Literacy Now

A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. Read the sentence and circle any of the nouns. Do this for sentences 1–10 on your noun worksheet and turn it in.

Does this sound familiar? Worksheet after worksheet, identifying all types of grammar with limited reasons to remember any of it beyond the lesson that day. Is understanding grammar important? Yes, it definitely is.

After teaching grammar this traditional way of using worksheets, I came to the conclusion that students weren’t fully grasping the concepts because nothing was relevant to them. They were simply circling answers to complete a task, but had little engagement in doing so. If I wanted my students to retain grammar rules, I needed to come up with something different, where students could apply their understanding in a meaningful way.

To begin each grammar concept, I used LearnZillion’s free write-along lesson. These are interactive video lessons for grades 3–8 aimed toward improving student writing. Each video focuses on a specific skill by modeling the process of revising or editing a blemished piece of writing. Students followed along using a practice sheet, culminated with a formative assessment where they can apply the skill to a new draft. This is a great site to build the foundation for the grammar skill you are working on with your students.

Next, I used EarthCam, a network of live webcams around the world. The students chose a destination, and then we traveled to the site and completed a free write of what we saw, focusing on incorporating the specific skill we were working on. Students loved applying the specific grammar skill while writing creatively. After a few minutes, students traded their writing, identifying the targeted skill. Afterward, students discussed their writing and if they used the grammar correctly. This was a great way to spark interesting discussions of their writing.

For homework, I used the National Geographic Photo of the Day. Students referred to this image to write a creative story, using the targeted skill of the week and previous skills we had worked on. Prior to leaving class, we used Google Earth to travel to the destination where the photo was taken, which built excitement, as these vivid images provoked students’ imaginations to come alive. In class the next day, I separated the students into groups of four, where they conferred about their writing, focusing on the grammar.

When working on dialogue, students paired with a student in class they didn’t know too well and interviewed that student. From this interview, they created a newspaper story using Fodey. In addition to working on dialogue, our classroom community became stronger, as students shared positive things with the class they learned about their classmate.

Every quarter, students worked together to create a writing project, incorporating the grammar we had focused on using technology tools such as Movie Maker, Animoto, Emaze, and Plotagon. Students then used Weebly, a site to make free websites, to display their learning to classrooms we collaborated with around the world, allowing them an opportunity to have an authentic audience.

Besides making significant gains on the Spring Measurement of Academic Progress test, students gained a loved for grammar, retaining the material better than any of my previous classes.

When I look back, it all came down to me changing my approach to how I taught grammar, and writing in general. Students didn’t need rote memorization, the way I was taught grammar growing up. They needed meaning, knowing why they were learning the specific skill and how it could be applied in their everyday lives. Every one of my students was capable of being successful; I just needed to offer them the right opportunities. If you are printing worksheets or pulling out those grammar workbooks, are your students engaged? Are you teaching grammar in isolation? Do students see meaning in what they are doing? Maybe it is time to reflect, finding ways for grammar to be more relevant for your students.

Brandi Leggett is a National Board Certified Teacher as a Middle Childhood Generalist. She received her master’s in Elementary Education from Arcadia University in Glenside, PA. She currently teaches third grade at Prairie Ridge Elementary in Shawnee, KS. Follow her class during the school year at Team Leggett.

Many struggling middle school–age readers are still developing their reading skills even when explicit reading instruction is usually no longer part of their general education curriculum. Strategies to overcome this challenge are summarized in publications including Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning, ILA Resolutions and Position Statements for Adolescent Literacy, and Writing to Read. These summaries stress the importance of providing students with opportunities to interact with texts through discussion and writing. With the advent of social media and other digital tools, written discussions now occur online. As these environments become more prevalent in classrooms, ensuring that struggling readers have access to the scaffolds and supports that make possible their successful participation is important.  

Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework based on the neurosciences, holds as a core belief that learner variability is the given. The UDL framework has been used recently to inform the development of an online reading environment for struggling adolescent readers, called Udio. Udio provides opportunities for students to participate in rich online discussions in support of reading comprehension.

I (Lori, a middle school teacher) had the opportunity to use Udio as part of a pilot study to support student interest and motivation in reading. I was excited about providing my students an opportunity to use online discussion as a way to interact more deeply with texts. Right from the beginning, students made it clear that they wanted to make their reading a social event, inviting others to read the same article so that they could engage in a conversation. However, the early online discussions consisted of short statements like “Yeah, I liked that, too” or “I agree.” Students needed additional supports and structures to develop meaningful discussions.

I began by reminding students that they had read folk tales in ELA, and we were going to read a folk tale on Udio. I asked students to read the folk tale article and then post a comment. We had been working on using evidence in our responses, and I was disappointed to see that students hadn’t posted much on Udio. I saw also that some students hadn’t understood the folk tale, so I printed the article, and students read it again, silently. We then had a face-to-face discussion about the article, discussing what happened to the main character and what is the moral of the story. I then asked students to read it one more time, online, and respond to each other using the sentence starters “First I thought…” “Now, I think…” suggested by Steve Graham.

This time, students engaged in a rich online discussion and deepened their understanding of the article. They were able to agree or disagree with each other online and used evidence to support their thinking. 

After this experience, students engaged in a conversation about the differences between online and offline discussion. For this conversation, students used their extensive knowledge of online discussions from gaming environments in addition to our class work.

Students’ reported benefits of online discussions included

• You don’t have to be in the room with the person
• If you can’t pronounce a word, you can type it
• You don’t have to respond quickly, you can think about your answer

Students’ reported benefits of face-to-face discussions included

• You are with other people
• You can clarify in person
• You can show people what you mean

Students found that both types of discussions improved their understanding; however, the online discussions connected with their out of school literacy life online and was very motivating.

Udio is still under research and development. The following are links to tools and environments that support online discussions:

Ensure students have access to texts with Text-to-Speech readers

• MAC: Directions to access TTS directly from the system
• PC: Directions to download Natural Reader, which will read text on the PC

Provide interesting age-relevant texts

• Wonderopolis
• Word Generation Project

Provide ways for students to share their thinking through online discussions

• Glogster
• Google Docs 
• Padlet
• VoiceThread

The contents of this article were developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (#H327M11000). However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.

Lori DiGisi is an administrator for Framingham Public Schools and a member of the ILA Board of Directors. Peggy Coyne is a research scientist at CAST, Inc.
This article is part of a series from ILA’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

To be fully engaged citizens in a world of local, national, and global events, our students need to be informed and able to sort critically through the ubiquitous flow of news and information. Growing up in Washington, DC, and having a father, grandfather, and uncle in the newspaper business, the news, particularly in print, largely influenced my perspective of the world. Remember “News Fridays” when we were challenged to find, cut out, and bring a newspaper article to class to be shared? Things were so simple then!

I write this article amid a flurry of news events that come to me not only in the newspaper but also as alerts on my phone, iPad, laptop, and digital reader. News about Supreme Court decisions on the affordable care act and marriage equality, news of tragedy and human triumph in Charleston, of a manhunt in New York, attacks in Paris, Tunisia, and Kuwait stream in with discussion and commentary online and on air. We need to equip our students to critically evaluate the flood of information, to make sense of the range of viewpoints, and to gather knowledge to build and support their own perspectives. Of the many resources featuring current events, there are two websites that offer classrooms tools to continue to do the critical thinking necessary to comprehend multiple perspectives.

Newsela offers nonfiction daily news across disciplines. High-interest topics are organized in categories: war and peace, science, kids, money, law, health, arts, and sports, with most recent articles featured on the home page. Each article is available at five Lexile reading levels (3rd–12th) to differentiate learning while having the whole class work on the same content. Advertisement-free articles are updated each day and can be read by students for free using an access code that is given when teachers “create a class.” In this open online version, students can annotate articles, take quizzes, and view their progress. The subscriber version, Newsela Pro, allows teachers to see who read the story, made notes, and took the quiz, tracking individual and class results aligning with Common Core Standards organized in an electronic binder. With Newsela Pro, teachers can customize and review writing prompts.

Other resources include the Newsela Learning and Support webpage to answer questions about the site and to provide resources and teaching ideas. “For Teachers, By Teachers,” a section within Classroom Resources, offers lesson plans and related materials submitted by teachers using Newsela. A Write Toolkit and a Text Sets Toolkit extend the possibilities of using Newsela articles. The text set is a collection of articles about a theme, topic, or related standard that teachers can use or create. Included are teacher-submitted lessons and connections to larger units. A “Pro/Con” text set offers articles that present multiple viewpoints where students could annotate and make comments in gathering notes to compare and contrast perspectives. The Write Toolkit guides teachers to insert writing prompts, offering rubrics and examples.

ProCon.org is an independent nonprofit organization founded to “promote critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship—and to educate without bias” as noted in their mission statement. Founder Steven Markoff provides extensive background information on the about us page. Varying perspectives on 53 controversial issues are presented in readings across content headings, including education, elections and presidents, health and medicine, and media and entertainment. Each issue contains a core question, background information, and specific pro and con arguments. The exploration of issues is student oriented, presenting text along with video, infographics, and political cartoons. The pro and con arguments include excerpts from major newspapers and quotes from experts and politicians. One issue raises the core question “Are Cell Phones Safe?” then offers “Did You Know?” facts from medical and science sources before presenting the pro–con arguments, the evolution of the cell phone science, and some videos related to popular culture. Sources are cited with links, often full-text PDFs.

Teachers can introduce students to the site’s approach to evaluating credibility of sources with their 1–5 star “theoretical expertise ranking.” A “Teachers’ Corner” offers lesson plans with related handouts and suggestions to make the activity easier or harder. Lessons are connected to Common Core, NCTE/IRA, and NCSS standards. Resources are provided that address teaching critical thinking. A collection of 50 illustrated quotes from Aristotle to Howard Zinn offers insights on critical thinking to be used to inspire students to continue to think deeply.

Consider ways to integrate Newsela and ProCon into your efforts to support students in thinking deeply and developing an informed voice. I have used both sites as resources for a class activity in building perspectives on cell phone use in the classroom. We start with a discussion web: “Should cell phones be allowed in the classroom?” We generate our own ideas, then jigsaw several articles, including those from these two sites that further inform on the issue, and then revisit the discussion web. This leads to further discussion and then more group work as we simulate a school board meeting, with each of six groups using what they have read and learned to perhaps step into the shoes of an opinion they may or may not hold and create a speech for or against cell phones in the classroom from the student, teacher, and parent perspectives. By thinking critically, reading, discussing, and evaluating ideas in text and beyond, students have improved their argument as informed citizens in the world.

Denise H. Stuart is a professor in the Curricular & Instructional Studies department at the University of Akron, Ohio. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

The International Literacy Association’s position statement on new literacies and 21st century technologies includes students’ rights to standards and assessments that include new literacies. The focus of this article is to look at how digital technologies can support literary instruction relevant to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). CCSS for English Language Arts lists three categories of reading standards: (1) Reading: Literature, (2) Reading: Informational Text, and (3) Reading: Foundational Skills.

Giving students practice in wide reading

In Reading Today,Elfreida Hiebert reported, “The inclusion of a standard on text complexity represents the most unique of several distinguishing features of the CCSS for English Language Arts.” She further reports that because of the strong relationship between vocabulary and comprehension, teachers need to conduct vocabulary lessons of critical vocabulary prior to reading.

In collaborative work with my colleague Dana L. Grisham, resources for integrating technologies into vocabulary and comprehension instruction were described in the California Reader (2014). Some recommended digital resources include the following:

• Many e-books have text-to-speech (TTS) features to enhance key content.
• eVoc Strategies for Teaching Vocabulary can be fostered using digital tools such as Wordle and Wordsift; both tools develop visual displays through word mapping.
• Electronic children’s magazines such as Weekly Reader and National Geographic Kids are great sources of informational text about current events.
• Other useful portals for research-based lesson ideas include ReadWriteThink and Reading Rockets.

A 2015 list of diverse books, as well as lists from 1996–2014, can be found at www.clrsig.org. All of these books were selected by the International Literacy Association’s Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group. The collection includes theme-based books involving characters from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and a range of family structures, as well as story lines that deal with identity issues related to gender and sexuality.

Focusing on comprehension

In their chapter about comprehension in the Handbook of Research on New Literacies, Bridget Dalton and C. Patrick Proctor write, “To read with understanding, the reader must be able to decode the words with a sufficient number of words automatized to allow for the fluency essential to comprehension.”

If the learner doesn’t understand a passage, the following digital tools and instructional strategies may help to enhance comprehension:

• TTS and Synthetic Voice with which text is read aloud at the word, sentence, or passage level.
• Vocabulary links provided in digital novels can lead to a graphic, video, or animation that elaborates on the meaning of a word.
• Vocabulary supports on the Internet such as an online dictionary, thesaurus, or encyclopedia extend opportunities for students to explore word meaning.
• In their The Reading Teacher article entitled “Internet Inquiry: Fundamental Competencies for Online Comprehension,” Tara Kingsley and Susan Tancock outline several instructional supports to help students select a topic, sort through a variety of media formats (text, graphics, audio, tags, bookmarks, and hyperlinks), build understanding across these formats, and communicate what they’ve learned to others.

Giving students practice in collaborative writing and Common Core assessments

Writing is also an important component of literacy, especially argumentative writing and writing about texts students have read. Online resources providing information about the two consortia that have created new assessments of these skills include Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.

In addition, in her article entitled “Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards”, Bridget Dalton identifies multimodal composition as a digital written product that includes printed word, images, sound, and movement. She gives examples of how teachers can use multimodal assignments to help students develop skills that CCSS identify as important to 21st-century literacy.

CCSS encourages teachers to focus on reading texts deeply, writing for digital environments collaboratively, and reading and writing nonfiction texts. The digital tools and texts in this article help teachers foster new literacies as well as prepare students for the demands of CCSS assessments.

Marilyn E. Moore, EdD, is a professor at National University in La Jolla, CA, and serves as faculty lead for the Reading Program.

One significant challenge I encountered as an early career teacher was student engagement. My subject area, history, is notorious for creating disengaging, passive learning environments filled with dry lectures and hand-cramping pages of notes.

However, concerns about student disengagement are not limited to just history. Increasingly, disengagement characterizes much of a student’s experience in school. In fact, reports from Institute of Play and the Gallup Student Poll suggest that the Gallup Student Poll suggestwhile 80% of elementary school students feel engaged in their work, only 60% of middle school students report feeling engaged and a mere 40% of high school students are engaged. Importantly, research also suggests that high school students are more likely to feel engaged when the work they are doing has personal or social meaning attached to it.

Work by John Guthrie and Gay Ivey suggests that allowing students a choice in their reading material is critical for engaging readers in both informational and literary texts, respectively. The Connected Learning report also offers compelling examples of youths using digital media and online networks to learn more about topics of interest, to share ideas, and to take action in their communities. One recent teaching method that integrates text choice and technology is Genius Hour (aka 20-time), consisting of sustained, in school, interest-driven student inquiry projects, which culminate in a public presentation of learning. I worked recently with a middle school science teacher, Michele Austin of King Philip Middle School in Massachusetts, as she and 24 students embarked on a 20-time program.

Process

We framed our work loosely on Joy Kirr and Tom Driscoll’s 20-Time in Education model along with AJ Juliani’s helpful infographic, putting an emphasis on inquiry projects that would improve the community. We drew inspiration from Chris Rosati’s Big Ideas for the Greater Good initiative in which local students developed projects to improve their community and videotaped their process. We allowed students to choose their topic and refine its scope as necessary.

Our 20-time project was scheduled for one period per week over 12 weeks, with presentations to take place during the 13th week. Class periods ran approximately 50 minutes during the students’ study hall/lunch block, and all students had access to desktop computers. Students were not required to participate in the 20-time endeavor, but nearly 90% opted in to the program and even brought friends from other study halls to collaborate.

We began by giving students time to explore and search for websites to construct their own understandings of 20-time. From there, we broke up the program into three four-week segments: brainstorming, researching, and action. Although student autonomy was a primary feature of this project, we provided graphic organizers to help students organize their ideas and push into deeper inquiry, plan out logistics, and aid them in getting unstuck.

Students took on a wide variety of projects. Three groups chose to run events, including a lip-sync contest, a baseball clinic, and a baseball league Opening Day Walk for charitable foundations, which raised over $4,000 combined. Other groups chose to focus on the process of creating clubs in school, such as a peer tutoring club and a nursing home collaboration club. Others wanted to research how to make things such as Scratch video games, a slinky toy, and even a human hamster wheel. We held the presentations on May 8 to a crowd of more than 50 community members, and several of the projects were highlighted in local newspapers.

Takeaways for practice

From these experiences, four important observations emerged:

1. Students find 20-time to be an engaging learning experience
   Students thoroughly enjoyed the 20-time process. After ending the program in early May, some students wanted to start a new project while others carried on with their projects into the end of the school year. Students valued the opportunity to choose their learning topics and the ability to receive peer feedback and support when they made their work public. The vast majority of students worked on their projects outside of class time, although they were not asked to do so. One particular feature students enjoyed was receiving feedback instead of a “score” because “messing up” was perceived as an opportunity to fix a problem rather than a path to a lower grade.
2. Internet navigation + reading + communicating = work in progress
   Students entered into the project with some background in Internet navigation and critical evaluation of sources. They were taught the differences in top-level domain types (edu vs. com) and the importance of finding the author of Internet texts. However, locating the author of a website and identifying his or her perspective on an issue was still a challenge for students. Furthermore, professional e-communication norms such as e-mail inquiries were relatively new to students, compared with informal methods such as texting that they were used to. Minilessons on observed challenges along with just-in-time modeling to meet student needs effectively addressed some common gaps in digital literacy.
3. Mentors make a big difference
   Make no mistake about it—it is a challenge for the teacher to help guide students through all of their projects. The teacher’s role is especially tough when the action takes place outside of school or if the teacher has a limited background in the student’s area of interest. We found the most successful projects were those where students actively sought out adults to help mentor their projects, as these adults could help the students navigate unforeseen logistical issues.
4. Genius Hour can be discipline specific
   While we and many other teachers have made 20-time or Genius Hour open ended, they do not necessarily need to be that way. Brian Hodges, a history teacher in the Public School system in Massachusetts, also runs 20-time in his classroom. His class has the caveat of tying their inquiry to a topic in social studies. Despite the constraint, Brian’s students reported positive experiences with 20-time because they had the autonomy to choose both their topic and presentation method. These two tweets (tweet A and tweet B) offer additional examples of the types of 20-time projects possible within different content areas.

Dave Quinn is a doctoral student in URI/RIC PhD in Education program. Previously, he was a history teacher at King Philip Middle School in Norfolk, MA, and a member of the Seekonk School Committee.