Literacy Now

We live in a world that relies on digital tools and technologies to access and share ideas. Engaging our students in skillfully using digital tools for these purposes requires us to organize learning in ways to maximize the exchange of expertise. It is also important to reflect on the social practices that support the use of digital tools. In “Instruction With Multimodal, Multiple Texts,” I describe three ways to organize student learning to take advantage of the different skills, strategies, and experiences students bring with them from their navigation of the digital world. Drawing on these resources will enhance student engagement and maximize learning potential.

Design instructional practices that require collaboration

Any situation where students can be given a problem and then have opportunities to work together and teach one another something new enhances collaboration. As learners discuss new ideas, they contribute to their collective knowledge. Collaboration can be fostered by encouraging students to turn to each other as resources to help themselves, and each other, figure out how to use digital tools to accomplish their goals, according to the International Literacy Association E-ssentials series, Literacy Practices That Adolescents Deserve. It’s important to recognize students often have a vision for how they’d like to use the technologies available to them to express their understanding. By following students’ lead, and providing opportunities for them to work together, learners listen, watch, and ultimately learn from one another.

Build in time for experimentation

Step-by-step instruction from a teacher is not necessary before students use new digital tools or apps. In fact, taking time to explain the available features within an app or digital tool may curtail students’ emerging digital competence and, in fact, detract from the collaborative and discovery nature of their work. I’ve observed students who are much more eager to actively figure out how to use digital tools rather than passively listening to a teacher explain how to use each of the tool’s features. While our instincts always tell us to model for students, experimentation with digital tools and technologies can spark a feeling of self-discovery that enhances engagement and investment in learning. When students use technology, a new role for the teacher is created— an instructional guide. We need to become more comfortable setting an assignment’s goal, and then giving students time to explore and problem-solve ways of meeting that goal. As I illustrated in Digital Concept Mapping, circulating around the classroom to prompt higher order thinking, sharing examples, or drawing out students’ expertise paves the way for active learning and experimentation. In doing so, rich learning experiences unfold.

Use strategic grouping to encourage shared expertise

While it is important to assess students’ individual knowledge, grouping learners strategically can lead to productive collaboration and collective expertise. My blog post on Creating Digital Products With iPads suggested that students benefit from the types of peer support that naturally unfold through informal conversation and trial-and-error investigation. Notably, smaller groups are often best. Students in large groups tend to wait for other group members to give direction; as a result, few students are able to recognize in a timely manner what their productive role should be. Pairs often afford an ideal balance of planning, talking, and doing. In addition, strategic groupings can help students take advantage of their varied levels of technology expertise. Peer interaction, in particular, helps students co-construct knowledge and generate purposeful dialogue about the topic being explored.

Skillfully using technology, and learning how to learn, will play a central role in our students’ success in a digital information age. Utilizing these three suggestions for organizing learning will help guide your students toward skillful use of digital tools and technologies.

Jill Castek is a research assistant professor at Portland State University in Oregon, where she leads the Literacy, Language, and Technology Research Group. She also contributes to the blog, Literacy Beat. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group.

Many existing standards and frameworks associated with digital literacy–infused instruction focus upon understanding the Web. However, over the past two years an initiative has been underway to go beyond this to include building a better Web. Within this initiative there is a belief that the Web is a read/write medium, meaning all users have a stake in it. It’s in the best interests of all users for the Web to be open, free, and inclusive. To make this belief a reality, we believe educators and students should be empowered to act as not only users of, but also makers of the web.

One of the challenges of embedding the Internet and other technologies into classroom instruction is that there are often competing viewpoints on how to embed these digital literacies into instruction. The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Standards provide some guidance for effective technology integration. The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards for the 21st-Century Learner offer a vision for teaching and learning using digital literacies. These standards tend to focus on critical consumption rather than on writing the Web. They provide little (if any) guidance on important concepts that are fundamental to the Web, such as open access, privacy, and security.

In 2013, Mozilla led work with a group of stakeholders and community members to define a map of the skills and competencies needed for exploring, building, and connecting on the Web. For more information on the reasons behind this initiative, please take a look at Why Mozilla Cares About Web Literacy. We have been involved in the initiative to develop the Web Literacy Map since its inception. This post provides an overview of the Mozilla community’s web literacy work to date and provides guidance on how to make use of this work in your classroom.

The Web Literacy Map

The Web Literacy Map, although presented in grid form with three strands (e.g., Exploring, Building, and Connecting), recognizes literacy as a culturally defined social act. We agree with tenets of Connected Learning, including a pedagogy of learning through doing. The three strands of the Web Literacy Map (Exploring, Building, and Connecting) are intertwined. For a complete overview of the Web Literacy Map, please review our Multiliteracies column in the May 2015 issue of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.

The core belief uniting the Mozilla community is that exploring, building, and connecting online cannot be taught in isolation. Each strand contains five competencies. A set of skills is nested under each competency. Although presented separately to aid understanding, each competency overlaps with another. This thinking is embedded into the general idea of the map metaphor. Individuals plot their own learning pathway, using the map as a guide. To view teaching and learning resources, please visit this website.

Learning pathways

By “learning pathways,” we mean a series of learning activities that scaffold the development of a learner in a given area. Such pathways may be linear or nonlinear and can be demarcated into descriptive and prescriptive approaches to learning theory. Descriptive learning theories make statements about how learning occurs and devise models to explain and predict results. Prescriptive learning theories are concerned with guidelines that describe what to do in order to achieve specific outcomes. Although the Web Literacy Map may look prescriptive in nature, it is intended to be descriptive and provide the raw material from which curricula and learning activities can be created.

We envision the Web Literacy Map as providing guidance for educators and students to define and develop their own learning pathways that may “provide easy and simple directions and pointers along a certain direction.” We seek to provide guidance for those new to this area, rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach. In doing so, learners are provided with opportunities to make decisions based in personal agency, to define steps that may seem more like hops, and to think about ways to do things that aren’t sequential or even seemingly rational. Self-defined or peer-defined learning pathways can resonate in ways that may prove far more meaningful to an individual than those that are suggested by experts.

Learning through making

Learning through making or doing is an approach to education with proponents in the educational literature including Froebel, Dewey, and Papert. By designing learning pathways, learners can participate in activities or build things (digitally or physically) to enhance their own learning. They can demonstrate skills across the web through content they create, demonstrating their newfound abilities.

The approach of learning through making and doing differs radically from a didactic approach to education. With a learning through making and doing approach, learners generate their own ideas and interact with the Web as they learn what it takes to improve their Web literacy skills. When learners are engaged to create and produce, we believe that there is greater opportunity to embed fun into inquiry-based literacy activities. 

To learn more about the Web Literacy Map, review the links provided in this post or contact the authors. You can also review commentary and feedback on the Web Literacy Map from researchers at the 2014 meeting of the Literacy Research Association. Over the coming weeks, we will host a series of interviews with experts in the field to discuss the points of the Web Literacy Map.

W. Ian O'Byrne is an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at the College of Charleston. You can read his blog or follow him on Twitter or on Google+. Doug Belshaw is a consultant with Dynamic Skillset. Reach him on Twitter. This article is part of a series from the Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

This year began differently. Every year is unique: new students, new preps, new schedule, new rooms, new colleagues, but this year, after only a few days, I sensed something in my freshmen students I had not yet experienced—quiet. I joked for the first couple of days about “dream students” and plowing ahead more quickly through the Common Core scope and sequence. However, after the first week or so, I grew uneasy because while the students were quiet, they were also unexcited and uninvolved—almost inert. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was happening with them, and then I read “Engagement With Young Adult Literature: Outcomes and Processes” (Ivey & Johnston, 2013), which questions the validity of current engagement models. Ryan Rutherford and Jo Worthy wrote about this study in a previous Literacy Daily post.

I realized engagement had come to be viewed as teachers manipulating students or “hooking them” to capture their attention. There was little emphasis on students’ concerns, emotion, and sense of agency. So, time for a revolution. Or maybe less a revolution and really a reclamation of what I have always known and believed to be good teaching and of what I have always valued—the learning process.

First, I reflected on both my students’ and my own engagement. Second, to support my observations, I surveyed my students about their sense of behavioral, emotional, social, and agentic engagement in my classroom and the school. Unsurprisingly, about 80% admitted they felt little to no agency anywhere in school, and those who “succeeded” actually aimed merely for a grade. Third, I prioritized student-selected young adult literature and time to read in the classroom—all necessary factors according to Ivey and Johnston (2013) for engaged reading. Fourth, I sought approval for this curricular change. I addressed the school’s improvement plan, and argued passionately to my head principal that I could balance my school and district’s demand for aligned skills in the areas of research, academic writing, and speaking and listening, with student freedom. I wanted my students to choose what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it without a whole-class text or one-size-fits all instructional model. Finally, I culled lists of texts that appeal to students and that inspire conversation, pulling from a variety of sources such as the Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers lists from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), ordered books thanks to grants, had students unpack their library, and we jumped in. We haven’t looked back since.

Class sessions now largely involve authentic discussions between students about books, writing, researching and more, as we now view reading and learning as social events of shared experience. I also regularly confer with individuals in order to build relationships and to push cognitive growth. To finish a text and to ace a summative assessment are no longer the foci; rather, relationships and learning for learning’s sake rule, as students teach each other more than I ever imagined possible. Everyone has read, written, researched, spoken, been listened to, and listened, and much as Ivey and Johnston found, I have found that students’ academic achievement continually meet or exceed the Common Core standards.

One of my students put it best: “Choos[ing] my own books and their content has been a very liberating and opening experience . . . . Being allowed to choose my books has help[ed] me live.” Well, the changes Ivey and Johnston’s research have inspired in my classroom have helped me live, again.

Teresa Lesage teaches English at West High School in Madison, WI.

The ILA Literacy Research Panel uses this blog to connect educators around the world with research relevant to policy and practice. Reader response is welcomed via e-mail.

In the classrooms I support, students are more than happy to share their ideas and opinions with the class. However, writing persuasive pieces and having the opportunity to convince a reader of something can be daunting for some students, which leaves teachers to search for motivating ways to engage students in persuasive writing.

I recently introduced a fourth-grade class to Blabberize, a web-based tool that allows users to add audio to a photo and make it appear as though a mouth in the photo is talking. In one persuasive writing piece, my fourth graders used a turkey to try to convince a farmer not to serve him for dinner. To make the writing unique and motivating, the students were going to record themselves reading their finished persuasive writing and, using Blabberize, they would make it appear as though the turkey were talking directly to the farmer.

Once students drafted and edited their writing, they searched for the perfect turkey photo on iClipart for Schools, a royalty-free clipart website. The image is central to the persuasive writing activity, and students knew they needed to find a turkey that had a prominent beak so the viewer would be able to tell it was moving when the turkey talked. When the perfect picture was selected, students uploaded it to Blabberize and shaped the mouth to the turkey’s beak. Next, students recorded their plea to the farmer, either recording it within Blabberize or by using a different audiorecording platform and then uploading the MP3 file to Blabberize. Finally, students watched their product and shared it with the class.

These students had a great time creating their own talking turkeys with Blabberize and, on the basis of their arguments and evidence, the farmer decided to spare the turkey from being dinner’s main course.

Stephanie Laird is an instructional coach in the Southeast Polk School District in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, where she works alongside teachers to affect student learning through the areas of curriculum, instruction, assessment, and community building. She holds an MEd in Curriculum and Instructional Technology from Iowa State University.

It’s easy for teachers to become overwhelmed by and get caught up in the latest new technology gadget. In spite of all the new technologies that appear almost daily, it is important to remember that “our focus must remain on the act of reading,” as Frank Serafini stated in Reading Workshop 2.0. As a university faculty member, I am always looking for ways to model meaningful technology integration for my undergraduate and graduate students so that the focus remains on literacy instruction and not on the technology itself. I want to provide experiences for my students to take and use in their (future) classrooms to enhance and transform literacy learning.

 

Adobe Voice is a free app available for the iPad. It allows users to record their “stories” in their own voice with a touch of a button. In addition to being able to narrate their stories, users can add images, icons, and text, as well as select music that is already integrated into the app to create beautiful visual presentations of their content.

One of the most appealing features of Adobe Voice is its ease of use. Once the app is opened, Adobe provides several templates for content creation. Using the templates, users can write stories, teach a lesson, explain a concept, or promote an idea. Once a template is selected, Adobe then provides prompts to help the user create their content. Users may also opt not to use a template and make up their own.  This feature is great to promote differentiated instruction. The app also offers multiple content layouts and options to add multiple images or icons, as well as text. A tutorial is available online.

I recently introduced Adobe Voice to my undergraduate Literacy Foundations students. Their assignment was to use the app to create a reflection on their recent field experience at a local elementary school. Only one student was familiar with the technology prior to our session, but within one class period they were all successful users. I asked my students to write a brief reaction after using Adobe Voice and they said overwhelmingly they liked using it and found it very easy to navigate.

Both Jillian and Maggie said Adobe Voice could be used successfully as assistive technology for students with special needs. Jillian also saw the benefit of this app as an assessment tool and a means to communicate with families. Lyndsey said she would have loved to have had this technology available when she was in school because she didn’t like to talk in front of people, and this would have given her another option for communicating in her classes. The majority of my students stated they would use Adobe Voice in their future classrooms. In just one class period, my students realized the value and versatility of this technology tool.

The possibilities for using Adobe Voice in the classroom are endless. The youngest learners who have not yet developed writing skills can use this technology to tell their stories. Students of all ages can show their learning in the content areas of math, science, and social studies, and it can serve as a tool for reader response. Teachers can use this as a tool for creating flipped classrooms and providing individualized instruction for their students. Adobe Voice is an extremely versatile tool that can be integrated easily into classroom instruction to transform literacy learning.

How will you use your Voice?

Kristin Webber is an assistant professor in the Early Childhood and Reading Department at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania where she also serves as program head for the masters in education reading program. Her latest article “From Reluctant to Engaged” appears in the May 2015 issue of Educational Leadership.