known work of literary fiction
• Transpose a TED Talk into a visual sketchnote poster
• Annotate readings or book margins with visual notes
• Collaborate to create class set of sketch-quotes from our set texts to be displayed in the classroom or on our class website.
• Create a single frame “mini narrative” in the style of illustrator Mari Andrew

In addition to these energizing classroom ideas, one of the best takeaways from the summit with Sylvia Duckworth was a spiral-bound A5 sized notebook. Written on the back and front cover of was an explicit, and highly confusing, warning: “Do not microwave this notebook.”

All summit attendees had been given a Rocketbook, which is a “cloud connected intelligent notebook.” The bottom of each page in a Rocketbook contains seven symbols which, when coupled with a free smartphone app, can be synced to a range of online locations. Users write or draw their notes on the paper, tick the symbol that represents the synced destination (email, Google Drive, Evernote, Dropbox, social media, etc.), and scan the page with their phone. The image is then cropped, enhanced, and "blasted" to its final location where it can be manipulated, stored, or shared with others. I had been issued the single-use version, Rocketbook One—not to be confused with the multi-use Rocketbook Wave, which enables users to erase the pages of the notebook using a cup of water and...a microwave oven!

This ingenious notebook is the perfect tool for anyone who wants to experiment with sketchnoting and share their work with a learning community. Rocketbook-ers enjoy screen-free time while creating their sketchnotes, then instantly store and share their finished products online in any number of digital forums.

Sketchnoting for school students with Rocketbook?  Blast off!

Nicole Timbrell is the head of digital learning and Australian curriculum coordinator in the Secondary School at the Australian International School Singapore, where she also teaches English. Formerly, Nicole was a graduate student and a research assistant at the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education.

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

“Thank you for teaching us to find ourselves through poetry.”

One of my students made this comment at the end of the semester I spent teaching autobiographical poetry in Vietnam as a Fulbright Distinguished Teacher. One of my goals was to increase students’ global competence.

Finding your voice in another language

Over several months, I taught middle school, high school, and college students how to write poems about themselves, using templates such as “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon and “Fourths of Me” by Betsy Franco. All were native Vietnamese speakers, with varying levels of English proficiency. Few of the students had ever written a poem before.

Although many students struggled to find the words in English, they were eager to get their ideas on paper. I was struck by the small details of their lives, especially the details that reminded me of my students in Connecticut, a half a world away. Pop culture (especially Korean pop bands), love, pressure from parents, stress from too much homework, challenging stereotypes, and understanding one’s place in the world were all popular themes throughout the poems. Here are a few notable excerpts:

I am from my mother
From love and sweetness
I am from the colorful kite in the sky
I am from the sunshine around the sunflowers giving me inspiration
From my countryside where I run to my horizon
Lying on the grass and feeling my heart
But at that moment
I am from a boy who I always think of
From his eyes when we meet
Oh my boy! Please understand me and feel my soul.

(Trang, “I Am From”)

one fifth of me
is standing on the ledge of a rooftop
wondering if today's a good day to die

one fifth of me
is sitting on a tree
yelling out me! me! me!

one fifth of me
is doing espionage in Europe
moonlighting for the Commies

(Claire Daring, “Fifths of Finch”)

My mom makes me every meal
My dad drives to dig for every “dong”
My sister is seeking love from the other side
My family is forced to find what is needed for our future

(Thang, “Frustration”)

Connecting across cultures

My students hesitantly submitted poems to the website I created. They wondered if their English was good enough, if they had anything important to say, if anyone cared. There were shouts of joy when I showed them that visitors from faraway places such as the United States, Australia, and Palestinian territories had left comments for them. At that moment, the students realized the power of their words and felt a connection to the outside world. And the students who read and commented on their poems began to understand that Vietnam is more than a war.

Today there are nearly 200 poems from students in four countries on the website. Visitors from 45 countries have read poems and written over 500 comments.  And more poems are being submitted.

I am a general who loves peace.
I fight for peace, to save my Karen people.
I hear the Karen people need freedom to be free.
I dream for my people and my country.
I am a general who loves peace.

(Saw Char, “I Am”)

The power of poetry and technology combined can help students form a deeper understanding of people from around the world on their journey to becoming globally competent citizens.  

Tim Flanagan is a sixth- and seventh-grade language arts and social studies teacher at Pawcatuck Middle School in Stonington, Connecticut. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter. Teachers can access a complete Where I’m From Curriculum Guide online with poetry lessons, model poems and directions for how to submit student poems to the website.

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

My ongoing research into young people’s online writing practices, particularly their fanfiction writing, has led me to encourage parents and teachers to celebrate and facilitate such pursuits, rather than to fear or block them. My enthusiasm and advocacy to help adults see the literacy potential of online writing communities has been echoed by other researchers, including Mimi Ito, who recognizes the need to work against the perception that youth participation in online spaces has no value.

While I remain convinced that online writing communities, such as FanFiction.net and Figment.com, provide youth with access to passionate and responsive audiences for their writing, a recent conversation at the Digital Media & Learning Conference 2017 has me thinking about privacy with renewed interest. After all, we live in a time when there’s no shortage of alarming reports of data breaches that have adults scrambling to protect their personal and financial information.

Notions of privacy in online communities and social networks are complicated indeed, as sharing information and making connections with others remain the central practices in these spaces. To add to the already abundant advice about the importance of teaching young people about digital citizenship or good digital hygiene, I offer these two specific actions to take when considering whether or not to recommend that youth participate in a particular digital space.

Read the terms of service: While many of us never bother to read the terms of service when we sign up on a website, these documents offer valuable insights into how protected youth are (or are not) when they post online. Before connecting your students to an online platform, review the site’s terms of service documentation to discover what types of data are collected and how that data are used. In particular, pay attention to whether the site collects personally identifiable information, and, if so, whether or not they sell that data to third parties as a matter of practice.

Rely on expert evaluations: Interpreting the legalese of terms of service documentation can be challenging. Thankfully, Common Sense Education’s Privacy Initiative does the difficult interpretation work for parents and teachers. Through their growing database of privacy evaluations, Common Sense rates websites, apps, and other educational technologies along dimensions of safety, privacy, security, and compliance. The resulting evaluations, such as this example, help adults make informed decisions about the potential privacy implications of youth participation in a variety of digital spaces.  

As our literacy practices become increasingly digital and networked, concerns about whether and how to protect one’s privacy will remain important topics for policy and practice. It is my hope that literacy teachers can make use of these recommendations as they include privacy considerations as an important factor when deciding how best to integrate digital spaces into their instruction. 

Jayne C. Lammers is an associate professor and director of the secondary English teacher preparation program at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education. She can also be reached on Twitter.

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

Have you heard of the popular trend that’s taking K–12 classrooms and faculty meetings by storm?  Breakout EDU is a collaborative “immersive learning games platform” where students are faced with challenges that unlock combinations needed to open the Breakout EDU box. In addition, there is a competitive beat the clock component that keeps students (and faculty) motivated. Challenges are engaging and interactive—like breaking into, rather than out of, an escape room. I haven’t met anyone that I have shared the activity with who hasn’t enjoyed it, including adults.  

Games range from early elementary to high school and in many cases, are suitable for higher education students.  My graduate education students love the excitement of completing the Breakout EDU games and collaborating, communicating, critical thinking, and creative problem solving. Opening a variety of locks on the Breakout EDU box leads to a gratifying experience and is enhanced by holding one of the “We Broke Out” or “We Rock!” signs in front of the stopped timer.  I love helping my students explore their curiosity of children’s literature while working in engaging and active ways. 

Currently, one of the games being spotlighted is The Dot, based on author Peter H. Reynolds' book. The Above and Beyond video representation of the book is used to help students learn about the Partnership for 21st Century Learning’s (P21) four Cs of 21st century learning: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. When I teach this lesson with my teacher candidates, we discuss the importance of what we refer to as the “fifth C:” curiosity, the spark that makes the learning personally meaningful and self-motivating. 

Recently, I came across an infographic poster on Twitter, created by “sketchnoter” Julie Woodard, titled “The 7 Cs of an Innovative Environment.” This poster builds on P21’s framework to include curiosity, cultural sensitivity, and community—all skills important for maintaining a healthy classroom environment. In addition, these skills support STEM and STEAM initiatives.

There are many games in the areas of seasonal fun, computer science, art, math, social studies, science as well as mysteries and social skill development. Create an account and explore the possibilities. Then “Break Out” for some engaging and highly interactive collaborative game excitement that develops life skills needed in and out of the classroom!

Mary Beth Scumaci is a clinical associate professor and technology coordinator with the Department of Education at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY. She designs and instructs technology and online courses in addition to facilitating technology trainings for students, faculty, and staff.

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