Literacy Now

As an assistant professor whose interests in literacy intersect with technology and mobile media, I get a lot of questions from aspiring teachers who wonder how to support students as they learn to write with technology. My experiences have helped me realize the importance of emphasizing process and experience over product.

Collaborative writing with wearable technologies

This summer, I cotaught a creative writing residency for rising third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students as part of a larger camp sponsored by a local National Writing Project site. The camp’s goals were (1) to cultivate the writerly life within our students, and (2) to flex our own muscles as English language arts educators by deeply reflecting on the process and experience students were having as writers rather than the finished product they composed. From haikus to transmodal graphic novels, we watched our students develop a fluency for writing that was fueled by engaging the “what if” question. This resulted in a collaborative piece the group composed to illustrate what happens when intermediate writers remediate a classic picture book with wearable technologies (a GoPro, in particular).

Apart from individual journals, pieces, and projects, fostering a collaborative spirit and culture among our budding writers was important. We also wanted to transform their thinking about revision away from something that involved “red marks and right spellings” and toward revision as the process of adapting and rethinking a message. To do this, we developed what Robert Yagelski calls a culture of writing as experience—as a way of being. Arguing that texts function as experiences, we highlighted how meaning could change significantly through the act of remediation, or the re-presentation of material in one medium through another. With my own interests in cultivating a disposition for sonic composition with writers and the liberty to play with composing under the guise of creative writing, I engaged the class with The Listening Walk Project (TLWP).

This project involved a collaborative piece of writing whose goal was to remediate Paul Showers’s famous picture book, The Listening Walk, by using audio and video to highlight the group’s collective experience of walking through the campus community.

Modal memoirs of remediating digital writing

In the earliest stages of TLWP, we introduced students to Showers’s book, discussed the process of remediation, and then voted on focal elements from The Listening Walk that we wanted to highlight as important in reimagining our own piece. Sound, video, and perspective were those most voted for by the group. Sound would provide coherence across Showers’s piece and ours, video enabled us to explore the features of wearable writing with the GoPro, and perspective became important to our young writers and the process of collaborative composing. The larger group disliked that Showers’s text presented us only with the young girl’s perspective. Some argued, “We never get to see what the dog sees!” whereas others asked, “What does the Dad hear, is it different?” These lines of questions continued to inspire our thinking and writing as we collectively embarked on our own listening walk.

TLWP process for remediation

Capturing over two hours of video, with each student as “lead author” and wearing the GoPro for 10 minutes, we came back to our classroom to debrief the experience of wearable writing. One of the first comments students made in watching the larger video was the need to fast-forward moments of whole-group walking: “That’s boring to watch.” Using FinalCut Pro, I acted as lead reviser to speed up travel between locations. Then, in groups of two, we cut the larger video down to a manageable 60 minutes. I worked with each group to have students note individual spots for revision. Some wanted text overlaid, adding figurative language to highlight the perspective their GoPro and wearable writing captured.

Others wanted to include some narration, using audio as an orienting device in between frames. These “notes to the director” were taken together to revise the larger video as a group. After we collectively revised, we watched the film in its entirety, now down to 11 minutes total. At this point, the collaborative revision was less about individual frames and monuments captured along the walk and more about coherence. Are transitions similar to one another? How do we account for shifts in perspective? Taken together, these small moments led to larger conversations, indicative of what I call a modal memoir. Alongside my coteacher, we used modal artifacts from the cutting room floor, the b-roll if you will, to highlight the rhetorical choices students made concerning audience, delivery, and purpose.

Later, when students reflected on the process, many shared how the GoPro felt on their body as part of the writing experience. As Goldie, a fifth-grade girl wrote, “TLWP wasn’t about the video, it was about the group walking together. The experience. We felt writing together.”

Listening to everyday implications

As their teacher, I realized that collaborative composing with wearable writing (in this case, translated through the GoPro technologies) fostered the ability to focus on process over product. It cultivated the experience that is inherent in all forms of composition. Whether through swiping, clicking, and tapping a tablet or physically shifting your body so as to capture new perspective, emerging digital technologies offer new opportunities not only for remediation, but also to cultivate a writerly identity.

As you seek to engage your students in their own writerly lives, consider how remediating forms, genres, and projects through a digital lens may offer new insight into who and how they are as writers. Encouraging students to draw, write, and compose their own modal memoirs throughout the year inspires them to consider revision not as a list of skill steps but as an experience well worth having.

Jon M. Wargo is an assistant professor of Teacher Education and core faculty in Reading, Literacy, and Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

As a K–12 literacy supervisor who also serves as a literacy coach, I work closely with teachers in grades 2–6 who teach from Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study Series. In line with our district’s mission to give learners more voice and choice, teachers frequently incorporate technology into writing workshop, in order to differentiate approaches to writing, to add depth to informational and argumentative writing, and to support conferring with writers. As an administrator, I have found this to be a huge benefit to both our writing instruction and achieving the district mission.

Across district classrooms, writers enjoy choice, facilitated through technology. Helping to overcome some writers’ reluctance to physically write and rewrite, word processing has given writers the opportunity to efficiently make changes to their pieces and improve how our youngest writers approach the revision process. In the words of one second grader, “I like when I don’t have to erase. I can just backspace.” A fifth grader said, “It makes [writing] more efficient. Even if I don’t have the best handwriting, people can understand my writing when I type.”

Technology also enables writers to engage in learning about new topics through safe digital resources. Writers in grades K–3 access PebbleGo and, through their school libraries, conduct research for their writing. They also use Wonderopolis to explore topics and then write about their wonders.

At the primary level, writers have researched a range of topics, written scripts, and then published their work through ChatterPix, an iPad app that allows learners to record themselves reading their writing while making their artwork come to life. Here’s a great example of how a kindergarten class used ChatterPix to publish their research about sharks. In a similar way, fifth graders across our district used Blabberize to present their informational writing about explorers. Writers across the grade levels appreciate opportunities to use technology to present their writing in different formats. Administrators are grateful that students are learning about the research and writing process in an engaging manner.

Sixth-grade teachers in my district ask students to incorporate digital tools into their writing to publish more interactively using Discovery Education’s BoardBuilder. The results are two-fold: this technology allows writers to create pieces that look like the writing they see on the Internet (e.g., the real-world writing that Kelly Gallagher recommends in his book, Write Like This), and encourages writers to analyze photographs and videos to determine which elements best support their writing purposes.

Integrating technology also allows writers to see writing as a creative process. For their narrative writing projects, secondary writers participate in the National Novel Writing Month. Last year, writers in sixth grade published their books independently, and each writer took a published version of his or her novel home. Students were thrilled at having become published authors. 

Where I have seen technology support writing workshop the most is with the use of Google Docs. In as early as third grade, when writers draft in Google Docs, teachers can provide feedback electronically and more quickly. I have observed teachers with iPad in hand, roaming the room, reading writing students shared with them, and then sitting down at a writer’s conference to discuss what they read or what the writer flagged as a trouble spot. The ongoing digital feedback allows teachers to comment alongside writers' flash drafts.

Finally, these digital conferences can occur between peers. Conferring is a powerful means for supporting writers’ growth, and technology provides teachers and students more accessibility and formative feedback. One seventh grader shared that he likes highlighting part of the text and using the comment feature in Google Docs to pose a question for his writing partner to consider. He also reported that comments from his classmates about his own writing have helped him make useful revisions.

Writers who use digital tools to actively engage with the research and creation process value opportunities to enhance their messages with multimodal elements. They also appreciate extending their writing time and their opportunities to confer with and receive feedback from peers and teachers outside of actual writing workshop time. Overall, I have seen technology enhance the outstanding teaching and writing that is taking place within the writing workshop model.

Aileen P. Hower is the K–12 Literacy/ESL Supervisor for South Western School District. She also coordinates the Eduspire and Penn State York Summer Literacy Institutes and teaches graduate level reading courses for Cabrini University and Eduspire. In addition to teaching, she is the vice president for the Keystone State Reading Association and conference chair for the KSRA 50th Annual Conference in 2017. You can find her on Twitter or on her blog.

When you look across almost two decades of the 21st century, you can see how much the curriculum has been modified to include digital literacy and digital skills, and it becomes clear that students need to be responsible digital citizens. This concept can be introduced in tandem in the classroom, but students will likely need plenty of practice in and out of school to really master them.

One strategy to increase students’ awareness of how to use social media appropriately is to prepare case studies generated from the news that illustrate common misuses of social media by celebrities or even regular folks. By examining other people’s behavior in relation to their own, students can learn to think more critically about what it means to be a responsible digital citizen and how to identify the contradictions involved. Cases like these can prove quite valuable because young people tend to look for models in society and then emulate what they do.

There are examples all over the world that can be used as teachable moments for students.

During sporting events such as the Summer Olympics, multinational companies often advertise their products with inspirational messages, for example Proctor & Gamble’s video showing the sacrifices athletes made to become an Olympian and the unconditional support they received from their families.

On the flipside of that coin during the Summer Games in 2012, the Switzerland soccer team lost against North Korea. One of the Swiss players was furious and decided to vent on Twitter. He insulted the players of the other team with racist comments. The next day, he was expelled from the Olympic team.

After learning about these real events, ask students to draw connections between what the video showed and the efforts each athlete took to be part of an Olympic team. Yet, even after all of this work, a young athlete is no longer able to compete professionally because of his reckless actions and misuse of Twitter.

A second example took place during an official visit to China in 2015. The former president of Argentina made a sarcastic remark via Twitter mocking the Chinese accent. The diplomatic community was appalled by this president’s behavior. Yet this behavior was applauded among her mass of followers who would never dare to question her actions because the great majority did not exercise critical thinking to analyze the connection between what she did and the negative international diplomatic implications. The message for students here is that respect should be expressed, even in cyberspace.

Offer students newspapers, articles, or videos about events like these and encourage them to infer what repercussions a leader’s digital actions may have had on internal and external affairs.

Digital citizenship is a concept requiring respect for others and oneself, reflection, and lots of practice. Our students need opportunities to discuss and reflect on the inconsistencies between the digital citizenship skills they learn about at school and what they see others do with social media outside of school. Case studies can offer a wide range of different examples to make these discussions memorable and meaningful.

M. Carolina Orgnero is an assistant professor at Universidad de Río Cuarto where she teaches Education and Technology courses in the English language program (TESOL) to undergraduate and graduate students. She also teaches EFL Pedagogy to preservice teachers at ISFD Juan Zorrilla de San Martín in Córdoba, Argentina.

Lately I have been reflecting on the disconnect between educational initiatives about the role of technology in literacy and learning and the realities that exist in some schools.

The past five years or so have been characterized by major educational shifts brought about by new policies and educational initiatives. A common characteristic of all of these initiatives is the importance of pedagogy for preparing 21st-century literate students, not just for integrating technology in the classroom. Tools alone do not teach, teachers do.

The Common Core State Standards include expectations about using media and technology and developing students’ digital skills. Embracing multimedia, reading multimodal texts, and using digital tools in classroom instruction are necessary for students to become college and career ready.

Future Ready Schools, a recent U.S. Department of Education initiative, is designed to provide guidance and support to school districts about making technology infrastructure, technology integration, and professional development decisions.

The 2016 National Education Technology Plan provides a framework for reimagining the role of technology in transforming student learning. It calls for equity, accessibility and connectivity as well as resources that can make learning for all students possible all the time, anywhere. The plan also promotes active use of technology and highlights the role of technology in assessing student learning.

The 2016 ISTE Standards position technology at the heart of teaching and learning. The standards also call for the development of an educational framework that redefines learning in a connected world; prepares students to become literate, creative communicators and digital citizens, critical and computational thinkers, collaborative problem solvers, and lifelong learners; empowers students to take ownership of their learning and construct knowledge; and equips students to compete in a global economy.

In terms of sample realities, these are perspectives of four educators I have been working with about their experiences with digital literacies and learning:

• “I am an assistant principal at a Title I elementary school. Although summative assessments require the use of a computer, most of what happens in the classrooms involves paper and pencil and very little technology. I have two concerns: (a) How can I close the digital divide for students who do not have access to technology and the Internet at home? The digital divide affects the literacy achievement gap. (b) Many students struggle with navigating the digital environment when taking assessments online. How can we best prepare students both in content and in digital literacy skills?”

• “I am a writing coach at an elementary school. For the past couple of years, I have been supporting teachers’ and students’ writing needs. I know that digital literacy involves one’s ability to use a variety of tools for reading and writing. But how can we help teachers integrate technology in their writing instruction in strategic ways? I think we need protocols for best technology integration use. Digital tools can help students brainstorm, share and evaluate each other’s writing, and collaborate in project-based learning.”

• “I am a literacy coach at an elementary school. I struggle with how to help teachers to be digital readers and writers. Literacy coaches play a key role in shaping teachers’ literacy practices and creating a common language about literacy. We can model innovative literacy pedagogies but we cannot do it alone. We need principals and teachers to collaboratively create a vision for future-ready teaching and learning.”   

• “I teach seventh-grade intensive reading at a digital school. My students and I are using a digital curriculum. All students at my school have a tablet they use at school and at home. Although technology is present throughout our day, many of my students struggle with reading and comprehending digital texts, navigating digital contexts, and developing critical thinking skills. The digital curriculum provides me with strategies and resources but I need professional development on how to develop my students’ digital literacy skills and abilities. The curriculum alone is not enough for teacher and student success. I have a lot of questions about what teaching and learning looks like in other digital schools.”

Leading, teaching, and learning in the digital age require engagement at many levels. We have to come together as literacy educators, researchers, policymakers, and community members to collaboratively problem solve about making digital literacies and learning a priority in preservice and inservice teacher education and in digital leadership. To impact student learning, we will need to collaborate with all stakeholders to develop digital ecosystems that support innovative pedagogies for preparing 21st-century learners.

Vicky Zygouris-Coe is a professor of reading education at the University of Central Florida.

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

As a former high school teacher who taught at a Title I school, getting a call from a graduate who seeks advice as he or she attempts to navigate the challenge that is college is not uncommon. So I wasn’t surprised to get a call from my former Associated Students Government President who was a junior at UCLA. He was hoping to get the summer internship at Hulu. As he was completing the application, he realized that Hulu wanted a personal digital portfolio. Despite my telling all my students repeatedly to set up an engaging personal website, to be active on Twitter, and to maintain a robust LinkedIn profile, he did not think it was that important for him to do so until it was too late.

Some readers might wonder why I would encourage anyone, especially high school students, to create an online presence. After all, if The New York Times’ article, “European Court Lets Users Erase Records on Web” is any indication, wouldn’t it just be better for my students to not have a social media account or a website?

I began working on creating positive digital footprints because of a post I saw on a website called Rate My Teachers 10 years ago. Although they were mostly positive, seeing posts about me as a teacher without my input prompted me to create a personal website. I did not want someone else’s perception of myself and my work to be the only thing on the Internet. It is true that I have received more than my share of junk e-mails, but I continue to collaborate and connect with researchers and teachers all around the world.

Social media and getting a job

According to the 2014 Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey, 73% of employers used social media as their primary recruiting tool, and 94% of those used LinkedIn as their primary tool. For highly skilled tech-related jobs, the percentage increases. Although many employers said they rarely care about a candidate’s political statements, their negative perceptions are strong against illegal drug references (83%), sexual posts (70%), spelling and grammar errors (66%), and profanity (63%) on any social media platforms. With the advancement of big data analysis tools, teaching our students to take control over what is being posted on the Internet is more important than ever! Here are a few things to remember to share with students.

• Whether you want to or not, you will make digital footprints. Once I spoke with a teacher about the need to maintain a professional website. She said, “I don’t want people to know about me, so I don’t have Facebook or any social media accounts.” I told her to Google herself. Needless to say, she was not happy with what she found. She realized that her students, friends, and family members have posted a lot of information without her knowing. For some teachers who have not considered themselves to be public figures, knowing that our salaries, work places, and our licenses are all accessible by the public under The Freedom of Information Act could come as a shock. Our work e-mails and browsing history when we access information on our work-issued devices can also become public. I don’t know about you, but I would rather maintain my professional website where I have control over what is being posted to be the first result to come up if someone searched my information. This leads me to my next point and example.

• If you don’t, someone else will tell your story. Take control. At the recent International Literacy Association (ILA) Conference in Boston, an attendee asked me if I had a business card with my information. Before I could answer her, she said, “Never mind. I will just Google you.” I was thankful I have maintained my personal website and a YouTube channel for many years. In fact, my first presentation at the ILA conference (then the International Reading Association) three years ago came about when another researcher found me on YouTube and wanted to include me in her presentation.

• Everything is permanent. Even the things you share on Snapchat. Many of my students believe that disappearing display on Snapchat means that the information is gone forever. I always tell them it is gone until they are running for political office or applying to become an FBI agent. I tell them unless they want whatever they shared to be on the homepage of Yahoo, MSN, or Bing or as a Google Doodle, they shouldn’t share it. Ever. I also inform them they should remember that having a Wi-Fi–enabled device means that the information is posted somewhere or shared with someone as soon as they take photos or videos on that device.

• Every post tells a story. Make it count. Because everything is nearly permanent online, one should be careful of what one chooses to share. I used to tell my students that I am an advocate for freedom of speech, which doesn’t guarantee them freedom of judgment from others. As the Jobvite Survey shows, all employers judge potential candidates on the basis of their social media behaviors.

• Be discreet on different tools, but keep in mind of the larger online persona. Although I have all the major social media accounts, I use different tools for different purposes. For example, I post only professional information on LinkedIn and Twitter as I consider it to be a professional space. On the other hand, I use Facebook and Instagram to share my personal activities only with my friends and family. It is no different from choosing the right type of literature genre to express one’s feelings and ideas. Sometimes one needs to write poems whereas other times one must write an essay! So why not consider it before your next post?

Exercising digital citizenship

We all live in a digitally enriched world where one’s knowledge and information have become an important commodity for success. You will notice now many major news outlets such as NBC, ABC, and CNN reported what was posted on the Facebook accounts of the victims of Orlando shootings or the slain Dallas police officers. You hear daily what was tweeted by presidential candidates.

Whether you consider yourself to be a public figure, taking control over your digital persona is a must. And teachers must teach their students to exercise good digital citizenship. For more information on how to help your students, please check out Common Sense Media.

Most important, remember that your digital footprint is your personal brand.

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.