Literacy Now

“It’s like...magic!” the second grader celebrated, as he scanned a QR code on a frog food container and was directed to a website about what frogs eat. “Magic” was also what we felt when a team of us—a second-grade classroom teacher, a technology staff developer, and an administrator—examined how digital tools helped to support student-directed inquiry in the content areas over the course of a school year. We discovered three practices vital to making digital inquiry–based learning successful.

Encouraging questions and wonderings

Knowing that their ideas mattered helped our students to feel comfortable trying out different inquiry questions/topic ideas during our science and social studies units. Before we introduced digital tools, we created a “Think and Wonder” wall on a classroom bulletin board where students could place sticky notes with any questions or ideas they were pondering. Idea sharing and questioning were established as vital components of our learning community. When we later introduced Padlet, an online collaborative “bulletin board,” kids were not only comfortable sharing their thoughts in the digital format but many also eagerly contributed responses from home. We were thrilled to see how seamless the transition to digital sharing was and impressed with the inquiry that had extended beyond the units of study and the classroom.

Extending the learning network

While creating a Google slideshow to share her understanding of communities, one of our students searched for a picture of a fire truck but could not find one she liked. Instead, she discovered and played with the Google drawing tool and created her own fire truck clip art. Her partner noticed what she’d done and excitedly told the classmates sitting nearby to come and see. Suddenly, this student was teaching a group of classmates a neat trick that many of them then went on to try. The teacher noticed this and invited the student to conduct a minilesson on using the drawing tool the next day. Other students were then invited to share their tips and strategies throughout the year. We noted how they helped each other in many ways such as providing technical support, helping to narrow down topics for research, and giving feedback to improve each other's presentations. The teacher was no longer the “expert” in the room and students viewed their peers as resources.

Finding entry points for all learners

At the culmination of our science unit study of frogs, we asked students to share what they’d learned about the life cycle through observations and research. We introduced Wixie, an online publishing and creativity platform that enables students ages 4–8 to create multimedia presentations. We were impressed by students’ abilities to customize projects with little support to demonstrate their understanding of the frog life cycle. Throughout the study, students asked questions related to the information they were learning. For their culminating project, many chose to extend their presentations by seeking answers to these questions. Some students transferred learning from other subject areas and incorporated Venn diagrams, maps and charts, and QR codes directing their audience to noteworthy frog websites. Other students created a single slide presentation that read more like an informational poster, with voice recordings to narrate over their photographs, digital and analog drawings, and flowcharts. Students with diverse learning needs were able to use their strengths to communicate their understanding using the various tools available.

If inquiry-based learning is to be successful in the elementary classroom, teachers need to facilitate a classroom environment where independent thinking is celebrated, risk-taking is encouraged, and strengths are highlighted. These practices can transfer in meaningful ways when using digital tools. By laying the groundwork for a culture of asking questions and seeking answers, sharing ideas, and learning from peers using digital tools, teachers can find their own “magic” in the classroom.

Jenny Gieras teaches third grade at Roaring Brook Elementary School in Chappaqua, NY. She can be reached via Twitter. Ellen Moskowitz is an instructional technology coach in Chappaqua, NY. She can be reached via Twitter. William Yang is an assistant principal at the Edgewood Elementary School in Scarsdale, NY. He can be contacted via Twitter. This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Earlier this fall, I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across an anchor chart created by Pana Asavavatana. Hashtagged with #MentorTech and #LivBit, I curiously clicked on the handle of @TheLivBits. Short for Olivia, Liv is an elementary student in the United States who shares selfie videos that range from book reviews to her thinking about reading. Liv also shares meetings with authors and inspirational bits.

In an age of global connectedness, Liv’s videos, shared through her “mom-monitored” Twitter, Instagram, and Vimeo accounts have taken the world by storm since she began posting in February 2016. Curious about the possibilities of using Liv’s videos in the global literacy classroom, I reached out to Pana and asked her to share her strategies for doing so.

Pana is the preK–2 technology and design coach at Taipei American School, an independent, coeducational day school with a U.S.-based curriculum. Founded in 1949 for preK–12 learners, its students represent more than 30 nationalities. In her role, Pana collaborates with 23 teachers as well as specialist teams, including Mandarin and art, with a focus on technology integration, robotics, and engineering.

An active Twitter user, Pana first encountered Liv through teacher and author Kristin Ziemke, who had posted about #LivBits. Pana discovered Liv’s Instagram (note: the account is private and you must request permission to follow), where Liv began her journey of sharing ideas about books. During summer 2016, Pana, Kristin, and Liv met at the Building Learning Communities (BLC) education conference in Boston, where each person presented.

As many of us know, “literacy” is more than just reading text on a page. Communicating in today’s world includes multisensory, multimodal, and interactive experiences to engage audiences. What does this mean for teachers and students?

Together, we must learn to think critically about new media and how to use it effectively to share ideas globally. Liv is one example of a student connecting with wider audiences using digital platforms, which reflects the evolving nature of communication today.

Mentor texts in literacy teaching are not new. We, as educators, often use them to teach craft or techniques in writing and hope our students will use these tools to enrich their own writing. Similarly, Liv’s videos act as “mentor tech” and provide models that Pana’s students use to create their own videos. Pana’s students begin drafting a script before filming their first video and then revising their work. Throughout this process, students watch several versions of Liv’s videos, noting craft techniques they might borrow—from what they might say to how ideas are presented on camera.

The collaboration between Pana and Liv is but one example of how new technologies are continually opening new doors for fostering a global literacies network, inclusive of both teachers and children. As Liv’s mom shared with me, Liv’s goal is “to be a positive voice for kids, to celebrate others’ work, and to grow advocacy for causes she cares about—like being a voice for shark education.” The selfie videos created by Liv and Pana’s students provide teachers another medium for generating meaningful assessment, feedback, and communication that tells much more about a child’s literacy learning than a test score.

Liv is one model of how children can use social media not only to learn but also to develop, reflect on, and share their passion and knowledge with others as they cultivate metacognition about their literacy experiences.

Special thanks to Pana Asavavatana, an Apple Distinguished Educator, for connecting with a stranger from across the globe via Twitter. I am deeply grateful for her willingness to share her teaching expertise and the work of her students at Taipei American School with me. 

Cassie J. Brownell is a doctoral candidate and Marianne Amarel Teaching and Teacher Education Fellow in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. A corecipient of a 2015 NCTE-CEE Research Initiative Grant, Cassie’s most recent collaborative project—#hearmyhome—explores how writing with and through sound might help students and teachers attune toward literacies and communities of difference.

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

Recently I read a blog post written by Doug Belshaw describing a project being completed by Mozilla to create digital badges associated with their Web Literacy Map.
Although digital badges and the Web Literacy Map are not recent developments, per se, I decided to spend some time examining the project further, which led me to the Academy Badge Library, a potentially useful tool for helping students (and teachers) demonstrate their competencies for online inquiry.

I think it’s important to begin with some background on the Web Literacy Map and digital badges. The former was originally described in a whitepaper that defined web literacy as skills and competencies required to read, write, and participate effectively on the web. In the original paper, the authors identified four areas of Web literacies: exploring, creating, connecting, and protecting. As often happens with anything related to technology, though, changes in context result in various updates to the map. The most recent version retained the original broad areas of Web literacy (write, read, and participate), yet added depth and detail to each by delineating specific skills for each area and competencies for each skill. The map also incorporated 21st-century skills to offer a comprehensive framework for teaching and learning Web literacy skills.

Digital badges, on the other hand, were characterized in one report as “digital credentials that represent skills, interests, and achievements earned by an individual through specific projects, programs, courses, or other activities.” They are proposed as a mechanism to provide greater understanding of an individual’s skills or accomplishments due to the defined performance criteria associated with each. An inherent benefit of digital badges is they can be embedded within an electronic resource and serve as a form of electronic portfolio. They have also been described as a way to provide students with choice, contributing toward motivation and engagement.

What really captured my interested about the Academy Badge Library—beyond the general benefits of badges—was the alignment between several badges with the skills and competencies associated with the new literacies of online research and comprehension. Specifically, badges used to demonstrate the capability to Search, Navigate, Evaluate, Synthesize, and Compose on the Internet addressed the five primary processes outlined in a recent article by Leu and colleagues, which included

1. Reading to define important questions
2. Reading to locate online information
3. Reading to evaluate online information
4. Reading to synthesize online information
5. Reading and writing to communicate online information.

I also noted that each of the badges addressed the specific sub-skills Leu et al. described in their work. For example, the Search badge included using and revising keywords, evaluating questions and search terms, and discovering information spread across a website, which were skills also mentioned in the article.

Relating this to the classroom and to research (including my own) has repeatedly shown that students should be explicitly taught processes necessary for effective online inquiry, and I view the Academy Badge Library as a way to supplement this instruction. Earning badges provides opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge in each of the aforementioned real-world competencies. In addition, accumulating badges allows them to document the skills they have developed and the achievements they have accomplished over time. Finally, as students earn badges, teachers can document skills and competencies related to 21st-century skills that are not often (or easily) assessed, including problem solving and critical thinking, especially if additional badges are earned beyond those directly associated with online research and comprehension.

The Web Literacy Map and Academy Badge Library can be useful to prepare students to be critical, effective seekers of information online. The resources listed below will provide deeper knowledge about digital badges and encourage badge creation, especially in the primary grades. Good luck as you begin this process!

Here are some additional resources if you wish to further explore badges:

• ITM 28: Class Badges
• What Is a Badge?
• Chart Students’ Growth With Digital Badges
• The Teacher’s Guide to Badges in Education
• Badge Library

These are tools you can use to create your own badges:

• Mozilla Open Badges
• Credly (and an instructional video)
• For All Badges
• Edmodo
• Badge Studio

S. Michael Putman, PhD, is an associate professor and interim chairperson in the Reading and Elementary Education Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His areas of research include the impact of teacher preparation and professional development on teacher self-efficacy, student dispositions toward online inquiry, and the effective use of technology within teaching practices.

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

James, a third grader enrolled in a summer reading program, reluctantly joined his tutor each morning and often shrugged in response to questions or invitations to participate. Initial assessments revealed low self-perception and attitudes toward reading and writing and a lack of motivation and independence as a writer. James demonstrated difficulty with finding writing topics, engaging in the act of writing, and maintaining overall writing stamina. He was more interested in outdoor activities or playing games on his tablet.

Using his interests in technology and the outdoors, his tutor encouraged him to take photos of his weekend fishing trip. She used these photos on his tablet to encourage discussion, and when asked what he wanted to write about, James chose fishing. Using Book Creator, he wrote an opinion and informational piece and then posted these pages in his Seesaw digital portfolio so his family could see his work. His mom “liked” it and left positive comments. Sharing his work on Seesaw gave James an authentic audience for his writing and made communication between home and school easier, which is an essential component of student success.

James used Seesaw throughout the tutoring sessions to reflect on his reading and writing progress and goals. Because James had difficulty with composing ideas in writing, his tutor provided him with sentence frames such as “As a reader/writer, I learned…” and “To continue to grow, I will…” to help initiate his self-evaluation and reflection process. James learned about the importance of continued practice as a reader and writer as noted in his reflection from June 30: “To continue to grow as a writer, I will keep writing.” The use of digital tools enhanced James’s engagement, interest, and attitude toward writing. According to his tutor, “Technology was definitely the [catalyst] that changed James’s view of writing!”

Digital portfolios

Digital portfolios can serve to demonstrate a wide range of purposes and processes including completed work or work in progress. Students can explain their thinking and request feedback from others to foster more authentic learning experiences. The online nature of digital portfolios makes it easy for both students and teachers to evaluate growth. Students can examine their strengths, set goals for areas of continued development, and take greater ownership in their own learning process. Additionally, stakeholders in students’ education such as parents and teachers can see ongoing evidence of students’ growth.     

Seesaw is a versatile online tool that can be used for a range of self-assessment activities such as exit slips, reflection, and portfolios for goal setting and to document progress over time. Getting started with Seesaw is simple. Once a class has been created, students can sign in with e-mail addresses or by scanning a QR code from their devices, which is especially helpful if students do not have individual e-mail accounts. Once in the Seesaw class, students can upload images, texts, PDF files, links, videos, drawings, and work from other apps. Teachers must approve work before it can be posted, and parents can be invited to view their child’s work. With teacher approval, students can feature their work on the Seesaw blog to connect with wider audiences from around the world. Giving students a platform from which to share their work increases access to authentic audiences, which is an important part of any writing program.

Katie Stover is an assistant professor of Education at Furman University in Greenville, SC, and coauthor of From Pencils to Podcasts: Digital Tools for Transforming K–6 Literacy Practices(Solution Tree, 2017) and Smuggling Writing: Strategies That Get Students to Write Every Day, in Every Content Area, Grades 3–12(Corwin, 2016). Lindsay Yearta is an assistant professor of Education at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC, and coauthor of From Pencils to Podcasts: Digital Tools for Transforming K–6 Literacy Practices(Solution Tree, 2017) as well as a number of articles published in peer-reviewed journals. She can be reached via Twitter.   

At Ruth Fox Elementary School in North Branch, MI, my colleagues and I are entering year three of our online professional learning with Matt Copeland, author of Socratic Circles. Not only have we continued our long distance learning via video, but we have also started exploring the benefits of using video to reflect on our instructional practices in the classroom. The results have been overwhelmingly positive!

Just last month, Edutopia published this piece by Mary Davenport, outlining the importance of yearlong, embedded planning for successful implementation of Socratic Circles, a protocol for facilitating student-led discussions that focus on close reading, higher order thinking, question formation, and speaking and listening. Davenport’s last step, “Let’s get reflective,” is crucial for building our capacity as educators to facilitate this type of classroom dialogue to spur learning and a deep sense of community and collaboration in the classroom. How might classroom video be leveraged to provide rich opportunities for such reflection?

Lights, camera, action!

Last spring, we used smartphones and tablets to record Socratic Circle lessons in our classrooms. Next, we used a simplified version of discourse analysis to gather and analyze data about the dialogue we were facilitating among students. To begin, we selected a short segment of video, approximately five minutes, and took the time to transcribe all of the conversation that took place therein. Then, with videos and transcripts in hand, we poured over our data, tabulating and commenting on what we saw.

For example, one teacher was able to document that in her five-minute snippet of classroom dialogue:

• 89% of the verbal contributions to the conversation were made by students
• Of the 14 students in the inner circle, 10 contributed to the discussion
• Of the 18 verbal contributions, five were questions and three of those questions came from the teacher whereas only two came from students
• In 12 of the 16 student contributions, the student speaking was responding directly to another student
• There were no instances of students inviting/drawing others into the conversation

Benefits of looking through the lens

Through these video analyses, we reflected on our own practice, just as Davenport suggests we should. Exploring a range of video annotation tools (MoocNote, Video Ant, Edthena), we identified, individually, where we believed our facilitation was working well and also where there were opportunities for personal growth. Because these annotations were all documented in the technologies we were using, we were able to share our videos and analyses with one another, collaborate, and offer our own coaching tips to build one another’s capacity to facilitate better classroom dialogue in the future.

As an example, from the previous data,the teacher was able to quickly identify the strength of the verbal interactions among her students’ dialogue but then also begin to brainstorm with her colleagues strategies she might use to facilitate students generating and posing more questions to the group. The professional conversation that grew organically from this activity was every bit as rich and productive as the student-led dialogue in the classroom.

Using video and discourse analysis afforded our teachers the opportunity to step back from the details of each classroom conversation itself and weigh the breadth and depth of the dialogue against our goals for the discussion. This practice and reflection has taken our implementation of the protocol to a whole new level. Our planning for future Socratic Circles with students has been greatly strengthened by this job-embedded professional learning facilitated by video.

This fall, we intend to share these same tools and procedures with our students, to engage them in studying their own conversations through discourse analysis and video, and facilitating their own growth in learning.

Amber White is a reading specialist, a teacher consultant for the Saginaw Bay Writing Project, and the Director of Curriculum & Instruction for North Branch Area Schools. You can reach her on Twitter. Matt Copeland is an author, presenter, and instructional coach who works with educators to build capacity in using Socratic Circles in K–12 classrooms and beyond. You can learn more about implementing Socratic Circles by joining our professional community.

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