Literacy Now

As an elementary teacher for 10 years, I dabbled in technology as a learning tool but always looked at it from the outside in. I used the Smartboard to present lessons and show my students fun math games. Technology was an insertion to my lesson, not a means to deeper learning.

Recently, I turned technology inside out and started to see it as a vehicle to move the content or unit of study to a deeper level. I asked myself: How can technology enhance the learning of my students and the learning process? How can technology support learning through collaboration, communication, and creation of information?

So my first graders and I embarked on a four-week journey into the unknown world of producing an iMovie together. I asked them: “What makes real reading?” To answer that question, we viewed videos of students demonstrating reading strategies. We evaluated these “texts” as an audience to see what worked and didn't work. These young learners identified that students who talked directly to the camera were easier to learn from than those who read from a script. They noticed showing examples of reading strategies was more informative than singing a catchy song. They thought deeply about the way others communicate through video.

After they had some schema of the film they would create, we stepped away from technology. Making the movie was our tool and motivation to communicate, and the goal was to share our learning and understanding of real reading.

During one work session I said to the reading specialist, “This video is going to be a mess! It is taking too much time out of our reading instruction.” Her response was clear: The students were internalizing learning and doing meaningful work. Having a supportive colleague who recognized the important work our students were doing allowed me to forge ahead. It validated the time and energy the class spent on the project.

Students wrestled with questions like What does visualization really mean? and How can I communicate what “looking for chunks” to decode really is? Through the process I did not give students answers but guided them and pushed them to be clear and articulate. It became a sort of formative assessment, where some partnerships moved independently and others needed recurring support and scaffolding. I didn’t know how the process was going to unfold and it didn’t matter. Learning existed in each moment. For every time I doubted the process, I was inspired by students’ thinking and processing.

Of course I’ve used an iPad before to record video, but never have I handed it over to 7-year-olds to do the real work. The morning I pulled the microphone out of the box and assembled the tripod, there was a buzz in the classroom as recording day finally arrived. The children rehearsed and revised on the spot, knowing their reading strategies and examples inside out. They asked to rerecord until they had it right—and would have kept going for perfection had I not cut them short. They saw the vulnerability in trying something for the first time and if they weren’t successful, they worked at finding a solution.

After editing, we shared our first film on Twitter and YouTube.

Even though I was convinced by this point that developing collaboration and communication skills through a digital medium was paramount to the product, the debut of our video was priceless. Parents thanked me for the “gift,” our school leader mistook us for third graders, and gurus in the literacy world retweeted us. The children had a real audience and received authentic feedback to solidify their learning. They recognized that people beyond our classroom walls know and use the same reading strategies. They felt famous for talking about reading.

Technology cannot be an add-on to the curriculum or an afterthought to boost motivation. It adds to learning and engages students in new ways, but becoming digitally literate is more than being able to manipulate the latest program. Technology changes in an instant, and we cannot equip our students for the tools and programs of tomorrow. This journey showed me I can endow my students with experiences that promote original thinking and creativity. I can create situations where they rely on one another to develop ideas and communicate. I moved from reading teacher to a facilitator of multiliterate learning. I led the way and set the vision, but the children did the real work.

Caroline Petrow is a first-grade teacher at Durham Academy in North Carolina.  She has 11 years teaching experience and a MEd Reading Education.  Follow Caroline and her students on Twitter. ​

It’s summer time, a time when many of us are looking for professional development opportunities to help us prepare for an exciting new school year. If you are in search of new ideas, explore the options at the SimpleK12 Professional Development in Your PJs website. The educator community is awesome and has much to offer in the form of webinars, resources, collaborative sharing, and more. Their mission:

…to help educators inspire their students, engage their learners, perfect their craft, and share their experiences to help others do the same. Never stop growing. Never stop learning. Never stop sharing. Online professional development. Anytime. Anywhere…even at home in your pajamas! We call it PD in your PJs. So put your bunny slippers on, and come join us!

I discovered this PD site on my mission for Google training. I was investigating professional development options and came across the SimpleK12 website. I signed up for a free all-day Google Apps webinar and was so impressed, I purchased a membership. There are many perks to the membership including professional development certificates after the completion of webinars, synchronous or archived. SimpleK12 offers more than 700 professional development hours and thousands of professional development webinars on hundreds of timely topics in education. The trainings target educators including administrators, media specialists, classroom teachers, literacy coaches, and technology specialists.

Webinars are facilitated by the energetic SimpleK12 team and are instructed by educators and specialists from the field who share practical and relevant information, skills, strategies, and best teaching practices that can be applied immediately. Webinar options include podcasting, digital citizenship, differentiated learning, counseling, Web tools, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). To view a listing of all webinars, download the SimpleK12 catalog or explore the website for opportunities. In addition to webinars, you can download classroom resources and e-books and participate in periodic free webinars.

There are three different membership options, Free Basic, Premium, or Group Membership. I purchased mine during my first all-day free Google webinar and received special pricing—membership deals are offered periodically. I can view 30-minute webinars in real time or watch archived webinars whenever and wherever I want.

SimpleK12 makes PD fun by awarding completion certificates, achievement badges, and Bunny Bucks you can spend in the SimpleK12 store, perhaps to purchase your own blue bunny slippers (the logo of the site that showcases it makes PD in your PJs possible). Follow SimpleK12 on Twitter, where they post excellent resources throughout the day. You can investigate free tech tools, live webinars, career opportunities, interesting articles, and much more. There is nothing like the blue bunny slipper alerts coming right to the palm of my hand. From one educator to another, I highly encourage you to investigate SimpleK12 and all it has to offer. This techie teacher rates SimpleK12 five blue bunny slippers up!

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 courses and trainings for students, faculty, and staff. Her mission is to help prepare teacher candidates for a successful career in education.

Mobile devices have permeated teaching and learning environments. Apps can improve preschool students’ math understanding, can positively impact science learning, and can be used to promote healthy behaviors. There are also a significant number of apps for literacy and language instruction. 

A challenge for literacy educators is finding good literacy apps, given that 2015 data show at least 1.6 million apps for Android devices and 1.5 million apps for iOS devices. A good app, in our definition, provides opportunities for pedagogically sound literacy instruction and provides adaptability to meet the needs of learners. It also, as Richard Beach and Jill Castek noted in "Use of apps and devices for fostering mobile learning of literacy practices,” is supported by research demonstrating its effectiveness and addresses “individual differences.”

Pedagogical stances

Given this need, we began to explore literacy apps, literacy app integration in the classroom, and the ways in which literacy educators are introduced to apps. In the winter of 2016, we observed a second-grade teacher from a local elementary school. We used an interval recording methodology to document (a) teacher instruction, (b) app use, and (c) student engagement. For this particular project, we were also interested in how students with disabilities engaged with apps.

One of the most interesting outcomes dealt with pedagogical stances. Educators have teaching beliefs and strategies. However, remembering that mobile apps come with their own set of pedagogical stances and strategies is also important. We found interesting differences in engagement when the teacher’s pedagogical stance matched or misaligned with the pedagogical stance of the app.

Our data suggested the following:

1. There is less student engagement when the teacher matched direct instruction (e.g., writing a scripted presentation) with an app aimed at content creation (e.g., Haiku Deck) or when she matched exploration (e.g., choice reading) with an app oriented around a task (e.g., Kids A-Z).  
2. We found higher levels of engagement when the teacher matched direction instruction (e.g., reviewing spelling words) with a task orientation app (e.g., Spelling City).
3. The most student engagement occurred when the teacher matched exploration goals (e.g., creating comics) with apps supporting content creation (e.g., Toontastic).

SpedApps and next steps for teachers

Educators can benefit from a deeper understanding of their pedagogy and the learning and the teaching strategies of apps.  Educators also profit from seeing lists of quality apps as well as models of app integration. However, apps are not always explicit in what they offer or how they can be used in the classroom. 

With these concerns in mind, we worked with an interdisciplinary team to create SpedApps. The website, a database of over 400 apps, provides a number of important features for teachers, parents, and learners. Searching for apps can include sorting by cost, name, content area, learning need, or physical development, or they can be searched directly by title. Once an app is selected, users see additional information about whether the app includes practice, feedback, progress monitoring, usability affordances, and customization. This website has an editor review, but more important, educators, teachers, and parents can create a login and provide their own review of apps (and suggest new apps). 

Our research on technology has suggested that it’s not a question of if a form of technology works—it’s more important to ask under what conditions  that form of technology works. In the example provided, a teacher found success matching her pedagogical strategies with the pedagogy of the app. SpedApps is one example; regardless of the tool used, we encourage researchers and educators to benefit from crowdsourcing when and how apps might be used for literacy instruction.

Kristine E. Pytash is an associate professor at Kent State University. Richard E. Ferdig is the Summit Professor of Learning Technologies and Professor, IT, Research Center for Educational Technologies. Enrico Gandolfi is a research fellow at Kent State University. Rachel Mathews is a doctoral student at Kent State University. This work was funded, in part, by a corporate gift from AT&T.

Instructional goals should drive teachers’ approaches to technology integration and implementation. Not only is this important in meeting teaching and learning objectives, but we’ve also found that students are more engaged when a teacher’s pedagogical beliefs are aligned with the technology being used. 

Often educators are advised to first consider their instructional goals and then find a digital tool that will help them in satisfying their teaching needs. However, we’ve found that by exploring digital tools and apps, teachers can see new possibilities for writing instruction. Therefore, learning about digital tools can act as an impetus for considering alternative approaches for strengthening writing skills. 

At Kent State’s Research Center for Educational Technology, we have the privilege of collaborating with local teachers and students to integrate technology into their education and learning. Teacher and student cohorts visit our technologically advanced classroom for six weeks, five days a week, for two hours each day. This spring, we observed a second-grade teacher as she received situated professional development for integrating technology into her literacy instruction while her students had opportunities to explore digital tools for writing.  On the basis of that implementation, we offer suggestions for programs and mobile applications that might best help educators facilitate writing activities and assignments in their classrooms.

Preparing students for writing

• Why It’s Important: Although the writing process is not a lockstep, there is strong evidence to support that students are more successful as writers when they understand it. Therefore, engaging students in prewriting and organizing activities before they start the first draft improves the quality of their writing.
• Digital Tools: Digital notebooks, such as Penzu, can serve as writing journals for students to generate ideas. In addition, applications like Popplet and Padlet can provide a space where students may independently or collaboratively brainstorm about topics or genre elements. By using these digital tools, students can make their planning visible as they can easily organize and reorganize ideas. 

Multimodal compositions

• Why It’s Important: Technology is changing how people write. By composing with images, audio, and video, students learn to use multiple modes to convey meaning. For students who might be considered struggling writers, composing with a variety of modes can also help students be more strategic in their rhetorical decision making.
• Digital Tools: There are a number of apps and digital tools that allow students to produce multimodal compositions. Haiku Deck, Buncee, and Adobe Spark are a few tools we routinely use with teachers and students. However, we would also encourage teachers to think about how programming and coding with apps such as Daisy the Dinosaur and Scratch Junior might also help their students engage in digital storytelling. 

Publishing students’ writing

• Why It’s Important:  When students publish their writing for a wide audience, they have opportunities to receive authentic feedback. This process develops their writerly voice: They become more aware of who will be reading their composition and tailor their voice according to the purpose, the context, and the audience. 
• Digital Tools: Digital platforms, such as Edmodo and Seesaw, are spaces for students to share their writing and then receive feedback.

Conclusion

Apps should align with pedagogy; however, teachers can reimagine how they can implement engaging, research-based writing instruction by exploring digital tools. This reimagination can also be facilitated through conversations with others; teachers grow by seeing the best practices of others. In addition to providing some examples in this blog, we also developed and have now opened access to SpedApps, a database with over 400 apps. This resource is not only a collection of mobile apps for content instruction (e.g., literacy) but is also a community where teachers can share the promise and pitfalls of mobile-based instruction as well as add their own favorite apps. 

Kristine E. Pytash is an associate professor at Kent State University. Richard E. Ferdig is the Summit Professor of Learning Technologies and Professor, IT, Research Center for Educational Technologies. Enrico Gandolfi is a research fellow at Kent State University. Rachel Mathews is a doctoral student at Kent State University. This work was funded, in part, by a corporate gift from AT&T.

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

Much of what we know about the powerful literacy experiences youths can have when participating in online fan communities comes from studies of exceptional cases—highly engaged youths with passion, access to technology, and specialized interests that lead them to “geek out” in digital spaces. From this work we know about Jack, a 13-year-old Australian boy, who developed technical and literacy design skills as he participated in Hunger Games fan sites, and about how Heather, a teenager in the United States, who rallied her global network of fan writers to defeat Warner Bros. studios as it threatened legal action against Harry Potter fans. My own research has relied on exceptional youths making recommendations for how teachers might support their students in writing for and with online audiences.  

But what about a more typical young writer? What else might we learn by digging into the experiences of a less exceptional case? Answering these questions motivated my analysis of one teenager’s participation in The Sims Writers’ Hangout, published in Research in the Teaching of English in February.

Though The Hangout has since shut down, for more than 18 months, Angela, who at the time was in 9th and 10th grades, was a regular participant on this site for fans who used The Sims videogames to write stories. In its online discussion forums, Hangout members shared their Sims fanfiction—multimodal, digital texts that pair images taken in the game with narratives that authors write (see an example of Sims fanfiction created with The Sims 4)—and readers posted feedback. I observed and interviewed Angela as she joined The Hangout, started sharing her Sims fanfiction, received critical responses, and then shaped her stories to meet the expectations of this online fan community.

Unlike past fanfiction research findings that illustrate how participating in an online community connects writers with a passionate audience or gives them access to identities as writers, one unique insight from my research was that Angela needed the other members of The Hangout to even be a Sims fanfiction writer. She leveraged her participation in this fan space to access people who helped her design Sims fanfiction in a variety of ways. Here, I share how Angela outsourced part of her Sims fanfiction design work as one illustrative example.   

Although she came to The Hangout with an affinity for The Sims and for writing, Angela ran into challenges meeting this community’s expectations for high-quality digital images because of her technology limitations. She did not have Adobe Photoshop and acknowledged that using freely available software made “image editing…really tedious.” Angela’s solution was to outsource this aspect of designing Sims fanfiction; she posted messages in the forum asking other Hangout members to provide her with pictures for her stories. In one such message, she shared a blurry image, saying “I'm going to need some help.” Two Hangout members volunteered, and Angela had a clearer, more stylized cover image when she finally shared the completed story.

What relevance do Angela’s experiences have for literacy teachers? As the standards governing many literacy classrooms now integrate digital literacies into curriculum expectations, it has become more important for teachers to consider how to support students’ writing for online audiences. I continue to advocate for educators to find ways to connect youth writers with online audiences who can shape their work. Although many already share students’ writing on a classroom website or blog, those audiences rarely extend beyond readers already connected to that class (i.e., other students, teachers, parents). Instead, I argue that teachers design digital writing tasks to ask students to share with existing, authentic online audiences, such as those in online writing communities. Doing so will connect young writers to collaborators who may shape their writing in meaningful ways.

Jayne C. Lammers is an assistant professor and director of the secondary English teacher preparation program at the University of Rochester. She can also be reached on Twitter.

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