Literacy Now

As I help preservice teachers gain confidence to stand before their first groups of students, I’m conscious of the tensions this next generation of educators will face in our uncertain era. What are the best approaches that new teachers can use to help their students to achieve the highest possible levels of learning? How can new teachers move political and legal controversies into educational and civic contexts?

I believe that, while there is no single panacea for problems that educators face every day, new teachers should embrace a multidimensional approach where digital tools and texts are essential mechanisms to inspire students. The digital world opens up interactions with authentic texts and tasks and creates engaged and more fully literate learners.

Why digital literacy enhances learning

When preservice teachers attempt e-learning, they discover how the digital world blends with traditional instructional delivery to achieve a diverse range of learning outcomes. Preservice teachers often gain digital confidence when they experience its larger potential for usefulness, self-efficacy, and responsiveness. Digital inquiry, with its possibilities to represent different points of view and a range of experiences, also elevates students’ capacity for critical thinking.

Preservice teachers need to be disposed to digital literacy learning themselves, which means they must master the digital competencies they would like to foster among their students. I require my preservice teachers to experience the digital composing process from a student perspective. That means they experience a mélange of frustration and wonder as they become immersed in digital learning and incorporate new digital inquiry methods that match essential questions to authentic tasks.

Sample digital learning tasks for preservice teachers

The supply of digital applications and sources for instructional purposes is far-ranging, indeed, and a bit overwhelming for preservice teachers. Yet, because digital literacies inspire educators to reconsider what it means to be knowledge-holders in society, they also validate the real-world forms of literacy that students possess.

Here are some sample digital learning activities that preservice teachers might design for their students:

• Research educational uses of smartphones and then use them in producing short instructional videos.
• Replicate a research study by viewing and analyzing televised broadcasts for stereotypes then evaluating their findings with a digital research poster.
• Create virtual digital identities to broaden cultural awareness.
• Design a multimodal media presentation that chronicles how a decade in history impacts lives today through science, social studies, or literature.
• Model how Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework that addresses the wide range of learner variation in today’s inclusive classrooms, can be enhanced through digital formats.

Final thoughts

When preservice teachers are required to find, understand, evaluate, create, and communicate digital information in a wide variety of formats, they inspire learning in their students. Preservice teachers need to complete their undergraduate programs with the skills to engage, participate, and teach in a world in which literacy must keep pace with rapidly changing technologies.

Carolyn Fortuna, PhD, is a recent recipient of the ILA Grand Prize for Reading and Technology. She’s newly retired from a 20-year career as a public school secondary English teacher and now teaches in the Educational and Gender Studies Departments at Rhode Island College, where she embeds critical digital media literacy instruction in all her courses. She is a staff member of the Media Education Lab and program chair for the Northeast Regional Media Literacy Conference.

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

Reading online about divisive and complicated topics can and should be central to the English language arts classroom. At least, that is what we have been advocating for the past four years, as we study how people read online about climate change. Reading online in a fake news era holds many challenges—and opportunities—for literacy teachers to directly confront the difficult nature of online sources about this divisive issue.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has been examining public beliefs and attitudes around climate change since 2009. The program’s research has identified six unique audiences within the United States public that each respond to the issue in their own distinct way. Another 2017 study in the American Educational Research Journal about reading online determined that students struggle to identify misinformation online and instead rely on previously held opinions.

In our research, we developed an instructional model that supports students in reading online about climate change. In a forthcoming chapter of Literacy Research, Practice and Evaluation, we outline the following model:

• Select a diverse set of digital information sources.
• Ask students to make their thinking visible as they evaluate these sources.
• Ensure students read/view sources multiple times in order to reflect upon and revise their evaluations.
• Create opportunities for students to deliberate the reliability merits of each source.

Our findings indicate that there is real value in students reading independently as part of a multi-step evaluation process. Our findings also point to the importance of providing students with opportunities to talk across differences in both large group discussion and in pairs.

Here’s an example of what this kind of discussion-based lesson looks like in a high school class. The lesson begins with a diverse collection of sources, continues with questions to facilitate critical reading over multiple steps and ideas for promoting student-led evaluation and discussion, and concludes with a reminder about how to link these practices to civic engagement that turns knowledge into action.

Curating a set of diverse sources

Identify online sources that hold a range of perspectives about climate change, such as:

• BP’s “Sustainability” webpage.
• A Christian Science Monitor article about one scientist’s shifting perspective on climate change.
• The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change’s website.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s website.

Supporting critical reading practices over multiple steps

First, students read/view a source briefly and note their evaluation of its reliability. In a second reading, students evaluate sources independently using the following questions to support critical reading practices:

• Who created the source?
• Why was it created?
• What claims are made?
• Are claims well supported? Explain.
• Do you detect biases or points of view?
• To what extent is this source reliable? (Possible answers: highly reliable, somewhat reliable, somewhat unreliable, unreliable)

Student-led evaluation and discussion

We use the following Stand Your Ground discussion format:

• Stage your classroom in four quadrants (highly reliable, somewhat reliable, somewhat unreliable, and unreliable).
• Ask students to move to the area designated for their rating of each source (one source at a time). Students should explain, defend, persuade, and modify their stances throughout the discussion.
• Ask students to take note of their final stances.
• Extend the activity through argumentative writing.

Civic engagement across perspectives and beliefs

Finally, we promote a spirit of civic engagement that does not shy away from debate. We argue dialogue should remain rooted in the scientific consensus. In pairs, students who hold different climate change beliefs evaluate sources for their reliability, talking aloud as they read or view a source. Then students may search together for online sources they both deem reliable.

Other helpful resources

A People’s Curriculum for the Earth (Rethinking Schools, 2014) includes interdisciplinary resources on environmental issues. Author Paul Fleischman created a website to support his 2014 book, Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines. Researchers Richard Beach, Jeff Share, and Allen Webb created a Wiki workspace about teaching climate change in ELA, where educators can connect and share resources.

Reading online about divisive topics can and should be a part of the ELA classroom. We believe it is important to support students’ independent critical reading habits by creating opportunities to examine online text with careful guidance and support by their teachers and with their peers.

Alexandra Panos is a former middle school ELA teacher and currently works as a PhD candidate and education researcher in the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education at Indiana University, Bloomington.

James Damico is a former elementary and middle school teacher and currently serves as the director of the INSPIRE Living-Learning Center at Indiana University, Bloomington in addition to his role as an associate professor in the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education.

April is National Poetry Month, when the genre becomes the focus of my middle school classroom’s writing workshop. Although pioneers of writing workshop pedagogy, such as Donald Murray, taught in an analog world, today’s writing is largely digital. Therefore, we align with Murray’s vision of students as authentic writers when we integrate digital tools and spaces for supporting—and inspiring—21st-century poets.

Digital tools that facilitate the writing process

In the prewriting stage of the writing process, students brainstorm ideas using digital mapping tools such as Popplet, Coggle or Bubbl.us. These maps are aligned to possible writing topics, including possessions from our lives that symbolize abstract emotions; people who have motivated or inspired us; and places that have grounded our experiences. Students store their maps in Google Drive or embed them in the digital notebooks (stored in Google Slides) to reference each time they begin a new poem.

During the drafting process, Google Docs is our go-to space, but other tools can scaffold the drafting of unique poetic forms. ReadWriteThink provides interactive spaces for drafting haiku, diamante, acrostic, letter, concrete, and other poetry forms. When I want to share model texts, I use the Poetry Foundation’s selection, where poems are categorized by audience age, topic, and form.

In revision, attention to word choice is central to the poet’s craft. A Google Docs add-on called OneLook Thesaurus provides synonyms, rhyming words, and associated adjectives or nouns. (For non-Chrome users, RhymeZone is another option.) I also use ReadWriteThink’s interactive Line Break Explorer to teach students to divide lines with thought and purpose.

Digital tools for presenting

When our poems reach the finished-for-now stage, we experiment with digital formats for presentation. Students combine images and design elements to display poems in poster style using Piktochart or Buncee (see image). For creating multimedia poems with voiceover, music, and moving images, I suggest Adobe Spark, LittleBirdTales, or WeVideo.

Spoken word poetry in digital spaces

YouTube is a cornucopia of spoken word poetry, which inspires my students more than any other form. However, when browsing YouTube for examples, careful curation is essential. Jeanne Woltz has an extensive list of spoken word performances appropriate for middle and high school students. I curate my personal favorites using visual web collectors like TesTeach or Symbaloo. We begin with Holly Painter’s “Find Your Voice” and add performances by Taylor Mali, Sarah Kay, and Daniel Beaty to model unique aspects of the performance poet’s craft.

When students are ready to publish their own spoken word performances, I prefer more secure spaces. This post details how to use Flipgrid to share video recordings, but another option is Padlet, which now allows users to record video directly to a shared bulletin board space. The video feature is available in both Firefox and Chrome, so is an excellent (free!) option for Chromebook users.

Poetry in social media spaces

Finally, don’t forget social media for both models and publishing. Thousands of young poets are embracing social networks as a publishing space. For example, Rupi Kaur has become a best-selling sensation through Instagram while Brian Billston found his audience on Twitter. A search using hashtags like #poem, #poetry, or #instapoem will yield thousands of models to share with students and will inspire them to publish their own poetry in these spaces as messages, images, or videos. Add hashtags to expand students’ reach to wider audiences and to engage them in the larger conversation of poets worldwide.

Angie Johnson earned a PhD in educational psychology and educational technology from Michigan State University. She teaches eighth-grade language arts and is a media and technology integration specialist at Lakeshore Middle School in Stevensville, MI.

Every time I lead my high school students through the research paper composition process, I remember how my teachers taught us to write it back in the day—solitary hours on a typewriter, flipping through card catalogs in a quiet library, constructing elaborate formal outlines, and lots of silent reading. While some of that might be considered quaint now, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy found that adult literacy rates steadily increased through the latter half of the 20th century, at least partially as a result of the kind of writing pedagogy described above.

In my own classroom today, online collaborative applications have made the act of writing research more social. However, relying solely on collaborative web tools for student writers isn’t always for the best. In his article “Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age,” Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger writes that the solitary act of reading and writing is vital to individual growth and that the use of collaborative writing tools doesn’t necessarily lead to more proficient readers and writers.

Over the last few years, my own writing pedagogy has found a middle ground between the monk-like writing habits I was taught as a student and the social orientation that many adolescents prefer today. Using the best of both approaches, students can produce compelling online conversations about their research as well as a high quality traditional research paper.

For example, the tools used by the students in my latest research writing unit include Google Docs with some add-ons, blogging on Youth Voices, and annotating via Hypothes.is.

My students begin each week by finding relevant sources and annotating them. In essence, this is how I used to conduct writing research—the difference being that now students add thoughts to their online reading with the social annotation tool Hypothes.is, which I’ve written about before. Since my students use a common tag, the resulting annotations function as another way for them to have conversations about their reading and writing. Conversations that I believe push their thinking and improve their writing (as a side note, I require that they annotate at least one article a week; at the time of this writing my class has made nearly twice as many annotations as required).

As students read and annotate each week, they summarize and analyze their findings in a Google Doc using the Easy Bib add-on to manage the sources for their final paper. At the end of each week, they also publish their findings in a larger community of peers on Youth Voices, a site I codeveloped with my colleague Paul Allison. I detailed the kinds of comments that motivate students on Youth Voices and other online discussions in the Journal of Educational Computing Research. I’ve found that students appreciate comments from peers that also include links to resources.

At the end of this unit, students produce a traditional research paper with correct MLA formatting. I believe that the public conversations that happen around student research as it unfolds—whether through social annotations or in the comments they receive on their Youth Voices posts—make their individual writing stronger.

Recently there’s been a renewed emphasis on media literacy education, especially in the United States. This revival is critical as a 2017 Common Sense Media survey found that 40% of students said they preferred to get their news from social media. Sixty percent of those students cited Facebook or Twitter as their preferred source for news. This structure may be problematic as research suggests that students of all ages do not actively scrutinize the content that comes across their social media feeds.

Sponsored content is often mistaken for legitimate news while research-based infographics from advocacy organizations are taken at simply face value. Although newsfeeds may appear chronological or unbiased to students, they are actually the result of algorithms that are carefully designed to share what keeps people clicking, regardless of the quality or the accuracy of the source or content. Given the growth of access and interest in social media, students need heuristics to navigate the new media landscape.

In school contexts, educators will often provide students with tools like the WWWDOT Framework or the CRAAP test to aid them in their evaluation of web texts. However, these academic processes do not always transfer to informal learning contexts. Additionally, as Mike Caulfield, the inaugural civic fellow for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities' American Democracy Project Digital Polarization Initiative, points out, research from the Stanford History Education Group suggests that applying these frameworks may not work as well as desired. In some instances, web designers have adjusted their layouts or web addresses to master these “tests.” In others, the conflicting answers to the extensive questions in these protocols results in an inability draw a definitive conclusion.

Given the negative consequences resulting from a poorly informed citizenry, we need alternative approaches that can help expedite the fact-checking process. Thankfully, Caulfield offers some practices to help mitigate these challenges which he calls “Four Moves and a Habit”:

• Check for previous work: Often, trusted sites—including news sites or fact-checking sites like Politifact—have already investigated this claim and documented evidence. It’s important to note to students that they do not have to agree with the author’s conclusions, but at least they’ll get a better sense of the landscape.
• Go upstream to the source: Many of the links on social media are secondary sources of information with an embedded link to the primary source. A good practice is to teach students to locate and read the original source before drawing any conclusions.
• Read laterally: If the “upstream source” seems suspect, open one or several other browser tabs to conduct secondary searches to see what other sources say about the topic and the source providing the content. Caulfield suggests that the knowledge isn’t in one source, but rather in the collective network of sources.
• Circle back: Sometimes reading laterally disproves the original source or provides conflicting information on the claims. In other instances, reading laterally can produce more questions than when you begin. If that’s the case, students should try to reframe the claim and circle back to start a new search based upon the new information.

Caulfield’s final piece of advice is to develop the habit of checking one's emotions. Web content that sparks a strong reaction is unlikely to receive much scrutiny as it either validates existing beliefs or causes us to automatically reject it. We’re also more likely to click and/or share these types of sources, which in turn causes them to appear on the news feeds of our connections. By helping students to pause when they read these types of headlines, we can lower the likelihood that they and others will become misinformed.

In addition to posting these four moves, Caulfield has a host of social media posts and thinking prompts for teachers and students to explore on his blog, Four Moves. His free e-book, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers provides further details on the moves. Regardless of whether educators use the links provided here or a different set of resources, it’s critical that we help students uncover strategies to enhance their media and information literacies for real-world contexts. The future of our democracy depends upon it.

David Quinn is the director of technology integration for the Mendon–Upton Regional School District in Massachusetts. You can connect with him on Twitter @EduQuinn.