Literacy Now

Recently, a computer engineer working for a local technology company contacted me. He told me his  freshman son was interested in starting a coding club at his high school. He remembered coming to one of my after-school club meetings to speak to my students about his choice of career as a computer engineer. He asked what my strategy was to have a club that had nearly 30–40 members, some of whom won the Congressional App Challenge, representing the 23rd California Congressional District. Because I consider coding as one of the major components of digital literacy skills, I’d like to share the answer I gave my friend.

Access matters

I began teaching computer coding by accident. I had to learn to code to pass a doctoral course that required me to create an item using an Arduino board. I quickly realized my limitations and hired a former student as a tutor. While I was struggling to learn to program and create a project to pass my course, I realized how much better my classmates were doing because they had some prior experience with coding.

Focus on exposure

I decided to start a coding club at my school. Clearly, I was in no position to be an expert coder in the room, so I asked for help. In addition to asking my tutor for help, I asked my classmates. That’s when I found out how many free resources are available. Although there are many outstanding resources now, I used CodeHS and Codecademy. I also wrote a grant to purchase more Arduino boards and e-textile materials. Finally, I asked my own students who have done coding to help. We began meeting twice a week, once during the week and on Saturdays.

I thought of my coding club like the thousands of little league baseball teams or youth soccer leagues. Not everyone who plays baseball as a little kid will become a professional, but having some experience will help one to appreciate the sport. Not having the opportunity to play certainly hurts the chances of having quality players in the future. Likewise, we need thousands of coding clubs to create future computer coders and engineers.

Interest over skills development

In addition to introducing free tools to my students to learn to program, I encouraged my students to chase their own interests. Not surprisingly, many of my computer coding club members were also avid video gamers. They were interested in learning about game development. So when they chose to create games using different tools, I encouraged them to do so while looking at the codes behind the tools. Other students wanted to learn HTML to create a simple website or learn to use Photoshop.

All hands on deck approach to developing digital literacy

In a recent Quartz article, Idit Harel, CEO of Globaloria, criticized the way U.S. schools are treating coding. She called this new wave of desire to teach coding by using free online applications “pop computing.” She argued that just as a person playing Guitar Hero shouldn’t be considered a musician, someone playing with coding applications or programs shouldn’t be considered a coder. I agree that we shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations. I do not expect that my students who came to a few club meetings will all become expert computer programmers.

However, as a former English teacher, I must say that I would rather my students read popular books like the Twilight or Harry Potter series than no books at all. I spent over a decade working hard to encourage my students to read more books, even writing a dissertation on a new pedagogy to help my students to read more classics such as Beowulf, Fahrenheit 451, and The Importance of Being Earnest. But when my students asked to read a biography of a baseball player or a book on how to assemble a race bike as their choice of independent reading materials, I always said yes because reading something was better than reading nothing. I believe that providing access to resources, creating structures to provide exposure, and supplying encouragement for interest-driven learning are ways to developing digital literacy for all 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.

In the spring, Ian O’Byrne, Heather Woods, and I launched the Teaching Literacies With Technology survey with the support of the ILA committee on Literacy, eLearning, Communication, and Culture. We created a website to support the project and circulated invitations through social media to the survey link. We announced the survey on Literacy Daily and at several conferences and have sincerely appreciated shares and retweets by fellow ILA members to their networks.

One hard thing about a research project like this is recognizing when a revision is required. After working to generate responses, only 37 participants had completed the study as of back-to-school in September—too few to draw any real conclusions about the questions driving our inquiry. As a response, we shortened the survey and the new, shorter version is available at digitallyliterate.net and via this link. We invite you to respond and to share the links! More data means a more informed ILA!

Preliminary data

Even with so few responses, we thought you might find some of our preliminary data interesting. We hope this will encourage you to contribute your own insights to the survey so that we can construct a more nuanced understanding of (a) the ways that teachers all over the world are integrating diverse technologies to support student learning, (b) the barriers they encounter, and (c) the types of professional learning that they would most appreciate.

Demographics of participants

Nearly half of our survey participants (16) reported being between 35 and 44 years of age. Seven reported being between 25 and 34, and eight reported falling in the 45–54 age category. Twenty-five participants live and work in the United States, five in China, two in Canada, two in Afghanistan, one in Greece, one in Zimbabwe, and one in Hong Kong. Eighteen respondents have PhDs or an EdD, and 10 have Master’s degrees. Most participants (26) work in higher education  contexts. Just 11 participants reported working in K–12 schools. None of our respondents self-identified as African American; 29 self-identified as white/Caucasian or of European descent. On balance, then, our survey respondents to date are mostly middle-aged white women with advanced graduate degrees teaching in universities or colleges in the United States. Given that our interest is in surveying teachers globally, we need to invite much broader participation by culturally diverse K–12 teachers of all genders living and teaching literacies around the world.

Barriers and challenges

Participants told us that access to technologies continues to be a serious barrier to their integration practices for literacies teaching and learning both in school and in their communities.

As one participant wrote:

“Equal access. We have districts in our state with almost no Internet access, and I have students who do not have access once they leave the school campus. Wi-Fi must be a basic civil service like electricity itself, sewage, and water.”

Another participant summarized more general concerns about restrictive acceptable use policies, firewalls, and lack of access to social media channels such as YouTube that several participants noted prevent technology integration in literacies instruction.

“The barriers are lack of access for the students in class, not outside of class.”

Another wrote:

“Lack of infrastructure and lack of computer access is an issue. Our district also has a conservative view on allowing students to publish content on the Internet and connect with others outside of the classroom. “

Generally, teachers reported concerns about their students’ ability to use technologies when they are integrated in instruction.

One respondent wrote: “Students do not come from a level playing field. It's challenging to scaffold digital literacy skills/behaviors when some students do not have rudimentary skills.”

Others noted that the digital use divide is very pronounced in their classrooms and are very concerned with issues of access to digital literacies skills and instruction for traditionally marginalized students.

In terms of professional development, teachers noted top-down initiatives as a major barrier to their own learning and sense of agency. One teacher wrote: “Lack of teacher-led initiatives. Too often, teachers are making choices about tech integration based on what their school/district/etc. tells them to do—not what they think will best support student learning.”

Have your say! Contribute to this global conversation about how teachers are presently integrating—and not integrating—technologies into their literacies classrooms at digitallyliterate.net.

Michelle Schira Hagerman is assistant professor of educational technologies at The University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. She is also on Twitter.
Heather Woods is a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa and coauthor of the Teaching Literacies With Technology survey. You can follow her on Twitter.

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

Literacy researchers such as Dick Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen have spent their professional careers proving through research that children who do not have access to books simply won’t read much outside the school setting and better readers typically read more and continue to improve, while their lesser accomplished peers lag further and further behind. No one understands this problem more than classroom teachers such as Justin Minkel, who is continually in search of viable options for getting books into the hands of readers who need them the most.

In a massive ConnectED Initiative to address the pervasive problem of text access in low-income households, U.S. President Barack Obama launched a comprehensive Open eBooks (also known as electronic books) effort in spring 2016, delivering more than 250 million dollars’ worth of digital reading material to elementary, middle school, and high school readers for free. More than 1.5 million student/family access codes for the Open eBooks app were requested during the two-week launch of Open eBooks, which is just a fraction of the number of students this initiative is meant to reach.

Providing access to electronic books is of paramount importance within a national landscape where Internet availability and access to smart devices has exploded in recent years. A 2016 study published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that in U.S. households surveyed with children ages 6–13, 85% of families below the poverty line owned a smart device (tablet or phone). In addition to personal smart device ownership, ConnectED’s focus on digital device access via schools or public libraries has resulted in Open eBook access opportunities for most U.S. students.

Accessing Open eBook’s high-quality books and educational resources is a multistep process initiated through the Open eBooks Get Started page. After clicking Create an Account to Shop via the First Book Marketplace site, adult participants request Open eBook free codes for as many children as they serve. The Digital Learning tab across the top of the First Book Marketplace site provides a drop-down menu for collections grouped by age. Participants select each collection for which they wish to have code access and add it to their shopping cart, which upon checkout costs them nothing.

An organizational preview of Open eBook collections could help consumers to wade through popular elementary grades book series, new and award-winning novels, nonfiction, and young adult titles spanning a wide range of interests and topics. Selections from multiple publishers are culturally diverse, and some are available in multiple languages. There are also accessibility provisions for special needs readers. Few picture books or pre-K–K titles are currently offered. Users can select 10 titles at a time.
With so many still unaware of the program, First Lady Michelle Obama is spearheading the Open eBooks initiative to inform and enlist all eligible Open eBook participants, including adults who work with in-need students in schools, libraries, clinics, shelters, out-of school programs, early childhood programs, and military family services. With this outreach, hopefully it won’t be long before all children have access to books.

Terry S. Atkinson is an associate professor for the Department of Literacy Studies, English Education, and History Education at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.

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

It’s fall in an election year, and my eighth-grade students will soon be researching controversial issues relevant to the political conversation. Most of their reading about these issues will be online, and not all of those sources will be reliable. For many years, researchers like Coiro, Coscarelli, Maykel, and Forzani (2015) have found that students struggle to determine the reliability of web sources. Evaluation requires thoughtful examination, and students often overlook the factors that matter most to a site’s reliability.

 

As a teacher, media specialist, and literacy researcher, my opinion on what works to encourage effective online source evaluation has evolved. I began teaching the use of evaluation checklists, but my secondary students rarely transferred these to other information-seeking tasks. I tried acronym-based strategies for memorizing questions or inquiry processes. These were certainly more streamlined, but students still didn’t own the process the way I wanted them to.

Recently I’ve tried another approach for teaching web evaluation to secondary students. It follows these central principles:

Reliability is not black and white; it is almost always gray. 

Most sources fall on a continuum between ideal and completely unreliable. Teaching students this important concept prepares them to expect complexity in the evaluation process.

Whether a source is reliable will depend on your purpose.

Although a site might be perfect for exploring an unfamiliar issue, it may not be the best source for evidence to support a reasoned argument. I teach students to define their purpose clearly and judge reliability in the context of it.

Different sources are held to different standards.

The problem with one site may be its lack of source information; another may be the author’s lack of expertise; still another may be a site’s affiliations. I consider again and again the reliability of the source and the most important things to notice. This reorients the inquiry wholly in the mind of the student, who must determine for herself or himself what most affects the reliability of the source at hand. It’s a difficult task, so we use two logical sentence prompts to scaffold students’ investigation: “I notice...” and “I wonder…” At this stage, we’ll often divide into pairs to share and compare our noticings and wonderings.

Discussion is essential!

Once students have examined sites individually or in pairs, we conduct a class discussion (in my class, a Socratic seminar) opening with the essential discussion of noticing and wondering. If necessary, I prompt students to examine what the group missed, but students usually challenge each other’s thinking:  Did anyone click on this author’s bio? (It includes nothing suggesting expertise on the topic.) Did anyone follow the source links? (They all take us to the same research study.) Did anyone notice who funded this research on cell phones? (It was sponsored by a phone service company.) What could be problematic about that? As students sort out answers to the essential question, they practice and internalize the habits of thinking that thoughtful evaluation requires.

Practice, practice, practice!

Students examine a variety of sites independently and participate in a handful of group discussions about those. Finally, they apply their evaluation skills in an independent inquiry project.

By the end of this unit my students begin to approach the evaluation process differently—noticing, wondering, questioning, and investigating. As one student proclaimed, “I’ll never look at a website the same way again!” 

Angie Johnson is a technology integrationist, media specialist, and language arts teacher at Lakeshore Middle School in Stevensville, Michigan. National Board Certified in 2002, she has been an educator for over 25 years and is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University.

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

Do you love Bette Davis? Do Tia and Tamera Mowry bring back childhood memories? Perhaps Kevin Costner strikes your fancy? Would you like to see them all together at your own convenience? Check out storylineonline.net.

Storyline Online is one of two literacy education initiatives sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) Foundation, whose vision includes belief “in a world where all artists can realize their dreams and all children are empowered to create their own.” SAG-AFTRA not only supports its professional members as they navigate life as performance artists, but also provides public outreach through BookPALS (Performing Artists for Literacy in Schools) and Storyline Online. (BookPALS provides volunteer performers to read aloud in Title I classrooms throughout the United States.)

With the sponsorship of Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), Storyline Online provides opportunities for parents, children, and educators to listen to and view children’s classic storybooks read aloud by professional actors and actresses 24 hours a day. Each book is selected to appeal to the imagination and interest of children in grades pre-K to 5. The website features 30 read-aloud stories including memorable titles such as Knots on a Counting Rope, Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge and Thank You, Mr. Falker. Activity guides developed by a literacy specialist offer a summary of each story, activities to extend the read-aloud experience, and information about the author, illustrator, and the actor who performs the read-aloud.

Storyline Online read-aloud books can be viewed on YouTube, but in the event a school system blocks this website, the viewer can click on the Select Player button to access the video on SchoolTube or My VR Player. When viewed on YouTube, closed captioning is available. Each year, the Foundation works with publishers to add three or four new books to the collection. Future plans include offering bilingual stories, with an English–Spanish book coming soon.

With over 6 million views a month representing readers from over 228 countries and territories, Storyline Online offers a go-to resource for all those interested in promoting children’s literacy. And, if you love Storyline Online, be sure to check out additional digital resources in Dawn Poole and Whitney Donnelly’s blog post entitled “A Wealth of Digital Aids for Early Readers.”

Joan A. Rhodes is an associate professor and cochair of the Early/Elementary Education program at Virginia Commonwealth University.