Literacy Now

Looking to inspire some creative writing fun with your students? The Comics Head app will delight your students and help chase away any writing blues. Comics Head is a colorful writing-focused app that has earned a five-star rating from the Educational App Store. This visual storytelling tool engages children and adults of all ages and makes creating comics a snap.

With a few taps on your iPad, you create fun settings, adding characters and speech bubbles for your dialogue. With a few more taps, you explore a variety of layout options, including some that can be the focus for beginning, middle, and ending story activities. You can select template comics and simply add or edit dialogue. You also have the ability to upload your own photos into the comics. Create one-page posters or multiframe storyboards and personal templates. How much fun is that?

I recently demonstrated the app at a technology workshop for a school district with their grade 3–5 teachers, literacy coaches, and principals. The app was a hit; my teacher candidates love it, too. Seeing everyone exploring and creating their own masterpieces is such fun. I wish I had something like Comics Head to help illustrate my stories growing up. Using an art tool like this sure would have helped me to feel like an expert illustrator. I suppose that is why I love their catchphrase, “Not an Artist? Not a Problem!” Integrating this user-friendly storytelling writing tool across the curriculum is limited only by your imagination. Create posters, alternate endings, new characters, character profiles, debates, and more.

There are two versions of the app: the free Comics Head Lite and Comics Head, a paid version for $4.99. This, of course, has more bells and whistles, or should I say superheroes and powers? The website supports a blog with instructional demo videos to help get you started. To begin creating comics, you simply click Create New Comic Image. You make a selection from the white canvas panel layouts. The template section has stories ready to use, or you can edit the dialogue text. With the paid version, there is a My Templates option that allows you to design custom templates. After selecting your storyboard, you then create backgrounds, characters, props, and photos. The paid version includes themes along with web and map access, where screenshots of Internet webpages and map locations can be integrated to enhance your comic designs. Audio can be recorded. The camera tool and paint tool provide customization options. Once finished with the storyboard, you can preview, save, and share to Facebook or Twitter or via e-mail with the Lite version. With the paid version, the storyboard can be posted to YouTube. Creating a slideshow is an another option. Both versions allow for printing.

In my opinion, the Lite version provides endless possibilities for free, but the paid version provides additional design and creative potential. Start Lite, explore Comics Head, and go from there. Get excited, get motivated, and create engaging comics that will add a flare to your creative writing lessons.

Mary Beth Scumaci is a clinical associate professor and technology coordinator with the Division 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’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Last week, I had the pleasure of volunteering with Mozilla for the biannual workweek. A workweek is a meeting where all the Mozilla employees meet in person with their teammates to work on their projects while planning and discovering more about the goals of the organization for the next quarter. As a K–12 teacher and doctoral student at the University of Calgary, what fascinated me most about the experience was the emphasis on learning throughout a workweek.

Although the communication was primarily face-to-face during the Mozilla workweek, these participants are usually communicating and working collaboratively in digital asynchronous spaces around the world. Throughout the week, online tools and mediums were integrated as a key means to work and collaborate as teams. This workweek experience is an example of a week in the life of the world in which our K–12 students are and will be living and working.

I am working on a collaborative project called the Open Innovation Toolkit with Emma Irwin (Mozilla-Open Innovation), Greg McVerry (Assistant Professor of Education at Southern Connecticut State University), and Mikko Kontto (Finnish schoolteacher). We are working with fellow volunteer Mozillians in a wide variety of projects around the world, to remix content and create workshops to support key personal leadership skills and behaviors focused on four key pillars: Build, Empower, Communicate, Open. I’d like to share two of the many workshops that hold particular significance for classroom teachers seeking to support students’ communication in digital learning environments.

Deep listening

The first project is designed around the concept of deep listening. Originally, I started a workshop about giving and receiving feedback, but the feedback for version 1 was that it was too complicated; we needed something that helped describe what to do before you give feedback, which is to listen, read, and/or watch. Considering that Mozillians work around the world in multiple time zones, online communication (through a variety of tools) is mostly asynchronous. As such, the way in which they communicate with each other and respond to each other is key in ensuring collaboration and the success of any project. Kerri Laryea writes in “A Pedagogy of Deep Listening in E-Learning”that deep listening can lead to transformational learning. Although her research focused primarily on e-learning in particular, it reminds us of the importance of deep listening in multimodal contexts in order to scaffold deeper and more meaningful learning opportunities.

Using powerful questions

Jane Finette created a second workshop titled “Using Powerful Questions.” In her current Mozilla work examining communication throughout the Mozilla organization and in her coaching work for future women leaders, Jane noticed the need for examining how to use powerful questions. Jane turned to Judith Blanchette’s research in her article “Questions in the Online Learning Environment” to inform the development of her workshop. This research examined the syntax, structure, cognitive function, and communicative characteristics of questions in asynchronous learning environments. Results of the study suggested that unlike face-to-face interactions in postsecondary classrooms, students in the asynchronous online learning course asked most of the questions. In addition, students in the online course exhibited higher levels of cognition, as they asked more rhetorical questions, using them to persuade, think aloud, and indirectly challenge other participants. Findings from this study may provide guidance for other educators seeking to engage learners in asking powerful questions that lead to deeper learning.

As we consider how to communicate in digital learning environments, it is important to consider the intention and clarity behind our communications. As research and experiences suggest, there is a tremendous opportunity for transformational and deep learning for all in technology-mediated learning environments. Anyone considering contributing to the Mozilla Open Leadership Project should contact Emma Irwin.

Verena Roberts is a K–12 educator, consultant, Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute (MVLRI) fellow, and doctoral student in the Learning Sciences program in the Werkland School of Education (University of Calgary). Verena has taught, designed courses, and consulted about curriculum and technology integration from pre-K to higher education in Canada and the United States. She has facilitated and developed a wide range of open networked learning projects with a focus on open educational resources, emerging blended learning professional learning opportunities, and personalized learning pathways for teachers and students. She was the 2013 iNACOL Innovative Online and Blended Learning Practice Award Recipient. Verena is currently a technology for learning specialist with Rocky View Schools, in Alberta, Canada.

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

If we have time to teach our students only one thing this school year, let it be critical literacy! There are few topics more crucial for students today than those that enable them to analyze information critically.

Gone are the days when trusted teacher- and peer-edited textbooks were the main providers of knowledge. So long to a time when most fake news existed at the checkout line in supermarket tabloids. These days, our students are flooded with information, and without the proper skill set for identifying fact from fiction, it will be difficult for them to determine legitimacy. Modern media come in many different formats, including print media (books, magazines, newspapers), television, movies, video games, music, cell phones, various kinds of software, and the Internet. Knowing how to read these media critically is the key to literacy and understanding for today’s learners and information consumers.

Critical literacy skills

Research suggests students spend about 30–40 minutes a day reading, but almost seven to eight hours a day consuming media. Understanding media and being able to analyze media messages critically are the skills required for being media literate. Media literacy is defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media. According to the Center for Media Literacy, media literate youths and adults are better able to understand the complex messages we receive from television, radio, Internet, newspapers, magazines, books, billboards, video games, music, and all other forms of media.

In our age of participatory culture, we should be treating our students like the type of prosumers (producers and consumers of information) we would like them to become. While putting our efforts into teaching students the craft, ethics, and responsibilities in producing media, we must also teach them to become skilled consumers of information, discerning fact from fiction at every turn or click of a hyperlink.

In order to survive their daily flood of information, students need a solid critical literacy toolkit. We can provide these tools in many ways. One way is to teach students to use the 5W’s for Critical Analysis, recommended by Donald Leu, Deborah Leu, and Julie Coiro in their 2004 book, Teaching With the Internet K–12. They suggest it is helpful for students to ask the following questions while consuming information: Who is saying/writing/creating this? What was their purpose of the particular media that was used? When did they say/write/create? Why did they say/write/create it? Where can we go to check for accuracy?

This ongoing cycle of five questions helps students decide whether the information is legitimate and whether it was produced to inform, influence, undermine, or sell something. Another useful set of strategies for critically analyzing information is Google’s Believe It or Not Search Techniques and Strategies. These lessons enable students to experiment with real and hoax sites while honing their analysis skills.

Critical multimodal skills

The prevalence and influence of modern media make critical literacy an essential skill. Visual messages can be quite strong and provide a great deal of information beyond words. I often think about how easily images can be enhanced with tools like Photoshop or computer-generated imagery (CGI). This blend of photography and video is so realistic that it is often impossible for the viewer to know if something they see is real or not real.

An excellent educator resource for visual meaning making was introduced by The Learning Network blog at The New York Times, titled What’s Going on in This Picture?. The blog focuses on photojournalism, visual literacy, and critical thinking by asking viewers to think about one interesting photograph a week. The photos appear without caption or heading, requiring readers to rely on information gathered from the image alone. Commenters use visual thinking strategies to identify the image through virtual discussion. Typical questions about the images include the following:

1. What’s going on in this picture?
2. What do you see that makes you say that?
3. What more can we find?

Later in the week, additional information and a backstory about the image is revealed.

Additional ideas for developing media and critical literacy skills can be found at The University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab. The project, founded by Renee Hobbs, provides public programs, educational services, community outreach, and multimedia curriculum resources targeted to the needs of educators.

Call for action

Many are concerned about the mass media saturation of today’s students who will become tomorrow's adults. However, we can empower our students to critically negotiate the daily storm of information they receive. Placing greater emphasis on media literacy and, more specifically, on embedding critical literacy skills into our instruction is essential. It is our responsibility, as educators, to provide even our youngest learners with strategies for determining if information is fact or fiction.

Susan Luft, PhD, is an Elementary English Language Arts Coordinator for Scarsdale Public Schools, New York. She is also a member of Fordham University’s Digital Literacy Collaborative (FDLC) project. 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).

Late on the Friday before my school’s weeklong Thanksgiving break, a senior came by my office. He wanted to know why he received a D on his annotated bibliography assignment. After all, he had all five sources his teacher asked him to find. He was frustrated and wanted help.

Having been an English teacher for over a decade, I directed him to look at Google Scholar. We put his keyword food politics into the search bar. I explained to him that sources should be current, preferably within the last five years, and showed him how to reset the date range to 2011–2016. Then I explained to him that the best sources should be peer-reviewed journal articles with digital object identifiers (DOI)—kind of like a social security number for a reputable article. Then I pointed out the Google Scholar–tracked citation counts. I told him he should use books and then other credible websites sponsored by governmental or educational institutions, in that order, only if he couldn’t find any peer-reviewed journals for his topic. After my explanation, we looked at his paper together, and he said, “So one source like that book I picked would have gotten me a B, but using four random websites, I deserved to get a D.”

Moments like that gives me hope despite reading “Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds” published by The Wall Street Journal and many other news organizations. Citing the recent Stanford University study, many were alarmed by the fact that 82% of the middle school students “couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled ‘sponsored content’ and a real news story on a website.” The study finding was not surprising to me because, having been concerned about this issue for a while, I have written posts about both digital literacy and digital footprint. The article also correctly pointed out how a lack of trained school librarians at many public schools had made the situation worse.

To continue to make matters worse, there are numerous fake news sites that deliberately mislead their readers. Recently NPR broadcasted a story on fake news sites, which revealed how numerous websites that appeared to be legitimate posted completely fabricated stories. One such story was shared over half a million times on Facebook. Although many social media companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google had announced their commitment to reduce the number of such postings using various computer algorithms, today’s media consumers need to be vigilant.

So what can we as teachers do to help our students?

1. Discuss credibility of sources. As a public school teacher, my students have asked me about my political beliefs more than once. I often used that as an opportunity to teach my students about the credibility of the source. To make my point, I would ask my students to look up articles on medical research findings. I pointed out whether an article was posted on websites like the World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or Harvard Medical School. Then I had students look for the articles posted on other websites. I also pointed out the tone of the language used in certain articles. Then I explained the difference between an opinion posted on BuzzFeed and The Washington Post by discussing the role of an editorial board and journalistic ethics. When a student brings up a topic, ask the following questions, “Where did you hear that?” “Who was the source?” “Do you think they are credible on the basis of their education, expertise, and experience?”


2. Model productive research behaviors. I also shared how I conducted my own research for my publications. I introduced different digital tools such as Google Scholar and EBSCO and how I used my tools such as RefWorks and Paperpile to collect sources. I also encouraged my students to request help from a librarian in their own research. I often added a lesson on the difference between the manuscript requirement of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and that of the American Psychological Association (APA). I explained how the MLA valued the author whereas the APA valued the publication dates as indicated in the requirements of their respective Works Cited and Reference sections.


3. Teach the explicit differences among the sources. I had my students think in terms of points or grade as to which source should get an A, B, C, D, or F. I had students evaluate different Works Cited pages and grade them before creating their own. By formalizing the evaluation process, I emphasized the importance of using credible sources.


4. Require citations. Even when my students created a multimedia presentation such as a video or a slide presentation, I required my students to cite every source including any picture. Toward the end of the school year, all my students knew that they would not receive a passing grade without citations.

In a society where the number of views on a YouTube video or retweets on a Twitter feed becomes the standards for one’s credibility, we must do better to inform our students of which sources they should trust.

Digital literacy involves dealing with multimodal texts in many different communicative situations while using a range of communicative resources such as images, colors, videos, sounds, and graphics. It also involves respectfully communicating with people from different cultures in addition to those with different lifestyles.

Writing and reading digital texts

As writers, we carefully select certain words and organize these ideas into logical paragraphs. Beyond these textual writing practices, however, we also need to plan the text’s graphic design. As part of planning, multimodal choices are unlimited: What font will we use? What colors should be in the background? What images might we use, and where should we place them in relation to the text? Will we add movies, animations, or hyperlinks? If so, where should we insert them, and how should they appear for the reader? Is there any benefit to organizing the information with a navigational menu?

Consequently, reading and understanding ideas designed by a multimodal writer requires attention to each of these elements in addition to how to effectively connect them to better understand why they are assembled together and what meanings they convey as a whole.

Multimodal texts: every time, everywhere

Multimodality is a basic feature of texts, according to Gunther Kress, an Australian researcher who highlights elements of multimodality in his work. However, as teachers, we may sometimes treat multimodal text features as superfluous; neglecting to call students’ attention to the important meaning(s) they convey. In Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen remind educators of the need to consciously help students develop the ability to make sense of all of the multimodal languages blended or “orchestrated” into a text.

These efforts can more actively foster students’ critical literacy. As Jay Lemke wrote in his 2006 handbook chapter titled, Towards Critical Multimedia Literacy: Technology, Research, and Politics:

Critical literacy needs to respond to these historic changes [in digital texts]. We need a broader definition of literacy itself, one that includes all literate practices, regardless of medium. Books-on-tape are as much literate works as are printed books. Scripted films and television programs are no less products of literate culture in their performances than they were as texts. In printed advertisements, the message toward which we need to take a critical stance is conveyed not just by the textual copy, nor even by the copy and the images, but by the interaction of each with the other, so that the meaning of the words is different with the images than without them, and that of the image together with the words distinct from what it might have been alone. In the multimodal medium of the Web, the message is less the medium than it is the multiplication of meanings across media.

Hands-on multimodality

Focusing on multimodality does not require radically different ways of teaching nor does it require a computer. Even simple activities can open students’ minds to the power of images. I (Ana Elisa) have found that asking students to compose a set of directions for how to play Tic-tac-toe can produce some interesting results. Many students try to give instructions using only words, and they find it difficult to effectively communicate all of the steps. Some students ask for permission to include drawings in their directions and find they are much more successful. Taking time as a class to compare various forms of instructions creates the opportunity for rich conversations around the power of images as part of a meaning-making experience. I report on an analysis of these experiences in my book Textos Multimodais: Leitura e Produção or, in English, Multimodal Texts: Reading & Writing.

These kinds of experiences are only the tip of the iceberg! Continued experiences with multimodal text features open students’ minds to the role that multimodality plays in reading and writing.

To learn more, view a video in which Gunther Kress talks about multimodality. You might also enjoy this video in which Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope explore the multiple modes of representing meaning in today’s media.

Carla Viana Coscarelli is a professor in the School of Language Arts at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil and coordinator of Projeto Redigir/UFMG. Ana Elisa Ribeiro is a writer and a professor in the Department of Language and Technology of Federal Center of Technological Education of Minas Gerais.