Literacy Now

Using video production in the classroom is no longer the expensive, intimidating approach to student engagement that it was 20 years ago. As a result of Web 2.0, digital tools are seemingly ubiquitous. With more freedom to use mobile devices in the classroom and increased Internet access, video creation and collaboration has expanded beyond the traditional broadcasting or English language arts class.

Since 2014, I have attended the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy at the University of Rhode Island and have had the good fortune of spending a week learning about best practices for using digital tools in the classroom alongside other K–16 educators. As a result, I have learned different methods for including video tools in my practice without the added stress and expense of purchasing cameras, tripods, and editing software.

Creation and asynchronous conversation

Though our world is huge, we can help our students engage in conversations that go beyond a 140-character tweet or an abbreviated post on social media. Flipgrid is one of the tools that I  have leveraged in my classroom in order to engage students in conversations with people with whom they might not normally communicate. This year, as my ninth graders stepped into my classroom, I knew they were my first group of students who had no memory of the events of September 11, 2001. I wanted them to hear firsthand what others had experienced. To do that, I created a Flipgrid, which started with friends and grew beyond people I knew. The interviewees used Flipgrid as a video tool to respond to a prompt about their own memories of September 11. I shared this Flipgrid with my students, who not only watched but were able to create their own video response to posts that resonated with them. Flipgrid offered my students an opportunity to have a dialogue with others through the affordances of connected learning. (Note: If you have a memory of September 11 that you would like to contribute to my Flipgrid or continue a conversation with one of the people who posted to this grid, I would love for you to share it here.)

Leveling the class participation playing field

Another creation tool I stumbled upon in its infancy and that I now use frequently with my students is Voki. Voki is a speaking avatar program that allows users to choose an avatar, make it unique by adding clothes and finding hairstyles and accessories, and add a voice through three methods: microphone, telephone, or a text-to-speech device. Certainly, the avatar design is what draws students in, but one of the most powerful aspects of this tool is that it gives students a platform for expressing themselves. Students can comment on a topic important to them or simply share what they’ve learned. Voki is also excellent for formative assessment. Though I didn’t realize this tool’s power at first, students who are often uncomfortable talking in class or who are physically unable to talk get the opportunity to engage in classroom discussions. The avatar does the talking for them through the text-to-speech option. There are many other ways to use Voki in the classroom; for instance, I’ve had students comment on politics or create advertisements for a product they were trying to promote. Teachers can also use Voki. For example, I have used the Voki Presenter option to teach elementary-aged students how to spell word family sounds. It’s a versatile tool, and many of the options are free to students and teachers.

As a veteran teacher, I know that when students are engaged, they love learning. By providing instructional approaches for developing student expression that go beyond the traditional multiparagraph essay (which typically is not read by anyone other than the classroom teacher), digital media has the potential to be a powerful approach to education. Not only does video production allow students to communicate with a broad audience, but it also provides them with an easy means to become civically engaged citizens.

Kara Clayton is the media studies teacher at Thurston High School in Redford, MI.

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

Makerspaces are informal learning contexts that have become popular because they feature hands-on exploratory learning driven by interests rather than curricula. These learning spaces provide a rich context for collaboration, communication, and literacy development. This post explores three aspects of learning in Makerspaces intended to spark new thinking about instruction in classrooms and beyond.

Making values

Making as a culture is a learn-by-doing endeavor. As makers engage in making, they’re innovating—expressing creativity and problem solving. In these spaces, learners choose to make things they like, need, or could use, as they express creativity or artistry. The Maker Camp Projects gallery and Makerspaces Projects show a range of examples. The learning that surrounds making capitalizes on just-in-time learning as makers work together to figure things out or research ideas as the need arises. Engagement in learning is real, as is the desire to create. Achieving a goal is fed by a need to know or a desire to explore. In this way, making is perhaps the most authentic form of inquiry.

Making networks

Makerspaces create an environment where learners of all ages come together to learn from one another. In making networks, the desire for sharing ideas that lead to improvements or hacks to make design better are paramount. In these networks, crowd-sourcing approaches are the norm; everyone contributes to make products and directions better for the whole community. Sharing encourages and empowers learners—other readers use resources, documents, and archives that have been posted to create/recreate what has been shared by others. Makers seek each other out online to share advice and mine specific expertise.

Makers are collaborative as part of the culture; sharing is part of process. Digital sharing involves writing and communicating with others on sites that makers commonly frequent (such as Instructables and Make:). Makers document their processes and share “in progress” work within networks to look for ways to use or improve a process or product or to riff on ideas shared by others (remix and make new things). Specific examples of making networks can be found in Making it Social: Considering the Purpose of Literacy to Support Participation in Making and Engineering, in the August 2016 issue of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy (JAAL).

Making genres

Genres are social processes in maker spaces and digital platforms provide multiple ways of sharing ideas formally and informally. Makers often compose multimodal online how-to guides that are presented through a mixture of images, videos, and text based directions. These posts also include reviews of what’s made (i.e., directions for making, extensions or hacks). Face-to-face interactions are a critical part of the social interaction of making as well as learners working together to support one another as they learn new strategies and processes. Within community makerspaces, students often serve as apprentices who monitor maker spaces while serving in roles that build their identities as experts with tools and technologies. For more resources and examples, visit Maker Space for Education.  

Instructional design choices that draw on the above principles can help youth develop agency, including taking charge of their own literacies and teaching others, in a community-oriented environment that treats individual learning as part of the greater, interconnected whole. Additional resources, readings, and reflections about how to facilitate learning within Makerspaces or similar environments are linked to Renovated Learning.

Jill Castek is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona. She co-edits the column Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning in JAAL.

In 2008, the state of Rhode Island required all high schools to show evidence of students’ proficiency across all subjects in order for students to graduate. My district decided that a senior project would be the vehicle used to demonstrate this proficiency. Senior projects are an opportunity for students to self-select a topic and use their senior year to explore this topic through research, an applied learning product, and a final presentation.

When we first started the project, our school required ongoing documentation of the project over the course of the year. We asked students to collect papers showing their progress and interaction with an expert in the field through paperwork. The papers were filled out, signed, and housed in a binder. However, in 2015, we realized that this process has little value to students.

We began to wonder: How might we make the shift to a more authentic learning experience for students to share their projects with a more global audience? How could students better represent their learning and exploration throughout the year?

Our solution: We decided to replace paper with a digital platform for creation rather than collection.

Since 2015, every senior in our district has the opportunity to build their own website to showcase their learning. When we started, students were introduced to Wix, Weebly, and Google Sites as free website builders. Now, two years later, students are feeding content into their sites through social media tools like Instagram and Tumblr or documenting their year through Twitter or Instagram, then curating their experiences with multimodal tools such as Storify.

Building Critical Skills

Through these experiences, our students have not only deepened their understanding of new topics but also developed important skills in analysis, visual literacy, responsibility, and reflection.

• Analysis. By deconstructing preexisting websites and previous student work, our students have developed a deeper understanding of how to organize, structure, and create their own original work. Also, as students explore the range of free digital tools, they spend time analyzing and choosing formats that best convey their message aligned to their purpose.
• Visual literacy. Much like a written piece must convey the right message and tone, website production encourages students to think more strategically about image selection, color choice, content placement, and alignment with or without text. These multidimensional representations of content help to document students’ proficiency with visual literacy skills. (see Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies)

• Responsibility. As students develop their sites over the course of a year, they also develop time management and organizational skills. While they curate relevant content, conversations arise about copyright and fair use, and students discuss the best strategies for attribution. (see the Media Education Lab’s Copyright and Fair Use: Lesson Plans for High School, College, and Graduate Education)

• Reflection. While we encourage students to make their websites a “one-stop shop” for information about specific topics, creating these sites also fosters reflection. As students build their sites, they have multiple opportunities to reflect on new knowledge gained and how they have grown throughout the process.

 

One senior described the process: “I loved making the website and I think it is a great visual for every senior project... I think this is a fantastic way to leave a positive and educational mark on the Internet compared to the negative things students put on the Internet nowadays.”

 

Affordances

Student-created websites are not only visually appealing but informative as well. We encourage students to think about how they can “go deeper” by embedding instructional YouTube videos, hyperlinking text to articles or community resources, and blogging. In turn, their senior projects become an important source of information for others. If an outsider wants to learn what one student thought about writing a children’s book, the student’s project website provides all of the resources. If someone else wanted to learn how best to start a vegan diet, another student’s website provides information about that.

Finally, the stamina students need to build and then continually add to, edit, and enhance their sites provides real-world applications and life skills that are often overlooked in the world of standards, testing, and grade-level expectations.

Impact and implications

Creating a website as an alternative to a portfolio is not groundbreaking. However, we have found that our students now have the ability to use portfolios to help them think critically about their experience with a self-selected topic over the course of the year and how to represent their thinking in both traditional and visual texts. Students become real authors and begin to understand how to remix content to tell their unique story of growth and learning. Because this tool is web-based, student authors also have the ability to share their work with the greater global community for feedback and to build credibility. While this is used with seniors in my setting, students at all levels can create their own websites for projects or portfolios to showcase their work with the world. I encourage you to try something similar with your own students!

Amanda Murphy is the Senior Project Coordinator and a social studies teacher at Westerly High School, Westerly, RI. Amanda received a Graduate Certificate in Digital Literacy through the University of Rhode Island in 2015, and she is a FuseRI Fellow with the Highlander Institute. Connect with Amanda on Twitter.

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

The end of January marks the first week of the academic year for Australian children. All across the country, teachers and students are bracing themselves for the annual first week back of getting-to-know-you conversations. Although student-to-student and student-to-teacher discussions early on in the semester are necessary to build rapport and establish a classroom climate of mutual respect and understanding, the details shared in these conversations are typically lost when the lesson ends. Thankfully, the use of digital technology can enable some of these getting-to-know-you conversations to be captured, published, shared, and reflected upon throughout the school year as students develop and change.

I use getting-to-know-you activities that encourage students to work both collaboratively and individually, create and share visual representations both with and without technology, converse with and listen to one another, and represent ideas using visuals, words, and sounds.

Both of the following activities are designed for middle school students (ages 10–15) but could be adapted easily for older students. Please note each activity achieves similar outcomes, so teachers should choose only one to try with each class.

The illustrated interview

The illustrated interview was inspired by The New York Times series in which notable people sketch their responses to a brief questionnaire. You can access the entire series, but I recommend the interviews by Buzz Aldrin, Tavi Gevinson, Tim Burton, and Richard Branson as great examples for students. After viewing a few examples of these short videos with students, the activity runs as follows:

1. A common set of getting-to-know-you questions is generated by the whole class, drawing on suggestions from both The New York Times Illustrated Interviews and the students’ own ideas.
2. Students are then organized into pairs, with each reciprocating as interviewer and interviewee.
3. The interviewer assigns the interviewee a list of 10 questions from the class set.
4. The interviewee selects five questions from the list and responds by drawing pictures on paper. These sketches are scanned, photographed, or filmed, and the digital files are returned to the interviewer.
5. The interviewer is then responsible for turning the sketched responses into a 60-second illustrated interview. Using video editing software, the interviewer adds relevant sound effects to each image (Sound Bible has free sound effects) and precedes each sketched response with a title slide encompassing the question posed.
6. The interviewers upload their completed illustrated interviews to YouTube (using the unlisted setting for greater privacy), and the films are then published to the class website for viewing by other students.
7. The culminating step is a screening of all interviews followed by a whole=class discussion. The teacher scaffolds reflective prompts to stimulate discussion such as I didn’t know that…, I found it interesting to learn that…, A question I have is…. The discussion sparks a reflection on what was discovered about their interviewee and themselves from the process of constructing the illustrated interviews and what they have learned about their fellow classmates from viewing the works. Through voicing or writing down their thoughts, students identify similarities and differences in values, interests, backgrounds, and personality to establish a climate of trust, understanding, and mutual respect within the class help.

The hot spot identity collage

The vital technology for this getting-to-know-you activity is ThingLink, a free online tool that enables the annotation of digital images via hot spots. When the cursor passes over a hot spot in ThingLink, a window appears with annotated text or a hyperlink. If you have not yet encountered this tool, you can view featured examples that provide an understanding of the many possibilities ThingLink presents in the classroom. The activity runs as follows:

1. Individually, students create a visual representation of their identity in the form of a paper collage (or similar). They then create a digital copy of their work by scanning or photographing their collage.
2. Students are organized randomly into pairs. The identity collages serve as the stimulus for a conversation between the pair of students about their personalities, backgrounds, values, and personal interests.
3. As they talk, students make notes, record quotes, and write down observations based on their partner’s discussion.
4. Following the conversation, each student uploads his or her partner’s identity collage to ThingLink and strategically positions hot spots on the image to reveal quotations and snippets from the earlier conversation. The student further uncovers aspects of his or her partner’s identity that might otherwise be unnoticeable in the classroom.
5. Once each ThingLink is completed and published, students can share their work via a URL. Alternatively, each ThingLink can generate an embedded code to be posted directly onto a class website.  
6. The final step in this exercise is to encourage students to view the identity collages on ThingLink and run a follow-up reflection and whole-class discussion. The instructions for this step should mirror the instructions for the illustrated interview activity.

In addition to creating online spaces that build positive peer and teacher relationships, these technology-enhanced getting-to-know-you activities simultaneously enable the formative assessment of each student’s digital composition, listening, speaking, and visual representation skills very early in the school year. I challenge teachers to consider trying out one of these activities the next time they meet a new class of students. Who knows what you will learn?

Nicole Timbrell is the Head of Digital Learning & Australian Curriculum Coordinator in the Secondary School at the Australian International School, Singapore, where she also teaches English. Formerly, Nicole was a graduate student and a research assistant at the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education.

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

I know what it’s like to feel overwhelmed when meeting students’ literacy needs, to lose touch with my family because of long hours at school, and to drop into bed exhausted at the end of every day—I had to take a break from teaching because the stress of being an educator was affecting my health. However, with the innovation of web-based technology, cloud coaching is showing promise as an effective inquiry-based intervention to reduce stress, improve instructional practices, and increase students’ academic performance by creating the conditions for having quality conversations and empowering literacy leadership.

The rise of teacher stress

A recent Pennsylvania State University report found 46% of teachers say they have high levels of stress on a daily basis, which is affecting their health and their ability to teach effectively. Mark Greenberg, a professor of human development and psychology at Penn State, explained the stress is causing “between 30 and 40% of teachers to leave the profession in their first five years,” which costs taxpayers billions of dollars a year to train new teachers. Teacher burnout isn’t plaguing just U.S. schools. A survey of 4,000 teachers in England report 82% of educators felt the workload expected of them was unmanageable and 73% said their health was being affected. As a way to reduce stress and retain teachers, school districts are integrating web-based technology to provide cloud coaching for mentorship, professional development, and instructional support.

What is cloud coaching?

Cloud coaching, also known as virtual or online coaching, uses the Internet and a webcam to create a collaborative partnership between two or more individuals in a digital environment. The coaching takes place through a variety of online platforms that are free, like Skype and Google Hangout, or require a small monthly fee, like Zoom and Gotomeeting. This online coaching experience cultivates leadership skills by engaging a teacher in quality conversations about possibilities, targeting effective instructional methods, and providing implementation support as the teacher takes action to systematize classroom literacy routines. The frequency and structure of cloud coaching is differentiated to meet the needs of each individual teacher.

Examples of cloud coaching

Executive coaching for administrators: Once a month, administrators from a small, rural school district spend one hour individually receiving cloud coaching with Dr. Ray Jorgensen. The focused inquiry process creates a shift in thinking, which allows the administrator to see situations from a different perspective, triggering new ideas and creating the conditions for more effective leadership. 

Content-focused coaching for educators: The University of Pittsburgh has implemented an eight-week online workshop to develop pedagogical knowledge of effective literacy routines. This is followed by one-on-one cloud coaching to support the implementation process. Results suggest cloud coaching has been effective at improving reading comprehension instruction and students’ reading achievement in high-poverty elementary schools.

Literacy leadership for instructional coaches: I provided cloud coaching to instructional coaches who were responsible for designing and conducting school-embedded English Language Arts professional development. Meg Rishel, a K–5 instruction coach, said, “Cloud coaching helped me grow as a literacy leader. I went from talking at teachers to talking with teachers. Additionally, I went from telling what I know to listening to what others know.”

Each coaching session began with a guided inquiry into educators’ successes and challenges as they implement effective literacy routines. After needs were identified, we collaborated to build an action plan that included gathering resources, generating an interactive presentation with open-ended questions that created the conditions for quality conversations among teachers.

Academic coaching for students: Students of all ages receive the same benefits from cloud coaching as their teachers. An 11th-grade student shared, “Before cloud coaching, I rarely thought I was good enough in school, and I would often shut down and stop being productive because of it. Coaching helped me organize the work I was doing and, more important, helped me to be proud of my work and to not limit myself. Now I feel much more capable and motivated to get things done!” Every Sunday I met with students to help them break down their academic workload into manageable chunks, provide feedback on essays, and suggest strategies to improve their study habits.

At a time when school districts may not have the resources to hire a full-time instructional coach or afford ongoing professional development, cloud coaching is an effective and innovative alternative to reduce teacher stress and empower literacy leadership. I learned it’s never too late to ask for help. Engaging in the inquiry-based process of cloud coaching not only improved my effectiveness as a literacy leader but also helped me reduce my stress by creating the conditions for quality conversations and relationships.

Julie B. Wise, an ILA member since 2000, is an international coach and consultant. Her research examines cloud coaching as an inquiry-based intervention to reduce stress so that individuals and organizations can cultivate literacy leadership. You can subscribe to her newsletter to stay up-to-date on mindfulness, literacy, and technology.

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