Literacy Now

Each day tweets, blog posts, and other digital media suggest a myriad of new notions and emerging possibilities for digital teaching, thinking, learning, creating, and communicating in 21st-century classrooms. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts our technological capabilities will frame the coming 25 years as one of the most exciting times in human history. This excitement, however, often loses its luster as teachers seek to integrate technology into their instructional practices with insufficient resources and aligned professional development.

What might be the factors or influences that encourage teachers to take risks involved not only to navigate the murky waters of technology integration, but also to put tech tools into the hands of their students? Across time and cultures, personal stories have transformed the minds, motivations, and actions of others. For this reason, our story of Maya offers inspiration and lessons learned for teachers with similar struggles. A fourth-grade teacher who sought to introduce her students to Web 2.0 research and publication, Maya persisted in challenging school administrative policies and was willing to learn to use an online publishing tool alongside her students (rather than teaching them how to use it), which were key factors leading to her successful efforts. Illustrating the evolution of emerging digital applications, the free online publication tool employed in her story was soon bought by a for-profit competitor.

So Maya and her students searched during the coming year for another online publishing option and their quest to navigate and publish together continued. However, the particular venue employed by this teacher and her students was not at the center of her story. Of greater importance was how Maya’s experiences aligned with guidelines for how teachers might use 21st-century literacies realistically in their classrooms, offered by eighth-grade teacher and framework guideline contributor, Sandy Hayes. They include the following:

• Do the usual work in a different way: Take a project or assignment you already do and use one tool to give the project a digital twist.
• Use the tools to learn: Don’t learn just to use the tools.
• Engage in meaningful assessment: Assess the work against skills and content learning, not by the finished product.
• Expect chaos: You are the nexus of chaos, so develop procedures to minimize the number of students clamoring for your help.
• Expect Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong probably will.
• Acknowledge your students as resources: You’ve heard the saying, “And the children shall lead you.” It’s truer than ever.

Meanwhile, as the spectrum of what was, what is, and what can be continues to broaden possibilities for literacy learners, motivated classroom teachers such as Maya persist and lead the way in implementing new literacies and pedagogies in schools. Savvy Media Education Lab professional developers such as Renee Hobbs are tuning into the power of such teacher motivations and how they shape digital learning. Using the Media Education Lab tool What’s Your Motivation?, made available via Powerful Voices for Kids, teachers gain better understandings of how their attitudes about and motivations for digital learning have an impact on instructional practices. Cutting-edge professional development tools like these have the potential to harness technology capabilities of the coming quarter century, leading to literacy teaching and learning that may dazzle the likes of Ray Kurzweil in years to come.

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

I knew things were going to become interesting when I watched an animated dinosaur climb onto the chair in front of Dr. William Teale and then hop onto the conference room floor to wander among the legs of the other attendees. The dinosaur demonstration at the Literacy Research Association annual meeting in Carlsbad, CA, was a conference highlight. In a 90-minute session, Frank Serafini, Dani Kachorsky, Earl Auilera, and Elisabeth Gee offered an introduction to the changing world of children’s picture books that was insightful and entertaining and that raised many questions among the session participants. We wondered how new forms of picture books might have an impact on students’ understanding of the text. Does it matter whether students read an original print-based text or view the digitally enhanced version first? Conference sessions that leave the participants wondering and ready to explore new instructional and research possibilities are extraordinary—this was one of those sessions.

According to Serafini and his colleagues, today’s picture books are changing as they take advantage of the affordances of technology. Children’s books are offered not only in print-based formats, but also are available increasingly in digital formats, which allow youngsters to read text enhanced by audio, images, and embedded game-like elements. Picture books are benefitting from an increase in the use of augmented reality features that was predicted in the 2011 Horizon Report. As the report noted, mainstream use of augmented reality, or the overlaying of digital sensory information on the real-world environment, was only two or three years away. When looking at a picture book that is enhanced with augmented reality features, one would think one was looking at a normal children’s book, but once a mobile device or webcam is placed in front of the page, 3D elements, sounds, and games begin to appear on the device.

Serafini described an emerging typology for use as we consider the strengths and weaknesses of augmented reality picture books for instruction. The typology ranges from books, like those by William Joyce, that modify the print-based text by adding animation to existing objects, characters, and settings (The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore) to those that employ game-based augmentations by adding game modules to the story narrative (The Numberlys). In the five classifications of the typology, those books that provide story elements discernible only through the use of a digital device may pose a potential ethical dilemma or concern for educators. Because these forms of augmentation modify texts by adding information that is not visible to readers of the printed text, they may limit readers who cannot gain access to the additional information. For instance, imagine a text about a planet that does not share its image until readers activate an iPad app. This reliance on technology to access elements that support the text’s narrative seems inequitable. Educators must ask themselves whether this type of augmentation increases the chasm between the haves and have-nots in digital learning environments.

The Digital Divide is a continuing concern in the field of educational technology. Although an argument may be made that access is improving, a 2015 presentation by Lee Rainie, the director of Internet, Science, and Technology research at the Pew Research Center, shows that gaps in Internet access, especially with mobile devices, still exist. These differences, based on 15 years of Pew Research Center research data, demonstrate the significant impact of household income, educational level, race, age, ethnicity, and community type on access to the affordances of new technologies. The necessity of using mobile devices for interacting with some augmented reality picture books requires educators to consider student access when planning to incorporate this literature in the classroom. Although it is suggested that educators shift from examining the quality of individual augmented texts to how students experience content across the multiple available platforms of a picture book, the lack of access to the books and some elements within augmented reality books should not be ignored.

Joan Rhodes is an associate professor and interim chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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

When we gather as teachers, hearing classroom “war stories” tossed about as we share our successes and struggles is common. We often feel beat up by mandates and practices inside our schools along with negative opinions from outside school walls, and many of us are seeking validation for our hard work.

However, if we want the practices and opinions to change so that we can provide the educational experiences our students deserve, we must be the ones to speak up and be willing to facilitate that change.

Like many of you, I did not become a teacher to become entangled with politics. I wanted to be in my classroom working face-to-face with my students. However, as more and more mandates infiltrated my classroom and pulled my focus away from sound practice, I kept asking, “Shouldn’t someone speak up?”

I went in search of answers. What I discovered was that those who were not with students day in and day out were the ones who were making the decisions, and they did not see the impact that those decisions had on students. We are on the front lines, so we need to speak up for our students.

For years, I heard the word advocacy brandished about; images of angry protesters on a picket line sprang to my mind. That’s when a wise person told me, “You’re an educator, the expert. Just educate those around you on best practices. Share your stories from the classroom.”

Stories are told every day about schools. Unfortunately, a vast majority are told by individuals who have no idea what teaching and learning look like in today’s digital age.

The good news is that we know what good teaching looks like. We experience it every day. We could fill volumes with the stories of our students’ accomplishments—both their struggles and their victories—and these are the stories that need to be told.

So where do we begin? How can we reach decision makers effectively while fostering change for students? Here are three ideas that I have found to be effective:

1. Build a network. Look around the school community. Find the people who serve on city council, the board of education, chamber of commerce, or in their church. Find those who own businesses or write for local publications. Every community, even those in areas with low socioeconomic levels, has these leaders. Reach out and invite them to become guest readers or provide extra sets of hands for classroom activities. Get them into schools so they can see what learning looks like. This also sets you up as an educational expert in the community. When a question or issue comes up, who will they reach out to first? You.

2. Stay in touch. Once you have built a network, stay in touch. Often. Memories in today’s digital world fade quickly. Discover how these individuals stay updated. If it’s e-mail, create an e-mail group. If it’s through social media, connect your class with them and encourage them to follow you back. Then every time something notable occurs, send out an e-mail or a post. Share your students’ stories of success and triumph (or let your students share them). Share victories big and small. Include photos, videos, projects, and student writing. Make the members of your network feel like they are an integral part of your learning environment.

3. Reach beyond. Building your local network lays a strong foundation for change. However, decisions often are made beyond our community’s borders. We need to reach policymakers, and often that means legislators. They need to become a part of our network as well. They need to see what true learning looks like in our classrooms. This is the step that most often causes trepidation because most of us prefer to stay away from politics. However, connecting with legislators can have the largest impact. When legislation arises that could affect education, reach out. Make a phone call. Write a letter. Most legislators admit they will never open an e-mail, but a handwritten note will get their attention.

Does this take time? Yes. Is it worth the investment we make? Absolutely. Like anything else, we need to remember that everything we do needs to be for our students. It’s not about us, but what is best for our learners.

Julie D. Ramsay is a National Board Certified Teacher and the author of “Can We Skip Lunch and Keep Writing?” Collaborating in Class and Online, Grades 3–8. She teaches ELA to sixth graders at Rock Quarry Middle School in Tuscaloosa, AL. She also travels the United States to speak, present, and facilitate workshops in applying technology to support authentic learning. Read her blog, eduflections.

Note taking has been around since the Bronze Age, with our ancestors using ideographic symbols to convey information before moving onto a more uniform means of communication based on an alphabetic system. Similarly, the tools used for writing began with dirt, stone, metal, or wood and evolved into using pencils, pens with scrolls, tablets, loose-leaf paper, and notebooks. Now we are one and a half decades into the 21st century, where we find this generation of students much more technologically savvy. Why is this noteworthy, pardon the pun? As teachers, we tend to teach the way we were taught, which most likely was taking notes using the more traditional form of pen, pencil, paper, or notebooks. In contrast, the population we are teaching is much more comfortable capturing notes using electronic resources. A major challenge in our jobs is to stay current with new technologies that can be used to enhance and extend learning in our classrooms, so we need to be willing to move outside our comfort zones to actually using these technologies. Instead of asking students to read and annotate with a pencil and paper, we can ask them to read and think with electronic tools that allow them to do more than just add words in the margin. The electronic tools enable students to add notes easily using text, drawings, pictures, audio, or even video. The good news is there are apps for that!

One option for note taking is Microsoft OneNote (available for download via Apple App for free). This app enables the user to create a digital notebook that includes pictures, text files, PowerPoints, PDFs, and links to favorite sites. Files can be synced to the cloud and accessed by laptop, iPhone, iPad, or other device, and your students (and you) can easily share lecture notes. OneNote is also a great productivity tool because of the focus on typing, handwriting notes, and audio recording. Students can organize information by using notebooks, tabs, and pages. You can learn more in this review of OneNote as well as a more detailed beginner’s guide created by Microsoft to help you find your way around the interface.  

Notability by Ginger Labs provides a second option for taking notes. This app is compatible with iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch (available for download via Apple App store for $5.99) and you can find a short tutorial here for creating and annotating notes. With this app, students can create memorable notes by combining handwriting, photos, and audio, and they can mark up PDFs, lecture slides, and forms. This app also provides for storing of files on iCloud along with a way to manage and share notes with friends. 

A third option,GoodReader by Good.iWare.ltd (available via iTunes for $4.99), enables students to access, download, organize, manage, read, and annotate any file that is stored or on the web. The app can quickly connect to remote servers and sync single files or entire folders to the iPad or iPhone. Although GoodReader is technically a file viewer, students can draw directly on the screen with their finger, highlight, and mark up text by adding notes through typewriter text boxes, sticky notes, lines, arrows, and freehand drawings. Additionally, students are able to read, annotate, edit and sign PDF documents; view Microsoft Office software, text files, and HTML files; view pictures; listen to audio files; and watch videos. You might enjoy this 27-minute video review of GoodReader as well as a tutorial of its annotation features.

Note taking has been and still is a valuable tool in helping students enhance and extend their learning.  Now is the time to open up a new world of note taking for both you and your students. OneNote, Notability, and GoodReader are just a few options for getting you started, so explore and enjoy note taking in today’s technological era!

Kimberly Kimbell-Lopez is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Leadership in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University. She has been an educator for over 25 years, and her areas of expertise include literacy and technology. Carrice Cummins is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Leadership in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University. She has 40 years’ experience as an educator with primary areas of interest in comprehension, content area literacy, and teacher development. She served as the 2012–2013 president of the International Reading Association (now the International Literacy Association). Elizabeth Manning is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Leadership in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University. A veteran K–8 teacher of over 25 years, her areas of interest include content area literacy, writing workshop, and curriculum design and development.

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

Two years ago, my colleague and I wrote a Reading Today article about the emergence of infographics for literacy instruction. The feedback has continued to demonstrate the passion educators and students have for visualization in the literacy process. In Stephen Apkon’s book, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, he laments that we spend more time teaching letters and words than imagery. With infographics, I hope that literacy educators can envision a synergy of both tasks.

An infographic is an illustration that uses words and pictures with visualizations that may include graphs, charts, and tables. Infographics are used predominantly as a text feature in journalism and textbooks. In the past decade, they have been used frequently to analyze and display information on news broadcasts, social media, and advertising. Readers of infographics must be able to decode the symbols and comprehend the language of imagery. As contemporary learners continue to connect to iconography and visual data in our daily lives, making sense of and creating infographics will become an essential skill.

Why it matters

Most educators think of literacy skills in traditional syntactic fashion, meaning that students need support in letter–sound relationships, vocabulary, and decoding. Each skill is critical for literacy proficiency, yet we consider visual symbols to be text features. I believe we are on the brink of accepting information and data visualization, illustrated in infographics, as an essential language of proficient readers and writers.

Through my presentations and writings, I am encouraging educators to explore infographic design beyond traditional graphic organizers and text feature study. Students creating written products of their learning have a powerful medium in infographics. The author’s purpose, genre of writing, and grammar are displayed abundantly in both the written text and the illustrated text. By uncovering the parallels for students, we open opportunities to examine close reading of visual images as part of text. Multiple perspectives are encouraged, hyperlinks and dynamic controls allow interaction, and multimedia is integrated to activate other senses. Through social media, infographics can be shared across cultural lines to spark global feedback.

I often see lessons designed around the close reading strategies recommended in the Common Core State Standards. Close reading relies on the three key shifts of the Common Core: text complexity, evidence-based responses, and content-rich nonfiction readings. Infographics offer complexity through multiple images, words, and graphs while conveying a message. Students use infographics to collect or parse evidence while reading text. Most infographics follow informational or argumentative genres of writing using the language of content area subjects. The design features of infographics are listed as critical tools for supporting specific ELA/Literacy standards at all levels (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI-7, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST-8.2.A).

Getting started

The best way to understand visual literacy with infographics is to examine and create your own. Spend time examining infographic elements with your students using samples from Daily Infographic. You can easily sort by subject and see different styles and levels of complexity. Ask your students to identify the following:

• What is the specific topic of the infographic?
• What is the author’s purpose?
• How does the author demonstrate authority or knowledge of the subject?
• How do specific visual elements support understanding or analysis?
• If you could improve this infographic, what might you illustrate differently?

As students begin to recognize common similarities of infographics, chart their findings in visible space (on the board or a web document). Ask your students to sketch ideas for a topic that you are exploring as a class. By working on a single topic, perhaps in dyads or triads, the students can bring unique perspectives and ways for delivering a message about the topic. Students can then conduct a search for infographics that align closely with your topic. You might suggest that your students write a short response to the inquiry questions mentioned above and share in a public document. You can expect a rich discussion to follow your review of their findings.

For more advanced practice, have your students sign up for a free account on Infogr.am or PiktoChart. Using their video tutorials, students can learn the basics of the intuitive interface and see models of completed projects. You could ask your students to use one of these tools to translate some of their sketches generated around your class topic into an infographic. Remind students that like good writing and presentations, it is not about bulky text and flashy looks, but a concise and engaging message. If they want to enhance their project, they should consider using dynamic features such as data filtering or multimedia integration.

Literacy educators have a critical role to play in the instruction of infographics. Graphic designers and artists have a vast knowledge of illustration, but literacy instruction can complement their meaning. Today’s reader is exposed to new literacies through hyperlinking and multimedia. Infographics enhance our understanding of complex data and illustrates narratives in a dynamic fashion. We may not all be great artists, but we can be exceptional readers.

Mark J. Davis is a third-year doctoral candidate in the University of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College doctoral program in education. He is a full-time reading specialist at Barrington High School in Rhode Island and active collaborator in educational media design. Additional resources are available on his website and on Twitter.

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