Literacy Now

There is no doubt that students who enter our classrooms are consumers of technology. They are most often using their phones to download apps to play games and communicate with other students (and sometimes their parents) through texting. If they need to know something, then that information is just a search away. The bottom line is that the idea of staying connected is such a central part of their lives that they cannot fathom what it would be like to not have that type of access. Our job as teachers is to help our students harness technology resources as a means of communicating what they are learning.

Over the past 20 years or so, educators have pushed for meaningful integration of technology into classrooms. A major challenge for us is to decide what that meaningful integration should look like. Is it simply reading information online? Is it taking notes about what we learned by word processing? Is it creating a slideshow or podcast that shares that information? Is it drawing pictures to represent key ideas (and the list goes on)? Our answer to all these questions is yes! What brings this answer to light in the classroom would be intentional planning and careful consideration of the required skills we want students to own by the end of the process, which then makes it possible to integrate technology in meaningful ways. By asking our students to read and evaluate information, write down key evidence, and respond and create as a means of sharing new knowledge, we are providing them with the opportunity to research, record, and report about what they have learned. In this column, we share with you a possibility in which technology can be integrated into science and English language arts (ELA) teaching and learning activities. Enjoy!

Studying the wetland biome

This example illustrates how technology can be integrated into a science unit on biomes. Student exploration of the wetland biome provides numerous opportunities for reinforcing ELA skills, especially Common Core State Standards Speaking and Listening Standards, Writing Standards, and Reading: Informational Text Standards.

Research!

Begin a study of the wetland biome by using the iBiome app. This app supports students as they gather information about the wetland habitat, research species that live in the wetland, investigate marshes, and create an environment where plants and animals flourish. As students explore iBiome, they can be specifically charged with defining what is meant by a wetland as well as describing key features and characteristics.

Students can also view a video about types of wetlands at UntamedScience. This video gives an overview of a wetland as well as a description of types of wetlands. Add in a review of wetland information at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), and students now have multiple sources to locate information about this particular biome.

Record!

As they explore the iBiome app, the Untamed Science video, and the NCEAS website, students could record their new knowledge by using Popplet. This Cloud-based software enables students to create a concept map that details what they are learning about the wetland biome. The concept of teamwork could be promoted by having students work in groups to explore various types of wetland biomes (e.g., marsh, swamp, bog, fen), types of animals, or types of plants.  Groups could also be tasked with recording more about what they learned by downloading pictures of their designated focus (i.e., types of wetlands, animals, or plants), inserting the pictures into a PowerPoint slide, then adding text box labels to identify key parts of each picture as it relates to their topic. Last, students could word process a script that describes what is included in their slide and use Audacity to create a podcast recording of what they learned.

Report!

Once the slide is completed, it could be saved as in .jpg format and imported into a class site on Glogster that shares each group’s work. Once students add their podcast to their Glogster slide, your class will have a Glogster site that shares what they have learned about the wetland biome. Wrap up this biome exploration by having each group orally present their findings to the rest of the class.

Although we have posed this idea using a science focus, this same triad of research, record, and report is effective within any content area. This three-part process enables students to be critical consumers of technology and of all that it offers. It can be used for both short-term and long-term research projects and allows students to use technology as a means to a robust end rather than simply the end being the entertainment of the technology itself. It requires students to engage in the process of rigorous reading and writing and gives them an authentic scholarly route with which to use their “native technology” skills.

Kimberly Kimbell-Lopez is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Leadership in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University. She has been an educator for over 25 years, and her areas of expertise include literacy and technology. She can be contacted via e-mail at kkopez@latech.edu. 

Carrice Cummins is a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Leadership in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University. She has 40 years’ experience as an educator with primary areas of interest in comprehension, content area literacy, and teacher development. She served as the 2012–2013 president of the International Reading Association. She can be contacted via e-mail at carrice@latech.edu.

Elizabeth Manning is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Leadership in the College of Education at Louisiana Tech University. A veteran K–8 teacher of over 25 years, her areas of interest include content area literacy, writing workshop, and curriculum design and development. Dr. Manning can be contacted via e-mail at lmanning@latech.edu.

As an assistant professor whose interests in literacy intersect with technology and mobile media, I get a lot of questions from aspiring teachers who wonder how to support students as they learn to write with technology. My experiences have helped me realize the importance of emphasizing process and experience over product.

Collaborative writing with wearable technologies

This summer, I cotaught a creative writing residency for rising third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade students as part of a larger camp sponsored by a local National Writing Project site. The camp’s goals were (1) to cultivate the writerly life within our students, and (2) to flex our own muscles as English language arts educators by deeply reflecting on the process and experience students were having as writers rather than the finished product they composed. From haikus to transmodal graphic novels, we watched our students develop a fluency for writing that was fueled by engaging the “what if” question. This resulted in a collaborative piece the group composed to illustrate what happens when intermediate writers remediate a classic picture book with wearable technologies (a GoPro, in particular).

Apart from individual journals, pieces, and projects, fostering a collaborative spirit and culture among our budding writers was important. We also wanted to transform their thinking about revision away from something that involved “red marks and right spellings” and toward revision as the process of adapting and rethinking a message. To do this, we developed what Robert Yagelski calls a culture of writing as experience—as a way of being. Arguing that texts function as experiences, we highlighted how meaning could change significantly through the act of remediation, or the re-presentation of material in one medium through another. With my own interests in cultivating a disposition for sonic composition with writers and the liberty to play with composing under the guise of creative writing, I engaged the class with The Listening Walk Project (TLWP).

This project involved a collaborative piece of writing whose goal was to remediate Paul Showers’s famous picture book, The Listening Walk, by using audio and video to highlight the group’s collective experience of walking through the campus community.

Modal memoirs of remediating digital writing

In the earliest stages of TLWP, we introduced students to Showers’s book, discussed the process of remediation, and then voted on focal elements from The Listening Walk that we wanted to highlight as important in reimagining our own piece. Sound, video, and perspective were those most voted for by the group. Sound would provide coherence across Showers’s piece and ours, video enabled us to explore the features of wearable writing with the GoPro, and perspective became important to our young writers and the process of collaborative composing. The larger group disliked that Showers’s text presented us only with the young girl’s perspective. Some argued, “We never get to see what the dog sees!” whereas others asked, “What does the Dad hear, is it different?” These lines of questions continued to inspire our thinking and writing as we collectively embarked on our own listening walk.

TLWP process for remediation

Capturing over two hours of video, with each student as “lead author” and wearing the GoPro for 10 minutes, we came back to our classroom to debrief the experience of wearable writing. One of the first comments students made in watching the larger video was the need to fast-forward moments of whole-group walking: “That’s boring to watch.” Using FinalCut Pro, I acted as lead reviser to speed up travel between locations. Then, in groups of two, we cut the larger video down to a manageable 60 minutes. I worked with each group to have students note individual spots for revision. Some wanted text overlaid, adding figurative language to highlight the perspective their GoPro and wearable writing captured.

Others wanted to include some narration, using audio as an orienting device in between frames. These “notes to the director” were taken together to revise the larger video as a group. After we collectively revised, we watched the film in its entirety, now down to 11 minutes total. At this point, the collaborative revision was less about individual frames and monuments captured along the walk and more about coherence. Are transitions similar to one another? How do we account for shifts in perspective? Taken together, these small moments led to larger conversations, indicative of what I call a modal memoir. Alongside my coteacher, we used modal artifacts from the cutting room floor, the b-roll if you will, to highlight the rhetorical choices students made concerning audience, delivery, and purpose.

Later, when students reflected on the process, many shared how the GoPro felt on their body as part of the writing experience. As Goldie, a fifth-grade girl wrote, “TLWP wasn’t about the video, it was about the group walking together. The experience. We felt writing together.”

Listening to everyday implications

As their teacher, I realized that collaborative composing with wearable writing (in this case, translated through the GoPro technologies) fostered the ability to focus on process over product. It cultivated the experience that is inherent in all forms of composition. Whether through swiping, clicking, and tapping a tablet or physically shifting your body so as to capture new perspective, emerging digital technologies offer new opportunities not only for remediation, but also to cultivate a writerly identity.

As you seek to engage your students in their own writerly lives, consider how remediating forms, genres, and projects through a digital lens may offer new insight into who and how they are as writers. Encouraging students to draw, write, and compose their own modal memoirs throughout the year inspires them to consider revision not as a list of skill steps but as an experience well worth having.

Jon M. Wargo is an assistant professor of Teacher Education and core faculty in Reading, Literacy, and Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.

As a K–12 literacy supervisor who also serves as a literacy coach, I work closely with teachers in grades 2–6 who teach from Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study Series. In line with our district’s mission to give learners more voice and choice, teachers frequently incorporate technology into writing workshop, in order to differentiate approaches to writing, to add depth to informational and argumentative writing, and to support conferring with writers. As an administrator, I have found this to be a huge benefit to both our writing instruction and achieving the district mission.

Across district classrooms, writers enjoy choice, facilitated through technology. Helping to overcome some writers’ reluctance to physically write and rewrite, word processing has given writers the opportunity to efficiently make changes to their pieces and improve how our youngest writers approach the revision process. In the words of one second grader, “I like when I don’t have to erase. I can just backspace.” A fifth grader said, “It makes [writing] more efficient. Even if I don’t have the best handwriting, people can understand my writing when I type.”

Technology also enables writers to engage in learning about new topics through safe digital resources. Writers in grades K–3 access PebbleGo and, through their school libraries, conduct research for their writing. They also use Wonderopolis to explore topics and then write about their wonders.

At the primary level, writers have researched a range of topics, written scripts, and then published their work through ChatterPix, an iPad app that allows learners to record themselves reading their writing while making their artwork come to life. Here’s a great example of how a kindergarten class used ChatterPix to publish their research about sharks. In a similar way, fifth graders across our district used Blabberize to present their informational writing about explorers. Writers across the grade levels appreciate opportunities to use technology to present their writing in different formats. Administrators are grateful that students are learning about the research and writing process in an engaging manner.

Sixth-grade teachers in my district ask students to incorporate digital tools into their writing to publish more interactively using Discovery Education’s BoardBuilder. The results are two-fold: this technology allows writers to create pieces that look like the writing they see on the Internet (e.g., the real-world writing that Kelly Gallagher recommends in his book, Write Like This), and encourages writers to analyze photographs and videos to determine which elements best support their writing purposes.

Integrating technology also allows writers to see writing as a creative process. For their narrative writing projects, secondary writers participate in the National Novel Writing Month. Last year, writers in sixth grade published their books independently, and each writer took a published version of his or her novel home. Students were thrilled at having become published authors. 

Where I have seen technology support writing workshop the most is with the use of Google Docs. In as early as third grade, when writers draft in Google Docs, teachers can provide feedback electronically and more quickly. I have observed teachers with iPad in hand, roaming the room, reading writing students shared with them, and then sitting down at a writer’s conference to discuss what they read or what the writer flagged as a trouble spot. The ongoing digital feedback allows teachers to comment alongside writers' flash drafts.

Finally, these digital conferences can occur between peers. Conferring is a powerful means for supporting writers’ growth, and technology provides teachers and students more accessibility and formative feedback. One seventh grader shared that he likes highlighting part of the text and using the comment feature in Google Docs to pose a question for his writing partner to consider. He also reported that comments from his classmates about his own writing have helped him make useful revisions.

Writers who use digital tools to actively engage with the research and creation process value opportunities to enhance their messages with multimodal elements. They also appreciate extending their writing time and their opportunities to confer with and receive feedback from peers and teachers outside of actual writing workshop time. Overall, I have seen technology enhance the outstanding teaching and writing that is taking place within the writing workshop model.

Aileen P. Hower is the K–12 Literacy/ESL Supervisor for South Western School District. She also coordinates the Eduspire and Penn State York Summer Literacy Institutes and teaches graduate level reading courses for Cabrini University and Eduspire. In addition to teaching, she is the vice president for the Keystone State Reading Association and conference chair for the KSRA 50th Annual Conference in 2017. You can find her on Twitter or on her blog.

When you look across almost two decades of the 21st century, you can see how much the curriculum has been modified to include digital literacy and digital skills, and it becomes clear that students need to be responsible digital citizens. This concept can be introduced in tandem in the classroom, but students will likely need plenty of practice in and out of school to really master them.

One strategy to increase students’ awareness of how to use social media appropriately is to prepare case studies generated from the news that illustrate common misuses of social media by celebrities or even regular folks. By examining other people’s behavior in relation to their own, students can learn to think more critically about what it means to be a responsible digital citizen and how to identify the contradictions involved. Cases like these can prove quite valuable because young people tend to look for models in society and then emulate what they do.

There are examples all over the world that can be used as teachable moments for students.

During sporting events such as the Summer Olympics, multinational companies often advertise their products with inspirational messages, for example Proctor & Gamble’s video showing the sacrifices athletes made to become an Olympian and the unconditional support they received from their families.

On the flipside of that coin during the Summer Games in 2012, the Switzerland soccer team lost against North Korea. One of the Swiss players was furious and decided to vent on Twitter. He insulted the players of the other team with racist comments. The next day, he was expelled from the Olympic team.

After learning about these real events, ask students to draw connections between what the video showed and the efforts each athlete took to be part of an Olympic team. Yet, even after all of this work, a young athlete is no longer able to compete professionally because of his reckless actions and misuse of Twitter.

A second example took place during an official visit to China in 2015. The former president of Argentina made a sarcastic remark via Twitter mocking the Chinese accent. The diplomatic community was appalled by this president’s behavior. Yet this behavior was applauded among her mass of followers who would never dare to question her actions because the great majority did not exercise critical thinking to analyze the connection between what she did and the negative international diplomatic implications. The message for students here is that respect should be expressed, even in cyberspace.

Offer students newspapers, articles, or videos about events like these and encourage them to infer what repercussions a leader’s digital actions may have had on internal and external affairs.

Digital citizenship is a concept requiring respect for others and oneself, reflection, and lots of practice. Our students need opportunities to discuss and reflect on the inconsistencies between the digital citizenship skills they learn about at school and what they see others do with social media outside of school. Case studies can offer a wide range of different examples to make these discussions memorable and meaningful.

M. Carolina Orgnero is an assistant professor at Universidad de Río Cuarto where she teaches Education and Technology courses in the English language program (TESOL) to undergraduate and graduate students. She also teaches EFL Pedagogy to preservice teachers at ISFD Juan Zorrilla de San Martín in Córdoba, Argentina.

Lately I have been reflecting on the disconnect between educational initiatives about the role of technology in literacy and learning and the realities that exist in some schools.

The past five years or so have been characterized by major educational shifts brought about by new policies and educational initiatives. A common characteristic of all of these initiatives is the importance of pedagogy for preparing 21st-century literate students, not just for integrating technology in the classroom. Tools alone do not teach, teachers do.

The Common Core State Standards include expectations about using media and technology and developing students’ digital skills. Embracing multimedia, reading multimodal texts, and using digital tools in classroom instruction are necessary for students to become college and career ready.

Future Ready Schools, a recent U.S. Department of Education initiative, is designed to provide guidance and support to school districts about making technology infrastructure, technology integration, and professional development decisions.

The 2016 National Education Technology Plan provides a framework for reimagining the role of technology in transforming student learning. It calls for equity, accessibility and connectivity as well as resources that can make learning for all students possible all the time, anywhere. The plan also promotes active use of technology and highlights the role of technology in assessing student learning.

The 2016 ISTE Standards position technology at the heart of teaching and learning. The standards also call for the development of an educational framework that redefines learning in a connected world; prepares students to become literate, creative communicators and digital citizens, critical and computational thinkers, collaborative problem solvers, and lifelong learners; empowers students to take ownership of their learning and construct knowledge; and equips students to compete in a global economy.

In terms of sample realities, these are perspectives of four educators I have been working with about their experiences with digital literacies and learning:

• “I am an assistant principal at a Title I elementary school. Although summative assessments require the use of a computer, most of what happens in the classrooms involves paper and pencil and very little technology. I have two concerns: (a) How can I close the digital divide for students who do not have access to technology and the Internet at home? The digital divide affects the literacy achievement gap. (b) Many students struggle with navigating the digital environment when taking assessments online. How can we best prepare students both in content and in digital literacy skills?”

• “I am a writing coach at an elementary school. For the past couple of years, I have been supporting teachers’ and students’ writing needs. I know that digital literacy involves one’s ability to use a variety of tools for reading and writing. But how can we help teachers integrate technology in their writing instruction in strategic ways? I think we need protocols for best technology integration use. Digital tools can help students brainstorm, share and evaluate each other’s writing, and collaborate in project-based learning.”

• “I am a literacy coach at an elementary school. I struggle with how to help teachers to be digital readers and writers. Literacy coaches play a key role in shaping teachers’ literacy practices and creating a common language about literacy. We can model innovative literacy pedagogies but we cannot do it alone. We need principals and teachers to collaboratively create a vision for future-ready teaching and learning.”   

• “I teach seventh-grade intensive reading at a digital school. My students and I are using a digital curriculum. All students at my school have a tablet they use at school and at home. Although technology is present throughout our day, many of my students struggle with reading and comprehending digital texts, navigating digital contexts, and developing critical thinking skills. The digital curriculum provides me with strategies and resources but I need professional development on how to develop my students’ digital literacy skills and abilities. The curriculum alone is not enough for teacher and student success. I have a lot of questions about what teaching and learning looks like in other digital schools.”

Leading, teaching, and learning in the digital age require engagement at many levels. We have to come together as literacy educators, researchers, policymakers, and community members to collaboratively problem solve about making digital literacies and learning a priority in preservice and inservice teacher education and in digital leadership. To impact student learning, we will need to collaborate with all stakeholders to develop digital ecosystems that support innovative pedagogies for preparing 21st-century learners.

Vicky Zygouris-Coe is a professor of reading education at the University of Central Florida.

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