Literacy Now

I facilitate a weekly writing group at a local juvenile detention center where, because of the transient nature of the population, student participation can be inconsistent.
As a writing teacher, this provides a unique challenge because I want students to see how their writing has developed over time. Youth at the detention center are also interested in revisiting their writing and will often ask if I have their writing so they can see it.
Therefore, I am interested in apps that will allow me to store their writing and the youth to reflect on previous work, regardless of when they are a part of the writing group. Storage apps provide me a system for making sure all who are a part of the writing group have access to their writing through a digital writing portfolio.

Why writing portfolios?

Writing teachers note that providing students ample time to reflect on their writing is important. When we give students opportunities to collect and reflect on their writing, they develop their identities as writers. Writing portfolios allow this to happen because students can showcase their writing, document their growth as writers, receive feedback on a body of written work, and consider next steps and new directions for their writing.
Knowing that reflection is critical to young adults’ growth and development as writers, teachers have long used portfolios to help students collect their writing over extended period of time. Many teachers, including myself, use digital portfolios because of the ease of teacher and student access to a body of work completed over time.

Apps for digital portfolios

As many teachers and students have more access to mobile technology, apps provide an excellent system for creating and organizing digital portfolios. Even for schools without tablets, many apps have companion websites. In addition, Bring Your Own Device policies can help teachers implement digital portfolios even when technology is limited in the classroom.
If you are interested in exploring apps for creating writing portfolios, I recommend looking at Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Seesaw, and Three Ring.While there are differences between these particular tools, many similarities exist, such as:

• Teachers can set up individual folders or notebooks (the term depends on the app being used) for students to house their writing. Since it is important for students to see their growth as writers over time, using these apps to store their writing portfolios provides an easy way for students and teachers to collect their writing over a period of time. These apps also allow students to upload multimodal compositions that include images, video, and audio.

• Certain apps, such as Dropbox, maintain a history of document edits; therefore, students can access old copies of documents. Students and teachers can use this feature to look closely at how one writing piece might have developed over a period of time. Again, this opportunity to be reflective about their writing helps students to become metacognitive about a particular piece or their writing in general.

• In Google Docs, teachers can record their thoughts and feedback with audio and additional notes through the use of comment features. This provides teachers an easy way to give ongoing feedback and assessments about students’ writing. Furthermore, students can also use these features to respond to a teacher’s comments, thus creating a conversation about writing. Seesaw has built-in audio recording and drawing tools that students can use when revising or responding to a teacher’s feedback.

• Many of these storage apps also link to other apps. Dropbox is linked to apps such as neu.Annotate+PDF, Notability, and GoodReader, and Evernote works with Skitch.

• All of these digital tools can be accessed and synced with other devices, and apps such as Dropbox have a way to access materials offline, so students do not always need Internet connection to view their writing.. This access is critical for students, and also can serve as an invitation for parents and family members to read students’ writing.

Additional considerations

When creating and implementing digital portfolios, teachers should keep the following questions in mind:

• What are your instructional goals for creating writing portfolios?
• Do you want portfolios to be accessed both online and offline?
• Do you have a school platform that you must integrate the portfolios into?
• Are teacher and student accounts needed? Do your students need e-mail addresses?
• Do you want the platform to allow for multiple formats such as writing, video, and audio files?

For teachers interested in more information about digital writing portfolios, an in-depth resource for creating digital portfolios is Michigan Portfolios.

Kristine E. Pytash is an assistant professor of literacy education at Kent State University.

The new Finnish national core curriculum (from pre-education to the ninth grade) will be used nationwide, beginning in the school year 2016–2017. The core curriculum work, involving the expertise of educational professionals, teachers, and different societal organizations, was completed in the end 2014. At the moment, local curriculum work (based on national core curriculum) has already launched in municipalities and in schools.

Along the way, the process has drawn international attention (see articles in The Washington Post and International Education News). From our perspectives as a researcher and a senior lecturer from the University of Jyväskylä, we have our own interpretations of how the forthcoming curriculum will provide opportunities to enhance students’ digital literacies.

The most essential aspect in the curriculum reform is the shift from focusing on learning objectives related to single subjects to an emphasis on broader competencies crossing all learning in schools. The seven competence areas are as follows:

1. Thinking and learning to learn
2. Cultural competence, interaction, and self-expression
3. Taking care of oneself and others; managing daily life
4. Multiliteracies
5. Working life competence and entrepreneurship
6. Competence in information and communication technology (ICT)
7. Participation, involvement, and building a sustainable future

In one way or another, digital literacies are embedded into all competence areas, but most explicitly into the areas of multiliteracies and ICT.

In the curriculum, multiliteracies refer to “interpretation, composing, and evaluation of written, spoken, and multimodal texts within a rich textual environment.” Multiliteracies help students to interpret the surrounding world and to understand its cultural diversity. By producing different kinds of printed and digital texts, learners are able to express themselves by using their strengths. Teachers are expected to use meaningful and authentic texts so that students learn not only literacy skills but also the enjoyment of reading and writing. 

All classroom and subject teachers are responsible for developing students’ multiliteracies, including both everyday language and disciplinary language. Further, ICT skills are an essential part of multiliteracies and other wide-ranging competencies. ICT should be embedded into all teaching so that students learn to use digital technologies to cocreate and share new knowledge as well as to interact within and across communities. 

The new core curriculum offers great possibilities to develop and support students’ digital literacies and digital citizenship. Of course, the extent to which Finnish schools will be able to realize this potential is dependent upon local curriculum work, the culture of each school, and engagement of individual teachers.

The local curriculum created by teachers and other educational professionals will play a key role in specifying and localizing the broader aims of national curriculum. In this curriculum process, the aims are also transformed into concrete teaching and learning practices. The strength of the Finnish curriculum process is that it enables teachers’ engagement in the curriculum development. However, one concern is that digital literacies may receive too little attention in this transformation.

School culture greatly affects the level of innovation with which digital technologies are used in schools. That means that it’s not only the level of equipment but also the level of commitment that educators have toward developing pedagogically meaningful ways to integrate technology into teaching and learning. At its best, the school culture encourages teacher collaboration and collaborative teaching. This collaboration is essential to integrate ideas and practices across different disciplines within and across schools.

In Finland, teachers have a lot of autonomy to realize the aims of the curriculum, which introduces possibilities as well as responsibilities. Teachers can actualize the curriculum according to their own pedagogical views and their strengths as teachers. Thus, this might result in varying levels of attention to digital literacies.  

In spite of some critical viewpoints, we, like most Finnish people, believe that in the long run, our teachers and schools will do well.

You can learn more about the Curriculum Reform 2016 in the March 2015 blog post by Irmeli Halinen, the head of Curriculum Development for the Finnish National Board of Education. You might also enjoy this slideshow presentation about the reform, prepared by Jorma Kauppinen, the director of the Finnish National Board of Education.

Carita Kiili, PhD, is a researcher and Sirpa Eskelä-Haapanen, PhD, is a senior lecturer of Early Years Education. They are both at University of Jyväskylä in Finland.

While attending a recent summer workshop, I was surprised to become immersed in debate about the validity of digitally based classrooms. Isn’t that a topic for last century? Hasn’t President Obama been pushing an agenda so that all schools are connected?

Yet a vocal opposition of teachers around me insisted that the digital world is only a passing trend, that it’s only young teachers who are equipped to incorporate digital tools and applications into literacy instruction.

I became a bit conscious of my gray roots and wrinkles as I responded. To me, digital literacy and learning should merge in every classroom, everyday, as authentic representations of the ways that today’s adolescents read their worlds. Digital tools offer advantages, what Danah Boyd called “affordances,” through access to multiple modalities and participatory culture.

But I also understand how individuals who haven’t had a lot of exposure to technology in their personal lives or professional development might be hesitant, even afraid. A teacher who stands before a class of skeptical students is vulnerable. We’re expected to know everything: Common Core content, multiple intelligences, classroom management strategies, formative assessment—whew! Who has time for digital applications, anyway?

Actually, digital intersections can ease the complex demands of our teaching profession. Technology in the classroom can provide students with individualization, inquiry, and engagement that complement traditional—and proven—methods of literacy learning. It does require taking academic risks, but the rewards can be invigorating.

Here are three steps you can take to gain digital proficiency:

1. Find a trusted colleague. Learning how to navigate Web applications is different from book learning. Until you’ve been shown the series of steps to, say, set up a blog or transfer a link to a teacher website, the digital world seems daunting. If you have a colleague with whom you can trust the raw truth that you really don’t know Instagram (or Moodle, Google Classroom, the difference among Internet Explorer/Firefox/Chrome—the list can be long), you can start on the path to digital proficiency. Set up mutually convenient times to meet and exchange ideas. Who knows? Your colleague likely will inhale your content area expertise in a mutuality of collaboration.
2. Pilot your new digital lesson when the stakes are low. Once you’ve found your digital inroad, it’s time to go live. Figure out where you can embed it into a unit underway cleanly and with supporting activities. Do you have a class of tech-savvy, invested learners? They’d likely help out if something goes awry.
3. Breathe deeply, reflect, and rededicate. You’ve done it! Your digitally infused lesson was a roaring success, simply an adequate learning event, or mediocre at best. Whichever the case, it’s time to feel proud of what you attempted and accomplished. But don’t stop there.

Be curious about new digital resources, approaches to 21st Century pedagogies, and opportunities for continual PD. After all, your digital excursions can open up many new and exhilarating possibilities. 

Carolyn Fortuna, PhD, is the recipient of the International Literacy Association’s 2015 Award for Technology and Reading. She teaches high school English in Franklin, MA, and is an adjunct faculty member at Rhode Island College.

Supporting students in their development as writers of persuasive essays can be a difficult task. There are many aspects to writing a good essay. Students need to learn how to develop a good argument, find information to support their ideas, think about alternative points of view, and do all this in a clear and structured essay.

iCivics is a worthwhile collection of online games, lesson plans, and other resources for teaching civics to middle school students. One of their resources, Drafting Board, scaffolds students’ learning to write well-constructed and well-supported essays by pulling together information from a variety of sources. There are seven civics-related topics from which to choose. The website makes it clear that this is a teacher-guided activity that works best when the teacher is available to answer questions and provide other assistance as needed.

The basic framework of each Drafting Board topic includes:

• Background—Helps students to develop background knowledge on the subject and begin to form an opinion. Students are provided various sources to read and from which to pull information to complete a fill-in-the-blank narrative.
• Claim Creator—This step in the process leads students to develop their point of view on the subject and to create the thesis for their argument.
• Paragraph Constructor—Using the resources introduced in the building background module, students are led to develop three body paragraphs supporting their point of view.
• Critic Crusher—This section gets students to consider alternative points of view and how to rebut them for an effective argument.
• Introduction & Conclusion Builder—Helps students learn to build effective introductions and conclusions. This is best done after writing the body paragraphs.

A number of supports are provided throughout these steps. For students who may struggle with decoding/fluency, there is an option to have most text read aloud. Each section begins with an explanation of that aspect of an essay and a list of the steps the student will encounter. In addition, students are shown how to use transition words effectively. Finally, at the conclusion of writing each paragraph, students are given a checklist to analyze their writing. These latter three supports, as well as the overall process, provide rich “scripts” that can help students when they are more independently writing.

As literacy educators, we are well acquainted with the gradual release of responsibility model for teaching students new skills and strategies. Drafting Board is a great example of the use of this model, with the default mode being an example of gradual release of responsibility in miniature. For the first body paragraph, students are led through the process with simple fill-in-the-blank steps called “auto-complete.” Students click on appropriate support in one of the resource texts, and it fills in the sentence in the paragraph. In the second body paragraph, students are asked to write their own text to complete sentences. In the third body paragraph, students are helped to write the introductory sentence, but then guided to write the rest of the paragraph on their own. There are five additional challenge levels that each provide a different approach to scaffolding students’ writing, from providing a lot of support to providing just a little.

My seventh-grade students worked through three of the different Drafting Boards. Then we researched the case of Korematsu v. the United States and the United States’ internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Students then wrote a persuasive essay about the Supreme Court’s decision in that case following the format they learned through Drafting Board. The following year, I noticed that some of these students carried over what they learned about the structure of an essay, the construction of introduction and conclusion paragraphs, as well as the use of transition words in the writing they did that year. The scaffolding of Drafting Board was a valuable means to help these students learn how to write an effective persuasive essay and learn a little civics, too.

Eric MacDonald teaches in the middle school at Benchmark School in Media, PA.

Your essay, blog post, or article is due. Now you just need a topic—but what? Everyone has heard “write what you know.” But every writer knows it is not that simple.

Believe it or not, there’s a powerful idea generator out there. And it’s free. And you likely have seen it every day of your online life for more than a decade.

Predictive search, that constantly changing set of possible search queries you see in search engines, is often ignored and sometimes annoying. You know those suggested results drop down from the search bar. But sometimes it provides just the word or phrase you need when you don’t know what you’re searching for, including writing inspiration. The suggestions are based on trending or popular searches.

You already know what predictive search is even if you’ve never heard the term before. For exactly this reason, predictive search technology is also a powerful idea generator. I suggest using a natural language query. Natural language queries are put to the search engine in the way you might ask a friend. As you type, the search engine tries to guess what you might want to know. Most people read far faster than they can type, so seeing a possible result may help with the search you actually want and suggest ideas that might not have occurred to you before.

Consider the search possibilities for writing for social studies with this stem in Ask.com: “When the Supreme Court…”

Let’s say I (or my students) need to write an article, essay, or script for a YouTube video, but I’ve encountered a bit of writer’s block. I can either wait for inspiration, or I can let technology help me to find my own inspiration. Predictive search guesses what interests me as I type my query. The results might help me zero in on a topic or suggest something I hadn’t thought of yet. Because humans use questions, natural search and predictive search are a good combination to help me develop a writing topic. Start with a query stem:

What is the
What is the best/worst
Who are the most
If [insert topic] changes/continues/stops, then

If you need a bit more refinement for your topic, just hit the search icon. Of course, be sure your writing is your own and attribute any sources you use.

Effective writers will adapt the topic to the audience and purpose for writing. Because predictive search results are derived, in part, from popular or trending searches, they will need to be adapted much of the time. But when you need inspiration, you might want to start with the tool that is right in front of you—the predictive search field in most of your favorite search engines.

If you are interested in a more whimsical view of predictive search, be sure to check out the found or accidental poems at Co.Create (warning: one of the poems at the time I wrote this post may make use of a term you may not want on your work or school computer).

Thomas DeVere Wolsey, EdD, is the CEO of the Institute to Advance International Education. Contact him at http://www.iaieus.com/contact.html. This article is part of a series from ILA’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).