Literacy Now

The end of January marks the first week of the academic year for Australian children. All across the country, teachers and students are bracing themselves for the annual first week back of getting-to-know-you conversations. Although student-to-student and student-to-teacher discussions early on in the semester are necessary to build rapport and establish a classroom climate of mutual respect and understanding, the details shared in these conversations are typically lost when the lesson ends. Thankfully, the use of digital technology can enable some of these getting-to-know-you conversations to be captured, published, shared, and reflected upon throughout the school year as students develop and change.

I use getting-to-know-you activities that encourage students to work both collaboratively and individually, create and share visual representations both with and without technology, converse with and listen to one another, and represent ideas using visuals, words, and sounds.

Both of the following activities are designed for middle school students (ages 10–15) but could be adapted easily for older students. Please note each activity achieves similar outcomes, so teachers should choose only one to try with each class.

The illustrated interview

The illustrated interview was inspired by The New York Times series in which notable people sketch their responses to a brief questionnaire. You can access the entire series, but I recommend the interviews by Buzz Aldrin, Tavi Gevinson, Tim Burton, and Richard Branson as great examples for students. After viewing a few examples of these short videos with students, the activity runs as follows:

1. A common set of getting-to-know-you questions is generated by the whole class, drawing on suggestions from both The New York Times Illustrated Interviews and the students’ own ideas.
2. Students are then organized into pairs, with each reciprocating as interviewer and interviewee.
3. The interviewer assigns the interviewee a list of 10 questions from the class set.
4. The interviewee selects five questions from the list and responds by drawing pictures on paper. These sketches are scanned, photographed, or filmed, and the digital files are returned to the interviewer.
5. The interviewer is then responsible for turning the sketched responses into a 60-second illustrated interview. Using video editing software, the interviewer adds relevant sound effects to each image (Sound Bible has free sound effects) and precedes each sketched response with a title slide encompassing the question posed.
6. The interviewers upload their completed illustrated interviews to YouTube (using the unlisted setting for greater privacy), and the films are then published to the class website for viewing by other students.
7. The culminating step is a screening of all interviews followed by a whole=class discussion. The teacher scaffolds reflective prompts to stimulate discussion such as I didn’t know that…, I found it interesting to learn that…, A question I have is…. The discussion sparks a reflection on what was discovered about their interviewee and themselves from the process of constructing the illustrated interviews and what they have learned about their fellow classmates from viewing the works. Through voicing or writing down their thoughts, students identify similarities and differences in values, interests, backgrounds, and personality to establish a climate of trust, understanding, and mutual respect within the class help.

The hot spot identity collage

The vital technology for this getting-to-know-you activity is ThingLink, a free online tool that enables the annotation of digital images via hot spots. When the cursor passes over a hot spot in ThingLink, a window appears with annotated text or a hyperlink. If you have not yet encountered this tool, you can view featured examples that provide an understanding of the many possibilities ThingLink presents in the classroom. The activity runs as follows:

1. Individually, students create a visual representation of their identity in the form of a paper collage (or similar). They then create a digital copy of their work by scanning or photographing their collage.
2. Students are organized randomly into pairs. The identity collages serve as the stimulus for a conversation between the pair of students about their personalities, backgrounds, values, and personal interests.
3. As they talk, students make notes, record quotes, and write down observations based on their partner’s discussion.
4. Following the conversation, each student uploads his or her partner’s identity collage to ThingLink and strategically positions hot spots on the image to reveal quotations and snippets from the earlier conversation. The student further uncovers aspects of his or her partner’s identity that might otherwise be unnoticeable in the classroom.
5. Once each ThingLink is completed and published, students can share their work via a URL. Alternatively, each ThingLink can generate an embedded code to be posted directly onto a class website.  
6. The final step in this exercise is to encourage students to view the identity collages on ThingLink and run a follow-up reflection and whole-class discussion. The instructions for this step should mirror the instructions for the illustrated interview activity.

In addition to creating online spaces that build positive peer and teacher relationships, these technology-enhanced getting-to-know-you activities simultaneously enable the formative assessment of each student’s digital composition, listening, speaking, and visual representation skills very early in the school year. I challenge teachers to consider trying out one of these activities the next time they meet a new class of students. Who knows what you will learn?

Nicole Timbrell is the Head of Digital Learning & 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’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

When I tell people how much I love statistics, data, and numbers, I often get a funny look, especially when people find out I have been an English teacher. But mathematics is a universal language! Yes, I love great literature, but I also adore numbers!

Even if you do not love numbers like I do, you might be able to appreciate the simple fact that data create a narrative, and taking control of the narrative is more important than ever before with the amount of data that we now have access to. Besides, our daily lives are filled with conversations about numbers, as we have all heard statements such as, “The median housing price is…” or “The average snowfall for this year is…” Whether you want to, we could probably all agree that being able to understand and work with data is extremely important. The following are some suggestions on how to work with data.

Know that sampling matters

Any lover of history would remember the famous picture of President Truman holding a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune that said, “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Since then, we have had many instances of data being incorrect because of who answered the questions. When looking at any data, we should remember who answered and in what context, which leads to my next point.

Be aware of the averages

To draw accurate conclusions, we should take time before making judgments about numbers, especially averages and the trend they are supposed to tell. I remember looking at performance data with my English department one year. We received graphs for tests for two years. The graphs showed the averages of a standardized test for ninth, 10th, and 11th graders over two years. Someone asked, “Does this mean the averages went up from last year to this year?” To that I replied, “No. It doesn’t. The group that is now 10th grade performed extremely well when they were in ninth grade. However, their performance dropped by 10%, while the current 11th graders’ performance dropped only by 5% from what they did in 10th grade. If you factor in the increased in difficulty for the test, our 11th graders are doing much better than the 10th graders.” Rather than simply looking at the average, we must consider the context of the data and what the average actually says. After all, if you stick one foot in ice water and the other in boiling water, the average would be warm even though your one foot is frozen and the other is burned!

Verify the scales

Another thing to remember when looking at statistics is that the scale matters. For example, if you heard that a school has a score of 800, would you be impressed? Once I tell you many schools’ Adequate Yearly Progress score is supposed to be between 0 and 1,000, you would realize that 800 is a solid number. What if I told you 800 was someone’s SAT Math Subject Test score? You would be impressed because 800 is the highest score a student can receive on that test.

Question the questions

When discussing data, we must remember the importance of the right data collection tools. Asking good questions is vital in all data analysis. Some say standardized tests do not tell us how well our students are doing. I say it does tell us something; it doesn’t tell us everything.

Fortunately, we have lots of tools that allow us to illustrate data easily. For example, Plotly allows you create graphs and charts easily and quickly. It’s three-panel dashboard offers simple options for you to enter data and create different charts. ChartGo is another website that allows you to create different charts. You can also import Excel or CSV files. But my favorite data illustration tools have to be Wordle and WorldClouds. As an English teacher, I used this tool with my students often. For example, we created a word cloud for the Gettysburg Address. It shows the repeated words in the speech to quickly discern the author’s purpose. My students and I had frequent discussions about the author’s purpose as we looked at the word choice.

Nate Silver, the editor-in-chief of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight and author of The Signal and the Noise, once said people think they want information when what they really want is the knowledge. The bottom line is that having good data helps all of us to make better decisions. By accepting that we must learn to work with data and becoming critical about how they are collected and analyzed, educators can model a good use of data to our students.

Kip Glazer is a native of Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States in 1993 as a college student. She holds California Single Subject Teaching Credentials in Social Studies, English, Health, Foundational Mathematics, and School Administration. In 2014, she was named the Kern County Teacher of the Year. She earned her doctorate of education in learning technologies at Pepperdine University in October 2015. She has presented and keynoted at many state and national conferences on game-based learning and educational technologies. She has also consulted for Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning and the Kennedy Center ArtsEdge Program.

I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed when meeting students’ literacy needs, to lose touch with my family because of long hours at school, and to drop into bed exhausted at the end of every day—I had to take a break from teaching because the stress of being an educator was affecting my health. However, with the innovation of web-based technology, cloud coaching is showing promise as an effective inquiry-based intervention to reduce stress, improve instructional practices, and increase students’ academic performance by creating the conditions for having quality conversations and empowering literacy leadership.

The rise of teacher stress

A recent Pennsylvania State University report found 46% of teachers say they have high levels of stress on a daily basis, which is affecting their health and their ability to teach effectively. Mark Greenberg, a professor of human development and psychology at Penn State, explained the stress is causing “between 30 and 40% of teachers to leave the profession in their first five years,” which costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year to train new teachers. Teacher burnout isn’t plaguing just U.S. schools. A survey of 4,000 teachers in England report 82% of educators felt the workload expected of them was unmanageable and 73% said their health was being affected. As a way to reduce stress and retain teachers, school districts are integrating web-based technology to provide cloud coaching for mentorship, professional development, and instructional support.

What is cloud coaching?

Cloud coaching, also known as virtual or online coaching, uses the Internet and a webcam to create a collaborative partnership between two or more individuals in a digital environment. The coaching takes place through a variety of online platforms that are free, like Skype and Google Hangout, or require a small monthly fee, like Zoom and Gotomeeting. This online coaching experience cultivates leadership skills by engaging a teacher in quality conversations about possibilities, targeting effective instructional methods, and providing implementation support as the teacher takes action to systematize classroom literacy routines. The frequency and structure of cloud coaching is differentiated to meet the needs of each individual teacher.

Examples of cloud coaching

Executive coaching for administrators: Once a month, administrators from a small, rural school district spend one hour individually receiving cloud coaching with Dr. Ray Jorgensen. The focused inquiry process creates a shift in thinking, which allows the administrator to see situations from a different perspective, triggering new ideas and creating the conditions for more effective leadership. 

Content-focused coaching for educators: The University of Pittsburgh has implemented an eight-week online workshop to develop pedagogical knowledge of effective literacy routines. This is followed by one-on-one cloud coaching to support the implementation process. Results suggest cloud coaching has been effective at improving reading comprehension instruction and students’ reading achievement in high-poverty elementary schools.

Literacy leadership for instructional coaches: I provided cloud coaching to instructional coaches who were responsible for designing and conducting school-embedded English Language Arts professional development. Meg Rishel, a K–5 instruction coach, said, “Cloud coaching helped me grow as a literacy leader. I went from talking at teachers to talking with teachers. Additionally, I went from telling what I know to listening to what others know.”

Each coaching session began with a guided inquiry into educators’ successes and challenges as they implement effective literacy routines. After needs were identified, we collaborated to build an action plan that included gathering resources, generating an interactive presentation with open-ended questions that created the conditions for quality conversations among teachers.

Academic coaching for students: Students of all ages receive the same benefits from cloud coaching as their teachers. An 11th-grade student shared, “Before cloud coaching, I rarely thought I was good enough in school, and I would often shut down and stop being productive because of it. Coaching helped me organize the work I was doing and, more important, helped me to be proud of my work and to not limit myself. Now I feel much more capable and motivated to get things done!” Every Sunday I met with students to help them break down their academic workload into manageable chunks, provide feedback on essays, and suggest strategies to improve their study habits.

At a time when school districts may not have the resources to hire a full-time instructional coach or afford ongoing professional development, cloud coaching is an effective and innovative alternative to reduce teacher stress and empower literacy leadership. I learned it’s never too late to ask for help. Engaging in the inquiry-based process of cloud coaching not only improved my effectiveness as a literacy leader but also helped me reduce my stress by creating the conditions for quality conversations and relationships.

Julie B. Wise, an ILA member since 2000, is an international coach and consultant. Her research examines cloud coaching as an inquiry-based intervention to reduce stress so that individuals and organizations can cultivate literacy leadership. You can subscribe to her newsletter to stay up-to-date on mindfulness, literacy, and technology.

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

As educators in British Columbia, we never set out to be app designers.

Our school district challenged educators to be innovative in the classroom, and they were finding a lot of pressure was put on the school system to get up to date with technology. At the same time, they were struggling with the cost of new technology and how to justify it as it applies to student achievement. Does technology make a difference?

The other pressure on schools concerning achievement was focusing on foundational skills, particularly skills in literacy and comprehension. Schools were noticing a significant lack of growth in literacy results after grade 4. A conversation started between Gloria Ramirez, an education professor from Thompson Rivers University, the district literacy coordinator, and me to address the drop in literacy at the grade 4 level. A plan began to form.

We knew that at about grade 4 the curriculum and structure of learning shifted in our school system, with a greater focus on nonfiction reading and literacy and an increased use of subject-specific academic language and vocabulary.

We turned to the school district to ask if they would allow us to work with a small group of teachers and target academic- and subject-specific vocabulary instruction. We also wanted to focus on rural and high-risk classrooms in grade 4. We were fairly certain that targeted support in vocabulary at grade 4 would make a difference but wanted to prove our theory. The other part to our plan was almost an afterthought. The district, as well as our education research team, wanted to know if using technology would help. Wanting some advice on how best to approach introducing technology into the classroom, we invited a technology professor from a local university to join us.

From there, we started our study. Using a number of classes in grade 4, we compared classes on the basis of the following parameters:

• Classes that had no interventions or supports from the team.

• Classes where the teachers received focused instructional professional development around explicit vocabulary instruction.

• Classes that received the vocabulary professional development but also had tablets as part of supporting the vocabulary instruction in the classroom.

But even with support from Musfiq Rahman, a technology professor from Thompson Rivers, we ran into challenges right away.

We struggled with finding applicable apps to match the instruction in the classroom around vocabulary. We found most of the commercial apps were too standardized in their approaches. In other words, the vocabulary selection did not match the specific academic and subject vocabulary introduced by the teacher in the classroom, so it lacked relevance.

Also, the way the apps introduced vocabulary was not always using high-yield strategies on how we learn and comprehend vocabulary. Finally, the information gathered by the apps and shared with the teacher was subject to privacy issues.

Even with all of these challenges around using technology and finding the best app, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that classes using technology showed greater improvement than those that didn’t.

Excited to discover that technology makes a difference, but also frustrated with the flexibility of available commercial apps, we asked if it was possible to design an app, LearningApp, to meet the needs of our teachers and perhaps even produce better achievement results than what we found in our initial study.

The answer was yes!

Rahman set out to bring some of his programming students to help design an app that could be customized by the teachers and integrate some of gaming features students would find engaging.

Students and educators from the university started working with classroom teachers and students from the elementary school to design an app that would meet their needs. If you want a lively discussion, you need only to ask your class what video games they enjoy and why. You can engage a whole class by just talking about their gaming experience. Even before the prevalence of video games, games from cards to board games have captured the attention of children and even involve learning. If only we can tap into that motivation!

We learned that the use of technology allowed for increased opportunities to individualize learning. This was especially helpful in isolated rural areas or where a child’s opportunity for exposure to diverse vocabulary might be limited.

We have currently developed a back-end platform with a number of capabilities requested by teachers and students:

• Teachers can collaboratively design simple instructional tasks for students and specific to their subject material.

• Instructional tasks can be shared among teachers as a databank of options when personalizing their instruction.

• Students are able to complete the tasks and get immediate feedback on their progress.

• Data and results can be gathered to give teachers immediate feedback on how students are progressing.

The back-end platform was designed to allow expansion of more complex instructional tasks. It can also be hosted on a secure server at the school board office to address privacy issues. Finally, it is a web-based program that can be used on all devices capable of accessing the Internet.

The next phase of the project is developing a gaming platform to work with the back-end platform and present students with a gaming experience. We are involving students in helping design a game that will work with the instructional components of the program and allow students to access the motivational aspects of gaming technology.

Once the app is completed, we will be able to follow up with action research to determine the level of impact on student achievement. With our initial research, in addition to what we know about gamification of learning and individualized instruction, we are positive we will see great results.

Michael Bowden is principal at Raft River Elementary in British Columbia, Canada.

Writing fanfiction—creative works that fans write based on storylines and characters in existing books, movies, or other media—has moved from the fringes of fandom activity to having more mainstream visibility. Some of the earliest examples of fanfiction appeared in science fiction fan magazines in the 1930s. However, the advent of the Internet and the popularity of online sites like FanFiction.net, Archive of Our Own, and Wattpad have brought fanfiction writing to millions of readers and writers worldwide and garnered the attention of literacy researchers and the popular press.

Literacy teachers can connect their classrooms to these online communities to foster their students’ development as writers. As a literacy activity that requires authors to become experts on the original source material, fanfiction has opportunities to practice reading and writing skills valued by the Common Core State Standards, including close reading and writing narratives. Sharing their work in an online fanfiction community further provides youths with authentic opportunities to produce and distribute their writing with the help of technology (also covered in Common Core) as they collaborate with others and receive feedback, though not always very helpful feedback, from the online audience.

Because of the intermittent quality of feedback available in online fanfiction communities, teachers can play an important role in guiding their students’ writing for and with online audiences. As my own long-term research with one fanfiction author has revealed, even skilled writers may be only haphazardly tapping into the potential of a site like FanFiction.net. Young writers need teacher support to fully benefit from participation in these online writing spaces. Such support might include the following:

• Scaffolding students’ explorations of existing fanfiction texts and the reviews authors receive to better understand audience expectations and various fanfiction conventions.

• Encouraging students to offer feedback on others’ writing in an online space first before posting their own work, which will give them an opportunity to read critically and deepen their familiarity with the fanfiction genre.

• Designing continued reading and writing activities that allow students to maintain a connection to their chosen online writing community and develop an audience for their work.

I recently talked with literacy teachers about these suggestions when I gave a presentation at the New York State Reading Association conference in Rochester, NY. During this session, we shared ideas for how teachers interested in connecting their students to online fanfiction communities find space to do so in already crowded curriculums and school days. One local high school teacher planned to return to her building and suggest that they consider turning an existing Creative Writing elective into one that explicitly and systematically connects young writers to online writing communities. Two teachers from Alice Buffett Magnet Middle School in Omaha, NE, told us about their FanGirl Club, which meets monthly after school. Members run sessions to teach other kids about writing fanfiction and host a fanfiction writing contest at the end of each year. Finally, we discussed possibilities for structuring an ongoing unit about online writing spaces as part of a literacy or language arts block, in which students research, select, write for, and maintain a connection to an online writing community of their choice throughout the school year. 

Whether you find space through electives, after school, or as a small part of the existing literacy curriculum, providing teacher guidance can go a long way to helping young writers benefit from the rich learning opportunities in online writing communities.

Jayne C. Lammers is an assistant 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.