Literacy Now

Richard Simmons was ubiquitous on television in the 1980s and 1990s. His Sweatin’ to the Oldies videos and weight-loss products sold millions. In the past decade, talk show hosts continued to welcome his exuberant and inexhaustible energy. Then, in 2013, he quietly disappeared from the limelight and chose to cut off communication with the public.

Dan Taberski created the Missing Richard Simmons podcast chronicling the genuine stories of Richard’s positive impact on others and wondered what had become of the exercise guru. In March 2017, Taberski’s podcast reached the top of the Apple iTunes Store charts and ignited stories from mainstream news outlets. The power of the podcast was front-page news.

The term podcast is often attributed to journalist Ben Hammerslay from 2004. The term is a made-up word combining “pod” which references newly introduced Apple iPods, and “broadcast” for the rise in online streaming radio. It is more likely that you have consumed media without ever realizing how the podcast changed our lives. In a digital landscape led by social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, there seems to be less attention paid to a passive technology introduced just over a decade ago. Yet we regularly stream music and binge watch an entire television series.

In other words, the podcast helped usher in the era of on-demand media. 

Podcasted radio shows are similar to audiobooks; an episodic podcast allows you to enjoy chapters that build on one another. Serial is one of the leading examples, whereby users follow a true-crime mystery that unfold over several weeks. Fan fiction with original storylines have gravitated towards podcasting. At AudioFictions, fans of the Harry Potter have created over 200 original stories based on the J.K. Rowling’s series.

Video podcasts, sometimes called vodcasts, have become more prevalent as well. YouTube and Vimeo certainly owe their designs to podcasting. Consequently, this helped usher in more online education, whereby learners participate at his or her own pace. TED talks have allowed millions of viewers to watch brief presentations of innovative designs and fascinating stories. MIT OpenCourseware and The Open University feature access to recorded lectures with exceptional educational content.  Talks with Teachers, #edChat Radio, and The Marshall Memo give abbreviated educational research and instruction through weekly podcasts.

Teachers are also embracing podcast creations in the classroom. In several English classrooms at Barrington High School in Rhode Island, Bryan Caswell and Molly MacIntosh have begun capturing students’ oral histories as podcasts. The format was inspired by National Public Radio’s The Moth Radio Hour program, during which regular people tell short stories about their lives. Students in this project were given a thematic question such as, “When did you realize that your perception had changed?” Based on critiques from peers, the best stories were recorded as a live performance before an audience of parents, students, and teachers.

For the past three years, I have been working with literacy students who needed practice with writing and oral speaking. Using the Star Wars Radio plays, we remixed stories from the original trilogy and created an episodic podcast. Each episode includes students’ vocal performance along with music and sound effects. As we build more episodes, we hope to use a Creative Commons License to distribute them publicly.

Podcasting is a remarkable medium that is certainly worthy of a second look. If you have an interest, do a simple search with the term “podcast” included. Chances are that a podcast exists for you. When you are ready to dive into podcast distribution, try using a host such as SoundCloud or PodBean to reach a wider audience.

Mark J. Davis is a high school reading specialist and a doctoral candidate at University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College. He is passionate about digital literacy with a specific interest in infographics and information visualization. Visit his website at www.davisclassroom.com or follow him on Twitter @watermarkedu.

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

E-writers, also known as digital writing tablets, are relatively simple devices that allow users to draw and write on varying size tablets. Less expensive versions are typically small and erase without saving, and more expensive models have larger displays and features like an ability to recall written images. E-writers have been touted for their ability to reduce paper waste and for their portability; however, little is known about how e-writers might influence students who are emerging writers. 

To explore the value of e-writers for emerging writers, we worked in a local elementary school with students in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. We conducted a six-week study to investigate how using e-writers might influence students’ self-efficacy and motivation. Using pre- and post-survey analysis, we measured students’ writing self-efficacy and motivation. Parents and teachers were also surveyed three times throughout the study to gather their perceptions.

During the study, students had access to a Boogie Board Sync e-writer at school. Teachers used the e-writer when they saw opportunities in their instruction and kept a log of how they used the Boogie Boards. After four weeks of the study, we also gave all students a second Boogie Board to take home so we could explore the ways they wrote with the e-writer at home versus at school. At the end of the study, we collected all the writing done on the Boogie Boards. 

We found evidence that e-writers can have a positive impact on students’ willingness to write and their perceptions of themselves as writers, as student data revealed significant growth in motivation and self-efficacy towards writing.

With the significant amount of technology currently available, we were curious as to why this technology, which essentially only allows students to write directly on the screen, might have this impact. What we found, according to the parents and teachers, was that having writing as the sole feature of the tool might actually be one of the main reasons for its success. Instead of using a tool that allowed them to do a variety of activities, students were using the e-writers only to engage in emerging writing activities such as writing, drawing, scribbling, and spelling.

In addition, parents and teachers noted that portability was important. Parents and teachers described various places (e.g. on the bus, during breaks, in the car, around the dinner table) where writing became part of their daily or family routine. Furthermore, parents and teachers reported that using the e-writer provided opportunities for students to collaboratively write with classmates and family.

We tend to think of technology as being a powerful motivator; while it often is, we can’t forget that students need time to write to develop as writers. We appreciate the affordances of digital tools for writing; however, technology shouldn’t distract students from writing. Rather, it should be used to engage students in rich writing practices. 

Richard E. Ferdig is the Summit Professor of Learning Technologies and Professor of Instructional Technology at Kent State University.  

Kristine E. Pytash is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education at Kent State University.

Karl Kosko is an Assistant Professor of Math Education at Kent State University.

John Dunlosky is Professor of Psychology and Director of the SOLE Center at Kent State University. 

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

After the 2005 publication of the National Reading Panel report, there has been a sense of urgency to accelerate student acquisition of academic vocabulary to support comprehension. We learned that “teaching words well means giving students multiple opportunities to develop word meanings and learn how words are conceptually related to one another in the texts they are studying” (Vacca & Vacca, 2016). Yet the vocabulary results from the 2009 and 2011 NAEP reading assessments demonstrate that “fourth- and eighth-grade vocabulary scores did not change significantly from 2009 to 2011.” If “vocabulary is the glue that holds stories, ideas and content together...making comprehension accessible for children” (Rupley, Logan & Nichols, 1998/99), then maybe our current strategies alone aren’t making vocabulary stick.

Technology provides new ways for students to interact with information through multimodal learning opportunities. My colleague Kathy Krepps commented on how her students didn’t know what the dictionary was, and I realized that text is not the first resource our students access to seek information. Our third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students who have one-to-one Chromebook classrooms naturally say “OK Google” to find information, not to read but to watch and to listen.

During this school year, Kathy and I have been working with teachers and students to develop our own elementary ELA curriculum. By using Google Slides, third-grade students create digital word collages, and fifth-grade students create a digital vocabulary notebooks as part of our vocabulary instruction. These tasks became easily differentiated for students with autism, who needed more nonverbal representations; for gifted and high-achieving students, who wanted to create new ways to represent meaning of higher academic vocabulary; and for struggling readers, who needed the repetition and guidance. In the following examples, you can see how students make meaningful connections to words through multimedia.

Digital word collages

Third-grade students used a digital word collage to explore ways to connect to unknown words from a text read in a literature circle. One student began adding symbols and songs, and the comment feature allowed me to guide his thinking through questioning.

Another student used an image as a background and used the color and the font of the words to help show the word’s meaning. Two videos show multiple meanings of how a word is used in earth science and poetically in a song.

Digital literacy notebooks

Fifth-grade students created and presented teacher- or self-selected words for a given unit in digital vocabulary notebooks. Then they engaged in academic conversations to discuss why the images, videos, and fonts were chosen and if they agree or disagree with perspectives. Word generation vocabulary units make it easy to incorporate this strategy into current events or to help students make personal connections.

Digital word collages and digital vocabulary notebooks are only two examples of how Google Slides can engage students in the instruction of academic vocabulary.

Other classrooms have been inspired to find additional ways to use Google Slides for vocabulary instruction. Andrew Pry, a fourth-grade teacher, challenges his students to use a “bank” in Google Slides to share “great vocabulary” words they come across inside and outside of class.

The multiple opportunities that students need to accelerate vocabulary acquisition exists in what they read and write but also in what we listen, speak, and view. Adding strategies like this can be the glue needed to make vocabulary stick.

Meg Rishel is an Instructional ELA Coach for Eastern York School District. You can follow her on Twitter.

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

I spent most of my preteen years writing, directing, producing, and starring in my own poorly produced horror movies. Working in the movie business was my dream. However, rather than growing up to be a director, I became a teacher—slightly less pay but far more rewarding for me.

I loved making movies as a child, so I figured my second graders might like it, too. Rather than creating movies from scratch, I thought it would be fun for my students to transform their favorite texts into motion pictures. As I began to plan the project, I had to consider implementation and how my students would benefit academically. Deciding how to proceed in a manner that would ensure the success of my students was difficult. I looked toward the actual Hollywood-style move-making process as a model and restructured it for second graders. I separated the process into eight phases that students would complete to produce their own movies: grouping, developing ideas, generating script treatments, storyboarding, scripting, holding specific preproduction conferences with the teacher, filming, and post production. 

I also considered how the project would fit into the literacy curriculum; after all, as teachers, we know that time is precious and our instruction needs to be research based, effective, and efficient. Engaging in such a complex, technology-based project would deepen students’ understanding of text and incorporate several literacy skills. I figured that during the project students would consider their own reading preferences, write summaries, visually represent sequences of texts, transform existing texts into scripts that were ideal for movie production, and ultimately edit and produce their own movies.

Fortunately, I was right: Not only did the kids love making their movies, but also the project provided a creative context for students to use their literacy skills for an authentic purpose. They collaborated, took risks, and creatively constructed their masterpieces. I hope the experience augmented their elementary careers and perhaps motivated some to move to Hollywood and make millions. Of course, I hope they remember me fondly as they decide what to do with their first paycheck.

Chase Young is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University and a former elementary school teacher. He is the coauthor with Timothy Rasinski of Tiered Fluency Instruction: Supporting Diverse Learners in Grades 2–5 (Capstone).

Chase Young will present a session titled “Engaging Students With Student-Produced Movies” at the ILA 2017 Conference & Exhibits, held in Orlando, FL, July 15–17.

Discussions about fake news in a post-truth world and how to react to these challenging trends have become quite prevalent around the world. It is easy to share Professor Donald Leu’ s view that "schools are an important key to solving the challenge of fake news." And it is not only fake news that becomes important to negotiate; all types of online information in today’s world require critical and thoughtful readers. 

At least two issues have become especially important as we increasingly encounter online texts. First, the earlier that we begin teaching critical evaluation skills, the more prepared our students will be. Second, given the difficulty in transferring learning effects from school tasks to other situations, we believe that students need regular practice to internalize the skills needed to be critical online readers.

One idea that we believe has promise is designing short monthly quiz activities around critical evaluation skills. This practice can be used quite regularly, even with younger children, if the texts and topics selected are reasonably appropriate for a certain grade level. 

Tips for creating quizzes and advantages of the practice

To prepare your quizzes, choose four online texts on the same controversial topic (e.g., health effects from using cell phones) that differ in quality and purpose. Prepare questions for each text that address, for example, the following issues:

• Authors’ expertise on the topic (e.g., level of education, amount of experience, current position or occupation; see question 1 in the example)
• Purpose of the text (e.g., to persuade, to inform, to sell something, or to entertain)
• Quality of evidence (e.g., based on research, the experience of one person, or one’s personal opinion)
• A main point of the text (e.g., a question to assess important content)

You might also include questions that address why it is important to pay attention to a particular aspect of online source evaluation (see question 2 in the example). To spark ideas for your quizzes, you might explore some of the examples for teaching critical evaluation provided by the Stanford History Education Group or Teaching Channel.

Next, it is time to select a tool to create your quizzes. If you are not yet familiar with online quiz tools, you can find multiple websites listing them (e.g., educatorstechnology.com).

Once you have four quizzes (one about each text), run one quiz in the beginning of each month. Remember, the questions should be used as triggers to further discussion about the topic rather than simply considering each text in isolation. The reflections and additional questions allow teachers to access students’ reasoning and how it may develop over the course of the quizzes.

At the end of the semester, hold a “final” on critical evaluation. The final gives students an opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of both content and critical evaluation skills learned during the process. At this point, questions should focus attention on comparing and contrasting the texts.  Because students usually get engaged with tasks that include elements of gamification, consider finding a colleague whose class will do the quizzes and compete for the title of Champions of Critical Reading.

Teaching students to think critically is not easy, nor does it happen quickly, so, in that respect, these quiz activities are certainly not a quick fix. Still, they are one step toward developing critical habits of thinking and reflecting about the quality of online texts. We believe that repetition is essential, and these quiz activities help to regularly take advantage of quick opportunities to discuss the credibility of news or other information.  Happy quizzing, and we hope that your class wins the finals!

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

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education 

Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).