Literacy Now

“Can we do this again?” Isn’t that what every teacher loves to hear? It’s always rewarding when students find your lessons engaging and want to repeat an activity. It’s even more satisfying when students ask this question after a lesson that you want to explore further, not just after a game you played to review for a test. Interactive presentation tools such as Pear Deck can help teachers create lessons that are both engaging and meaningful.

What is an interactive presentation tool?

Remember attending staff development sessions with PowerPoint presentations and thick, stapled note-taking packets? Maybe you even subjected your students to similar presentations. Today, there are many more options for engaging your students.

Interactive presentation tools, such as Nearpod and Pear Deck, allow you to create PowerPoint–type slides, but now you can ask questions and get instant feedback from all of the students in your class as you present. By sharing a link and code to your slideshow, students can sign in and see the presentation on their devices. A slide could contain information, questions, or both in multiple formats. As students respond on their devices, the answers (without student names) can be displayed on the projector screen.  

One of the biggest advantages of tools like Pear Deck is that every student can now participate freely in discussions. Teachers can instantly catch a glimpse of each student’s understanding, even those who never raise a hand. This is what formative assessment looks like in the digital age.

Sometimes teachers shy away from new technology or feel overwhelmed by it. No need to worry when it comes to tools like Pear Deck and Nearpod. If you have ever created a PowerPoint slide, you can create an interactive presentation and have your students using it tomorrow.

What does using Pear Deck look like?

I began using Pear Deck in my seventh-grade language arts classroom two years ago. In addition to the features mentioned earlier, Pear Deck offers the following:

• Pear Deck is a Google Drive app, and each session of a presentation can be saved to your Google Drive. Student names are attached to their answers in the teacher view.
• Did the bell ring when you were halfway through your presentation? No problem, just save the session and start it up again the next day. When students join they will be brought to where you left off automatically.
• There is a variety of question types in Pear Deck: multiple choice, number response, text response, drawing, dragging, and more. You can also have slides with information, videos, pictures, and websites.

Teachers across disciplines and grade levels are using Pear Deck. Here are some ideas for using Pear Deck in language arts classes:

• Check for understanding of a read-aloud book. Ask students to identify characters, vote for a favorite character, or explain the theme.
• Have students draw a scene from the book and review the drawings with the class.
• Post photos of different versions of the book cover and have students circle the one they think is most effective.
• Post four photos on a slide and have students drag a dot to the image that most closely resembles the setting of a story.
• Ask students to write a simile. Review student answers and discuss what makes an effective simile.
• Teach close reading skills by reading and discussing a complex text using Pear Deck.
• Working on editing skills? Have students drag a dot to the error in the sentence, or use multiple choice to ask them to choose the correctly punctuated sentence.

No matter what you ask your students to do on Pear Deck, the real value comes in discussing the answers as a class. Instead of hearing from the same two or three students, you have an answer from every student. This leads to much richer and more meaningful discussions. And at the end of class, your students will want to know when they will be doing this again.

Tim Flanagan is a seventh-grade language arts and social studies teacher at Pawcatuck Middle School in Stonington, CT. He holds a sixth-year degree in Instructional Technologies and Digital Media Literacy from the University of New Haven. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter.

In the book Words Onscreen, author Naomi Baron cites research that might surprise you: When it comes to reading for school, today’s students prefer reading on paper over reading onscreen. According to Baron, our students may compose copious amounts of digital writing on their personal devices, but when it comes to close reading, students still prefer printing a PDF and annotating it with a pencil in hand.

Baron cites a study from late 2013 whose findings show that 84% of U.S. college students say they prefer print over digital text because it’s easier to bookmark and highlight. Baron readily admits this may change with time: “Annotation becomes easier on digital devices, especially for those who practice” (p. 30).

There’s no doubt that our students will get a lot more practice annotating online. In fact, annotating the Web is nothing new. The developers of Mosaic, one of the earliest browsers from the ’90s, envisioned a Web that anyone could annotate. And there’s no shortage of web annotation tools—AnnotateIt, Bounce, Diigo, Genius, and Marqueed, to name a few. But one tool I’ve been incorporating into my teaching lately is Hypothes.is.

Hypothes.is was developed using the standards of the W3C (the major governing body of the Internet), specifically the standards of the W3C Annotation Working Group. The mission of Hypothes.is is to enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge by creating an open platform for the annotation of any web document—images, videos, and data.

The easiest way to use Hypothes.is is to find a webpage you want to annotate and paste the URL into the search bar on the homepage of the Hypothes.is website. After that, a sidebar on the right of the screen appears allowing users to begin annotating. If anyone else has annotated the page, their public annotations are visible too. Another way to see what’s been annotated is to scroll through a webpage and then click on any highlighted areas.

You can add annotations by selecting an item on the page and clicking the annotate button; you then have a choice of making that comment public or private. Users have the ability to add tags as well. Some educators use tags to create streams of content based on a common term for the group. Then members can follow the group conversation more easily by following that tag. For example, one massive online open course on Shakespeare uses the tag moocspeare to help organize their conversations.

This past summer, I taught teachers getting their masters in educational technology. These educators came from three continents, and we viewed hypothes.is as a way to facilitate asynchronous discussions across multiple time zones. Pictured in this post is a snippet of our conversation about the NMC Horizon Report: K-12 Edition in Hypothes.is.

The interface allowed us to highlight the PDF of the text, make notes on it, and then reply to one another’s thoughts on the article. In addition, users can invite others into the conversation or share the annotations. A feature I find useful for my high school students is sorting annotations by date or by users, so that producing a portfolio of a student’s annotations for assessment is easy.

Baron is probably right that many of us still prefer annotating on paper when it comes to the close reading that we do for academics, but one of the affordances of web annotation is the potential for massively open online reading. Tools like Hypothes.is will make this only easier.

Chris Sloan teaches high school English and media at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, UT. In the summer, he is an instructor for the overseas cohort of Michigan State University's Master's in Educational Technology.

I have had an ongoing interest in understanding young people's fanfiction writing and their participation in online affinity spaces, with a goal of informing the important work teachers do in literacy classrooms. As part of this research, I (with my research assistant, Valerie Marsh) have been conducting a longitudinal case study of Laura, following her as a writer from the end of middle school through high school.

Over the years, we have conducted periodic interviews with Laura, her family, and one of her English teachers, and we have collected samples of her writing across spaces and time. We have a window into the writing Laura does to express her Broadway musical fandom on the website FanFiction to meet expectations in honors and Advanced Placement English classes, to draft a novel for eventual publication, and to deepen her connection with characters she plays as an actress in school and community theater productions. We can see how Laura makes sense of writing for a variety of audiences and purposes, considerations important to writing instruction.

In our article in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, published in March, we focused on her online fanfiction writing, exploring how the access, anonymity, and genre conventions provided by the website facilitated Laura’s writing for and with audience in ways unavailable to her in other contexts. As Laura explained in one interview, “In fact, fanfiction might have been my first introduction to the concept of audience.” Other researchers have noted that sharing writing online accomplishes the following:

• It places both the writer and the writing “among the audience” in ways that impact what writerly choices get made
• It connects the author with a passionate, public audience that provides direct feedback
• It demands that writers consider the audience’s expectations as they write

Drawing on this work and danah boyd’s concept of networked publics, we came to understand Laura’s fanfiction writing as networked writing, revealing how the writing process and sharing with the audience are inextricably linked. Laura composed her fanfiction texts with abstract audience expectations in mind, expectations she understood by participating in this networked public. She also crafted her fanfiction texts in direct response to the audience feedback she received when she posted her writing on FanFiction.

What does this mean for writing instruction?

As the Common Core writing standards require students to “use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others,” teachers can play an important role in students’ learning about what it means to connect with audiences in a digital age. We concluded writing instruction should include two important components:

Scaffolded opportunities to share writing with offline and online audiences. Such instruction might involve providing students anonymity as they share their writing first with the classroom audience, and then for authentic online audiences that reach beyond the school. Through these writing tasks, students’ writing would be evaluated by the audiences that give them feedback, rather than by the teacher. Students could then begin to consider wider audience expectations as they craft their writing.

Explicit instruction guiding students to critically analyze audiences in networked publics. Laura indicated to us that she became familiar with the Fanfiction.net audience’s expectations by reading others’ posts and “by accident.” We see a role for writing instruction to guide students through a process of researching an online space, and studying the texts that get shared as well as the feedback mechanisms available and how they’re used. Such analysis can help young writers develop a profile of the networked public before writing a piece to be shared with that audience.

Teaching networked writing in these ways can further connect writing instruction to students’ interests in online spaces. More importantly, scaffolding students’ critical analysis of how to write for and with the audiences in networked publics can empower youth as they seek to solve real-world problems.

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

I facilitate a weekly writing group at a local juvenile detention center where, because of the transient nature of the population, student participation can be inconsistent.
As a writing teacher, this provides a unique challenge because I want students to see how their writing has developed over time. Youth at the detention center are also interested in revisiting their writing and will often ask if I have their writing so they can see it.
Therefore, I am interested in apps that will allow me to store their writing and the youth to reflect on previous work, regardless of when they are a part of the writing group. Storage apps provide me a system for making sure all who are a part of the writing group have access to their writing through a digital writing portfolio.

Why writing portfolios?

Writing teachers note that providing students ample time to reflect on their writing is important. When we give students opportunities to collect and reflect on their writing, they develop their identities as writers. Writing portfolios allow this to happen because students can showcase their writing, document their growth as writers, receive feedback on a body of written work, and consider next steps and new directions for their writing.
Knowing that reflection is critical to young adults’ growth and development as writers, teachers have long used portfolios to help students collect their writing over extended period of time. Many teachers, including myself, use digital portfolios because of the ease of teacher and student access to a body of work completed over time.

Apps for digital portfolios

As many teachers and students have more access to mobile technology, apps provide an excellent system for creating and organizing digital portfolios. Even for schools without tablets, many apps have companion websites. In addition, Bring Your Own Device policies can help teachers implement digital portfolios even when technology is limited in the classroom.
If you are interested in exploring apps for creating writing portfolios, I recommend looking at Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Seesaw, and Three Ring.While there are differences between these particular tools, many similarities exist, such as:

• Teachers can set up individual folders or notebooks (the term depends on the app being used) for students to house their writing. Since it is important for students to see their growth as writers over time, using these apps to store their writing portfolios provides an easy way for students and teachers to collect their writing over a period of time. These apps also allow students to upload multimodal compositions that include images, video, and audio.

• Certain apps, such as Dropbox, maintain a history of document edits; therefore, students can access old copies of documents. Students and teachers can use this feature to look closely at how one writing piece might have developed over a period of time. Again, this opportunity to be reflective about their writing helps students to become metacognitive about a particular piece or their writing in general.

• In Google Docs, teachers can record their thoughts and feedback with audio and additional notes through the use of comment features. This provides teachers an easy way to give ongoing feedback and assessments about students’ writing. Furthermore, students can also use these features to respond to a teacher’s comments, thus creating a conversation about writing. Seesaw has built-in audio recording and drawing tools that students can use when revising or responding to a teacher’s feedback.

• Many of these storage apps also link to other apps. Dropbox is linked to apps such as neu.Annotate+PDF, Notability, and GoodReader, and Evernote works with Skitch.

• All of these digital tools can be accessed and synced with other devices, and apps such as Dropbox have a way to access materials offline, so students do not always need Internet connection to view their writing.. This access is critical for students, and also can serve as an invitation for parents and family members to read students’ writing.

Additional considerations

When creating and implementing digital portfolios, teachers should keep the following questions in mind:

• What are your instructional goals for creating writing portfolios?
• Do you want portfolios to be accessed both online and offline?
• Do you have a school platform that you must integrate the portfolios into?
• Are teacher and student accounts needed? Do your students need e-mail addresses?
• Do you want the platform to allow for multiple formats such as writing, video, and audio files?

For teachers interested in more information about digital writing portfolios, an in-depth resource for creating digital portfolios is Michigan Portfolios.

Kristine E. Pytash is an assistant professor of literacy education at Kent State University.

The new Finnish national core curriculum (from pre-education to the ninth grade) will be used nationwide, beginning in the school year 2016–2017. The core curriculum work, involving the expertise of educational professionals, teachers, and different societal organizations, was completed in the end 2014. At the moment, local curriculum work (based on national core curriculum) has already launched in municipalities and in schools.

Along the way, the process has drawn international attention (see articles in The Washington Post and International Education News). From our perspectives as a researcher and a senior lecturer from the University of Jyväskylä, we have our own interpretations of how the forthcoming curriculum will provide opportunities to enhance students’ digital literacies.

The most essential aspect in the curriculum reform is the shift from focusing on learning objectives related to single subjects to an emphasis on broader competencies crossing all learning in schools. The seven competence areas are as follows:

1. Thinking and learning to learn
2. Cultural competence, interaction, and self-expression
3. Taking care of oneself and others; managing daily life
4. Multiliteracies
5. Working life competence and entrepreneurship
6. Competence in information and communication technology (ICT)
7. Participation, involvement, and building a sustainable future

In one way or another, digital literacies are embedded into all competence areas, but most explicitly into the areas of multiliteracies and ICT.

In the curriculum, multiliteracies refer to “interpretation, composing, and evaluation of written, spoken, and multimodal texts within a rich textual environment.” Multiliteracies help students to interpret the surrounding world and to understand its cultural diversity. By producing different kinds of printed and digital texts, learners are able to express themselves by using their strengths. Teachers are expected to use meaningful and authentic texts so that students learn not only literacy skills but also the enjoyment of reading and writing. 

All classroom and subject teachers are responsible for developing students’ multiliteracies, including both everyday language and disciplinary language. Further, ICT skills are an essential part of multiliteracies and other wide-ranging competencies. ICT should be embedded into all teaching so that students learn to use digital technologies to cocreate and share new knowledge as well as to interact within and across communities. 

The new core curriculum offers great possibilities to develop and support students’ digital literacies and digital citizenship. Of course, the extent to which Finnish schools will be able to realize this potential is dependent upon local curriculum work, the culture of each school, and engagement of individual teachers.

The local curriculum created by teachers and other educational professionals will play a key role in specifying and localizing the broader aims of national curriculum. In this curriculum process, the aims are also transformed into concrete teaching and learning practices. The strength of the Finnish curriculum process is that it enables teachers’ engagement in the curriculum development. However, one concern is that digital literacies may receive too little attention in this transformation.

School culture greatly affects the level of innovation with which digital technologies are used in schools. That means that it’s not only the level of equipment but also the level of commitment that educators have toward developing pedagogically meaningful ways to integrate technology into teaching and learning. At its best, the school culture encourages teacher collaboration and collaborative teaching. This collaboration is essential to integrate ideas and practices across different disciplines within and across schools.

In Finland, teachers have a lot of autonomy to realize the aims of the curriculum, which introduces possibilities as well as responsibilities. Teachers can actualize the curriculum according to their own pedagogical views and their strengths as teachers. Thus, this might result in varying levels of attention to digital literacies.  

In spite of some critical viewpoints, we, like most Finnish people, believe that in the long run, our teachers and schools will do well.

You can learn more about the Curriculum Reform 2016 in the March 2015 blog post by Irmeli Halinen, the head of Curriculum Development for the Finnish National Board of Education. You might also enjoy this slideshow presentation about the reform, prepared by Jorma Kauppinen, the director of the Finnish National Board of Education.

Carita Kiili, PhD, is a researcher and Sirpa Eskelä-Haapanen, PhD, is a senior lecturer of Early Years Education. They are both at University of Jyväskylä in Finland.