Literacy Now

Computer coding is a trending topic these days. One reason why is a key feature of the current focus in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education—President Barack Obama’s Computer Science for All initiative. According to folks in the White House, coding has become a new “necessary skill” for our students’ economic opportunity and social mobility.

Computational thinking, math, design, engineering, and data analysis are considered essential skills to prepare students for the high-paying technology jobs that are open and currently unfilled. That is all well and good, but literacy-focused educators may be wondering how literacy fits it in with coding movement.

As a school librarian invested in literacy education, I have seen school and public librarians embrace the computer coding movement. Some people argue that libraries have no place in computer science and should stay with their traditional programs and services. In contrast, proponents see that computer coding helps develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and these are at the core of our professional mission: to help people understand how to solve problems using information effectively, which are skills that support people as lifelong learners.

Not until a group of librarians and I visited the South End Technology Center (SETC) in Boston, MA, last June that I realized computer coding has a big place in literacy education. Dr. Susan Klimczak, L2T Director of Special Programs at SETC, spoke to us about how computer coding is essentially writing a story. The five-stage story structure is all there. When you code, you set the scene, build tension, create climax, include falling action, and come to a resolution—think Minecraft game design. The possibilities for librarians to collaborate with English and reading teachers using code are wide open and exciting.

At a sold-out Coding With Scratch workshop for school librarians in August, facilitator and school librarian Jennifer Robinson and I were impressed by librarians’ eagerness to learn and bring coding into their schools. After Jen explained the basics about Scratch, we let the librarians loose, tasked with developing a short computer program with a sprite (character), setting, costumes, and actions. They quickly learned the start, loop, repeat, and sequence commands. Excitement grew as the participants interacted and learned through trial and error. These educators experienced the design process emotions of frustration, pride, dismay, and exhilaration and were hooked on the value of bringing coding into the literacy fold.

To show librarians what a collaborative English language arts and coding project could look like, Jen described her project with fifth-grade students. Working as an instructional partner with the classroom teacher, Jen had the students create a computer program using Scratch to show evidence of competency in a Common Core narrative writing standard. First, students read a biography and then created a narrative script highlighting important parts in this person’s life. After a brief tutorial on Scratch, students attempted to master the broadcast and receive commands to code a dialogue sequence from their script.

Librarians who are on the coding bandwagon have the dispositions to be comfortable with the discomfort of taking risks and letting go of control. They are trained collaborators who support traditional literacies of reading and writing but are also technology leaders willing to try new things and create student-centered learning activities. Check with your school librarian for ways to bring coding into your literacy instruction.

Mary Moen is a visiting research professor and the coordinator of the School Library Media Program at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. A former school librarian, her research interests include teacher professional learning of technology, digital literacy, and makerspaces in libraries.

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

In the spring, Ian O’Byrne, Heather Woods, and I launched the Teaching Literacies With Technology survey with the support of the ILA committee on Literacy, eLearning, Communication, and Culture. We created a website to support the project and circulated invitations through social media to the survey link. We announced the survey on Literacy Daily and at several conferences and have sincerely appreciated shares and retweets by fellow ILA members to their networks.

One hard thing about a research project like this is recognizing when a revision is required. After working to generate responses, only 37 participants had completed the study as of back-to-school in September—too few to draw any real conclusions about the questions driving our inquiry. As a response, we shortened the survey and the new, shorter version is available at digitallyliterate.net and via this link. We invite you to respond and to share the links! More data means a more informed ILA!

Preliminary data

Even with so few responses, we thought you might find some of our preliminary data interesting. We hope this will encourage you to contribute your own insights to the survey so that we can construct a more nuanced understanding of (a) the ways that teachers all over the world are integrating diverse technologies to support student learning, (b) the barriers they encounter, and (c) the types of professional learning that they would most appreciate.

Demographics of participants

Nearly half of our survey participants (16) reported being between 35 and 44 years of age. Seven reported being between 25 and 34, and eight reported falling in the 45–54 age category. Twenty-five participants live and work in the United States, five in China, two in Canada, two in Afghanistan, one in Greece, one in Zimbabwe, and one in Hong Kong. Eighteen respondents have PhDs or an EdD, and 10 have Master’s degrees. Most participants (26) work in higher education  contexts. Just 11 participants reported working in K–12 schools. None of our respondents self-identified as African American; 29 self-identified as white/Caucasian or of European descent. On balance, then, our survey respondents to date are mostly middle-aged white women with advanced graduate degrees teaching in universities or colleges in the United States. Given that our interest is in surveying teachers globally, we need to invite much broader participation by culturally diverse K–12 teachers of all genders living and teaching literacies around the world.

Barriers and challenges

Participants told us that access to technologies continues to be a serious barrier to their integration practices for literacies teaching and learning both in school and in their communities.

As one participant wrote:

“Equal access. We have districts in our state with almost no Internet access, and I have students who do not have access once they leave the school campus. Wi-Fi must be a basic civil service like electricity itself, sewage, and water.”

Another participant summarized more general concerns about restrictive acceptable use policies, firewalls, and lack of access to social media channels such as YouTube that several participants noted prevent technology integration in literacies instruction.

“The barriers are lack of access for the students in class, not outside of class.”

Another wrote:

“Lack of infrastructure and lack of computer access is an issue. Our district also has a conservative view on allowing students to publish content on the Internet and connect with others outside of the classroom. “

Generally, teachers reported concerns about their students’ ability to use technologies when they are integrated in instruction.

One respondent wrote: “Students do not come from a level playing field. It's challenging to scaffold digital literacy skills/behaviors when some students do not have rudimentary skills.”

Others noted that the digital use divide is very pronounced in their classrooms and are very concerned with issues of access to digital literacies skills and instruction for traditionally marginalized students.

In terms of professional development, teachers noted top-down initiatives as a major barrier to their own learning and sense of agency. One teacher wrote: “Lack of teacher-led initiatives. Too often, teachers are making choices about tech integration based on what their school/district/etc. tells them to do—not what they think will best support student learning.”

Have your say! Contribute to this global conversation about how teachers are presently integrating—and not integrating—technologies into their literacies classrooms at digitallyliterate.net.

Michelle Schira Hagerman is assistant professor of educational technologies at The University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada. She is also on Twitter.
Heather Woods is a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa and coauthor of the Teaching Literacies With Technology survey. You can follow her on Twitter.

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

Literacy researchers such as Dick Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen have spent their professional careers proving through research that children who do not have access to books simply won’t read much outside the school setting and better readers typically read more and continue to improve, while their lesser accomplished peers lag further and further behind. No one understands this problem more than classroom teachers such as Justin Minkel, who is continually in search of viable options for getting books into the hands of readers who need them the most.

In a massive ConnectED Initiative to address the pervasive problem of text access in low-income households, U.S. President Barack Obama launched a comprehensive Open eBooks (also known as electronic books) effort in spring 2016, delivering more than 250 million dollars’ worth of digital reading material to elementary, middle school, and high school readers for free. More than 1.5 million student/family access codes for the Open eBooks app were requested during the two-week launch of Open eBooks, which is just a fraction of the number of students this initiative is meant to reach.

Providing access to electronic books is of paramount importance within a national landscape where Internet availability and access to smart devices has exploded in recent years. A 2016 study published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that in U.S. households surveyed with children ages 6–13, 85% of families below the poverty line owned a smart device (tablet or phone). In addition to personal smart device ownership, ConnectED’s focus on digital device access via schools or public libraries has resulted in Open eBook access opportunities for most U.S. students.

Accessing Open eBook’s high-quality books and educational resources is a multistep process initiated through the Open eBooks Get Started page. After clicking Create an Account to Shop via the First Book Marketplace site, adult participants request Open eBook free codes for as many children as they serve. The Digital Learning tab across the top of the First Book Marketplace site provides a drop-down menu for collections grouped by age. Participants select each collection for which they wish to have code access and add it to their shopping cart, which upon checkout costs them nothing.

An organizational preview of Open eBook collections could help consumers to wade through popular elementary grades book series, new and award-winning novels, nonfiction, and young adult titles spanning a wide range of interests and topics. Selections from multiple publishers are culturally diverse, and some are available in multiple languages. There are also accessibility provisions for special needs readers. Few picture books or pre-K–K titles are currently offered. Users can select 10 titles at a time.
With so many still unaware of the program, First Lady Michelle Obama is spearheading the Open eBooks initiative to inform and enlist all eligible Open eBook participants, including adults who work with in-need students in schools, libraries, clinics, shelters, out-of school programs, early childhood programs, and military family services. With this outreach, hopefully it won’t be long before all children have access to books.

Terry S. Atkinson is an associate professor for the Department of Literacy Studies, English Education, and History Education at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.

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

It’s fall in an election year, and my eighth-grade students will soon be researching controversial issues relevant to the political conversation. Most of their reading about these issues will be online, and not all of those sources will be reliable. For many years, researchers like Coiro, Coscarelli, Maykel, and Forzani (2015) have found that students struggle to determine the reliability of web sources. Evaluation requires thoughtful examination, and students often overlook the factors that matter most to a site’s reliability.

 

As a teacher, media specialist, and literacy researcher, my opinion on what works to encourage effective online source evaluation has evolved. I began teaching the use of evaluation checklists, but my secondary students rarely transferred these to other information-seeking tasks. I tried acronym-based strategies for memorizing questions or inquiry processes. These were certainly more streamlined, but students still didn’t own the process the way I wanted them to.

Recently I’ve tried another approach for teaching web evaluation to secondary students. It follows these central principles:

Reliability is not black and white; it is almost always gray. 

Most sources fall on a continuum between ideal and completely unreliable. Teaching students this important concept prepares them to expect complexity in the evaluation process.

Whether a source is reliable will depend on your purpose.

Although a site might be perfect for exploring an unfamiliar issue, it may not be the best source for evidence to support a reasoned argument. I teach students to define their purpose clearly and judge reliability in the context of it.

Different sources are held to different standards.

The problem with one site may be its lack of source information; another may be the author’s lack of expertise; still another may be a site’s affiliations. I consider again and again the reliability of the source and the most important things to notice. This reorients the inquiry wholly in the mind of the student, who must determine for herself or himself what most affects the reliability of the source at hand. It’s a difficult task, so we use two logical sentence prompts to scaffold students’ investigation: “I notice...” and “I wonder…” At this stage, we’ll often divide into pairs to share and compare our noticings and wonderings.

Discussion is essential!

Once students have examined sites individually or in pairs, we conduct a class discussion (in my class, a Socratic seminar) opening with the essential discussion of noticing and wondering. If necessary, I prompt students to examine what the group missed, but students usually challenge each other’s thinking:  Did anyone click on this author’s bio? (It includes nothing suggesting expertise on the topic.) Did anyone follow the source links? (They all take us to the same research study.) Did anyone notice who funded this research on cell phones? (It was sponsored by a phone service company.) What could be problematic about that? As students sort out answers to the essential question, they practice and internalize the habits of thinking that thoughtful evaluation requires.

Practice, practice, practice!

Students examine a variety of sites independently and participate in a handful of group discussions about those. Finally, they apply their evaluation skills in an independent inquiry project.

By the end of this unit my students begin to approach the evaluation process differently—noticing, wondering, questioning, and investigating. As one student proclaimed, “I’ll never look at a website the same way again!” 

Angie Johnson is a technology integrationist, media specialist, and language arts teacher at Lakeshore Middle School in Stevensville, Michigan. National Board Certified in 2002, she has been an educator for over 25 years and is currently a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University.

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

Do you love Bette Davis? Do Tia and Tamera Mowry bring back childhood memories? Perhaps Kevin Costner strikes your fancy? Would you like to see them all together at your own convenience? Check out storylineonline.net.

Storyline Online is one of two literacy education initiatives sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) Foundation, whose vision includes belief “in a world where all artists can realize their dreams and all children are empowered to create their own.” SAG-AFTRA not only supports its professional members as they navigate life as performance artists, but also provides public outreach through BookPALS (Performing Artists for Literacy in Schools) and Storyline Online. (BookPALS provides volunteer performers to read aloud in Title I classrooms throughout the United States.)

With the sponsorship of Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF), Storyline Online provides opportunities for parents, children, and educators to listen to and view children’s classic storybooks read aloud by professional actors and actresses 24 hours a day. Each book is selected to appeal to the imagination and interest of children in grades pre-K to 5. The website features 30 read-aloud stories including memorable titles such as Knots on a Counting Rope, Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge and Thank You, Mr. Falker. Activity guides developed by a literacy specialist offer a summary of each story, activities to extend the read-aloud experience, and information about the author, illustrator, and the actor who performs the read-aloud.

Storyline Online read-aloud books can be viewed on YouTube, but in the event a school system blocks this website, the viewer can click on the Select Player button to access the video on SchoolTube or My VR Player. When viewed on YouTube, closed captioning is available. Each year, the Foundation works with publishers to add three or four new books to the collection. Future plans include offering bilingual stories, with an English–Spanish book coming soon.

With over 6 million views a month representing readers from over 228 countries and territories, Storyline Online offers a go-to resource for all those interested in promoting children’s literacy. And, if you love Storyline Online, be sure to check out additional digital resources in Dawn Poole and Whitney Donnelly’s blog post entitled “A Wealth of Digital Aids for Early Readers.”

Joan A. Rhodes is an associate professor and cochair of the Early/Elementary Education program at Virginia Commonwealth University.