Literacy Now

English language arts teachers have long recognized the critical role meaningful feedback from peers has in process-writing classrooms. However, one limitation of traditional face-to-face peer response I noticed in my own teaching is that I never knew who was engaged with others and at what level. I didn’t have an efficient way of knowing who was giving (and who was getting) good feedback.

 

Over the past few years, peer feedback has been integrated into learning management systems like Canvas, Blackboard, and Turnitin. Stand-alone applications like Peerceptiv and Eli Review are online peer review systems that provide data never possible in traditional face-to-face settings. I’ve recently begun incorporating Eli Review into my teaching and am excited about the potential for learning and literacy development.

Once students submit a draft of their writing in Eli, reviewers add comments and rate the draft on the basis of the assignment’s goals. During the next phase, student writers indicate the helpfulness of the feedback they received in two ways—by rating it and by stating whether the reviewers’ suggestions were incorporated into the revision plan. Here, a student writer rated the comment by Student #39 as being more helpful (four stars) than one by Student #37 (three stars), so Student #39 will have a higher helpfulness rating for this particular task. However, the writer has indicated he will add both suggestions to his revision plan; this will have a positive impact on both students’ helpfulness rating.

Teachers can endorse feedback, which would also raise students’ helpfulness score. So far in my use of Eli Review, I haven’t endorsed any comments because I want students to take more ownership of the process. Bill Hart-Davidson, cocreator of Eli Review, advises teachers to use the endorsement feature judiciously, such as by telling students from the beginning of an assignment they will endorse certain types of feedback that support particular learning goals. For example, in an argumentation unit, teachers might endorse a reviewer’s comment on a peer’s use of counterarguments.

With each subsequent assignment, helpfulness ratings and other data aggregate and after multiple reviews, a student’s overall helpfulness index is quantified.

As a teacher, I can use data from Eli in a number of ways. For example, engagement data can be used as formative assessment. The helpfulness score category can be sorted in descending order, and this information could be used to make groups of equal or mixed ability. That same list also identifies students who have the lowest helpfulness scores, which says (at least) two things about those students: Either they are not engaged in the activity, or the kind of feedback they’re giving isn’t considered useful by their peers. I can discuss with students ways they could provide more valuable feedback.

In the article “Learning by Reviewing,” Kwangsu Cho and Charles MacArthur found that students who read and reviewed peers’ papers outperformed students who read but didn’t review those same papers. Peerceptiv’s Christian Schunn cites a decade’s worth of research describing the numerous cognitive gains students get through the act of online peer reviewing.

Teachers have long known that students become better writers by reading and reviewing peers’ work. Data generated in online peer feedback systems make that learning more visible.

Chris Sloan teaches high school English and media at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, UT. He is also a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University. His article The Relationship of High School Student Motivation and Comments in Online Discussion Forums was published in March 2015 in the Journal of Educational Computing Research.

The new digital technologies, granting storytellers the ability to combine text with audio-visual, ludic, and hypertext elements, are not a death toll for the novel. Rather, like film, they present new frontiers for storytelling.

—R. Lyle Skains, “The Shifting Author—Reader Dynamic:
Online Novel Communities as a Bridge from Print to Digital Literature,” 2010

The emergence of new forms of digital texts blurs the lines among short film, journalism, documentary film, website, memoir, blog, short story, and novel. This cross-pollination of textual forms highlights the engaging new ways through which fiction and nonfiction stories can be told. A beneficial result of this development is new opportunities for teachers and adolescents to achieve reading and literacy standards using the lure of digital devices.

Here in Australia, our National Curriculum recognizes that literacy development is supported by the study of language in all its forms. Therefore, in addition to traditional texts types such as novels, short stories, and plays, students are required to “interpret, appreciate, evaluate and create literary texts in spoken, print and digital/online forms.” The multimedia features of digital texts enable students and teachers to cover a range of reading, viewing, and listening outcomes. For example, the use of a Web documentary–style digital text allows students to respond to the aural components of voice-over narration, background music, or audio interviews with subjects; print components of the written text on the screen; and visual components of video, photographs, or the graphic design elements of the text’s digital interface. In addition to these components, digital texts differ from traditional texts in that they often allow a self-paced, self-directed, nonlinear navigational pathway through the stories, enabling readers greater agency in their experience of the narrative.

Two nonfiction digital texts have been used recently with grade 11 students in my English classroom to analyze a range of literacy modes and meet the literacy requirements of the Australian Curriculum: “Firestorm” from The Guardian newspaper and “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” from The New York Times that features journalism, documentary film, and memoir to tell the dramatic survival stories resulting from both an Australian bushfire and a Washington state avalanche. “Firestorm” employs looping background video of the rural Tasmanian setting, and a rotating slideshow of photojournalism images deliver an “as it happened” sensation when the reader scrolls through both the text and interviews with the surviving family. The coupling of these videos and archival photographs with ambient noise—the rustling of wind through the trees and the local birdlife, the crackling of flames in burning bush land, and the quiet chattering of local residents in a teahouse returning to normality after the fire—further enhance the reader’s sense of vicarious experience.

Likewise, “Snow Fall” makes innovative use of multimedia to convey the story of the Tunnel Creek avalanche that claimed the lives of three experienced skiers. A rotating three-dimensional model of the alpine setting, a time-lapse sequence of the meteorological map showing the storm cell present on the day of the disaster, and a graphic model demonstrating the deployment of a skier’s protective air bag are all multimodal elements that sit alongside the extensive prose, slideshows and film interviews with the survivors and the victims’ families. Even the most perfectly composed passage of descriptive prose or the most in-depth investigative reporting of these events would struggle to compete with the engaging and aesthetic presentation of these two stories in this digital form.

The study of “Snow Fall” and “Firestorm” with my digitally connected adolescent readers has resulted in some rich discussions about emerging modes of representation, robust debates about what it means to be a reader, and the ways storytellers in the 21st century use technology to appeal to a range of audiences. From reluctant to avid readers, technology experts to newcomers, the adoption of digital storytelling texts in your classroom will enable all students to think about the future of reading in their lives.

For an uninterrupted reading experience of both “Firestorm” and “Snow Fall,” teachers and students should seek out a high-speed Internet connection. Although both texts can be accessed on a tablet, a laptop or desktop computer will better enable all features to function to their full effect. Both texts are suitable for grades 10 and above; however, teachers of younger students may consider Inanimate Alice as an alternative digital storytelling text for grades 5–9. Inanimate Alice is also accompanied by a set of educational resources.

Nicole Timbrell is a high school English teacher and e-learning integrator at Loreto Kirribilli in Sydney, Australia. She is completing graduate studies in Cognition, Instruction and Learning Technologies at the University of Connecticut where she worked previously as a research assistant in The New Literacies Research Laboratory. Find her on Twitter.

Unlike traditional book reports that are often written only for the teacher as an audience, online book reviews offer students an engaging way to connect with other readers within and beyond the four walls of their classroom. With the continued influx of the Internet and an increasing availability of a wide range of digital tools, creating and sharing book reviews with a wider audience is easier than ever. In their Reading Research Quarterly article about using multimedia book reviews to increase elementary students’ independent reading, David Reinking and Janet Watkins reported that multimedia book reviews offer numerous benefits including improved attitudes towards reading, increased time spent reading, and enhanced confidence and engagement in literacy-related activities.

Third graders in Anna Derrick’s class at Monarch Elementary in Greenville, South Carolina experienced this firsthand when they shared their reviews of recently read books using AudioBoom, an online podcast tool that allows users to record and post up to 10 minutes of audio recordings. Known as “boos,” these recordings can be shared easily by posting the link on Twitter or sharing the QR code that is generated automatically by the website.

Derrick’s third graders were inspired to enhance the quality of their work after learning that their online book reviews would be accessible to a wide audience. To begin, they studied various book review formats by reading and critiquing other online book reviews written by kids on websites such as Spaghetti Book Club. Next, they drafted their book reviews and orally rehearsed their ideas by reading drafts with a peer. This peer interaction often resulted in discussion and suggestions for improvement, and students eagerly made both oral and written revisions to their thoughtfully composed reviews. After making revisions, students recorded their reviews using AudioBoom. Many students opted to record their reviews again after listening to the original recording in order to improve their fluency when reading, like that of Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet.

To share their published book reviews with peers, students created QR codes and posted them on the classroom bulletin board. Their classmates then scanned the QR codes with iPads to listen to their peers’ online book reviews. To connect with a wider audience, Derrick used Twitter to share students’ AudioBooms using the hashtag #Readergrams. In fact, one fifth grader from Washington, DC, replied to a tweet about Nia the Night Owl Fairy, “Oh I used to love that in second grade! It’s a series!” This demonstrates the communicative nature of using technology to share about books. Perhaps the students in Derrick’s class will be inspired to read other books in the series.

Several benefits were observed among Ms. Derrick’s third graders after using a combination of AudioBoom to record their book reviews and QR codes and Twitter to share their reviews. First, these activities appeared to enhance students’ motivation and interest in reading. Second, their fluency improved through authentic opportunities for repeated readings, which corroborates with Chase Young and Timothy Rasinski’s findings in their Reading Teacher article “Implementing Readers Theatre as an Approach to Classroom Fluency Instruction.” In their study, they found repeated readings improved students’ fluency with both familiar and new text.

Finally, when Derrick’s students found out they would be sharing their book reviews with an audience beyond the teacher, they appeared to be were more thoughtful in how they composed their book reviews, which in turn helped to improve the quality of their writing. Overall, the activities observed in Derrick’s classroom reiterate the idea that having students create online book reviews can foster their motivation and interest as readers and writers while encouraging them to connect with a broader community of readers.

Katie Stover is an assistant professor of literacy education at Furman University in Greenville, SC. You can follow her on Twitter. This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

I pride myself on being a pretty good problem solver, and if you’re a teacher and you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re the same. As teachers, we’re constantly solving problems, big and small, as we plan and orchestrate daily learning activities.

Recently, though, I’ve realized that when it comes to integrating technology to foster literacy development, I should pull back a bit. I’ve noticed my penchant for quick and efficient problem solving is actually depriving my students of valuable learning opportunities.

Specifically—and not just in my classroom, but in classrooms I’ve visited—I’ve noticed that, when there are choices to be made and some uncertainty about which app or web tool to use, or how exactly to use a particular tool to solve a problem, the level of engagement and the quality of the intellectual work I see often shoots way up.

Why does this happen?

What I observe is that when students become partners in the work of weighing the affordances and constraints of using web tool A or tool B—or using web tool A or paper and pencil instead—they tend to have strong opinions.

What’s really interesting is I suddenly hear students spontaneously saying specific things about their literacy work habits and preferences (“I’ll start reading this on my phone and then read more later at home on my laptop”) and connecting those to particular affordances of the tool they prefer and to specific features of the texts they’re reading or are about to compose (“With the split screen feature you can read both texts side by side—if your screen is wide enough”; “With the search tool it takes two seconds to find all the places where the author used the word treachery”).

This kind of talk is music to my ears—students are metacognitive, stepping back from a task and thinking about what they’re doing and how they can do it best (or slightly better). Eliciting this kind of talk certainly does not require making technology the focus; there are excellent paper-and-pencil ways to grow your students’ metacognitive muscles. Still, with technology in the mix, I have observed greater interest in engaging in metacognitive reflection.

I also observe that when there is discussion about the pros and cons of tool A and tool B, it’s not always the same students who do the talking. Students who are less-frequent contributors during traditional ELA discussions about things like author’s craft or intertextual allusions may suddenly have a lot to say about a particular web tool—and how it helps them read or write in a specific way. This observation aligns with what we’re learning from research by Julie Coiro, Don Leu, and others about how online and offline literacies overlap but also have distinct knowledge and skillsets. You will likely find the same—some students demonstrate equal proficiency in both areas, and others may demonstrate proficiency in online literacies that eclipses their proficiency in traditional print literacies.

A bonus benefit is even when the discussion is fairly short, I invariably come away with specific new information and insights about my students.

The big pay-off, though, is that these conversations launch students into precisely the kind of thinking and learning we want to be doing in a literacy-focused classroom—thinking and learning about how, in our reading and writing, we can make choices that help us achieve greater clarity, comprehension, intertextual connection, aesthetic appeal, and so on.

However, even if class discussion about alternative web tools is incredibly rich and interesting, you probably don’t want a debate about the relative merits of CiteLighter versus Diigo to completely dominate the class period you set aside for your students to research sources for the essay—or blog post—they’re writing.

Give it a shot—try from time to time to involve your students in reflecting on, investigating, and debating the merits of alternative literacy tools or alternative uses of tools—even when you’re feeling pressed for time and part of your teacher brain is telling you to just make the decision on your own before class.

I predict you will find that when you involve your students in reflective discussion around problems of technology integration, it will stimulate deep thinking and learning that may surprise you. Some of this may focus on technology in a narrow sense, but much of it—the really valuable part—will be about the materials and strategies and challenges of doing things with words and ideas, about reading and note taking and finding contrasting perspectives in texts, about the constraints of a particular genre, and more.

What is gained by writing a text message rather than an email, composing a video essay instead of a traditional prose essay with embedded images, or using one note-taking tool instead of another? Let’s face it: Looking to the future, it’s these conversations—about the affordances and constraints of new apps and tools for enhancing reading, writing, and other literacy practices—that will be increasingly central to our students’ professional, personal, and civic lives.

Paul Morsink is a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University. This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Recently I was given an opportunity to interview teachers in Germany about their methods for teaching students to conduct online inquiry. Although I came away from these discussions with a variety of insights, the acknowledgment from a majority of the teachers that students need more preparation in critically evaluating online information resonated with me. I’ve heard similar comments from teachers in the United States and South Africa and read various research reports confirming this need.

Cited as one of the five primary processes within online research and comprehension, the evaluation of online information is unique to the digital age. With the click of a mouse, information is now available worldwide, regardless of its credibility or accuracy. Perhaps as a result of this situation, curricular frameworks in Australia, Manitoba, Canada, and the United States require the development of skills in evaluating information found online. Teachers, however, appear to lack specific processes to teach students how to consistently engage in strategies to verify and assess trustworthiness and reliability. Conversations have revealed a tendency to tell students that they should not use Wikipedia as a source. Yet there is much more to this process. Just as students need strategy instruction to be successful within “traditional” reading activities, they also benefit from explicit instruction in how and when to evaluate information found online.

Given the need for instruction in this area, there are several resources I think will be helpful for developing plans to teach this critical skill. First, I recommend an article by Shenglan Zhang, Nell Duke, and Laura Jiménez that describes the WWWDOT framework (Who wrote this and what credentials do they have? Why was it written? When was it written and updated? Does this help meet my needs? Organization of website. To-do list for the future.), which teaches students to direct their attention to six aforementioned dimensions of websites. In collecting and assessing this information, students render a decision on the trustworthiness of the site. What is helpful about the article is the description of one teacher’s process of teaching the framework across four lessons.

Julie Coiro and I also wrote an E-ssentials piece on how to use CAPES (Context, Actions, Products, Evaluation, and Standards) self-regulatory framework. The framework requires students to ask a series of questions, plan actions based on the questions, then evaluate the website on the basis of specific criteria (i.e., standardsof reliability)to determine whether it’s a trustworthy source of information. The article contains a shortened example of a think-aloud that can be used to teach the process of evaluation, and a companion site demonstrates the process in greater depth.

Another useful set of thinking prompts and lesson ideas can be found at Julie Coiro’s post on Edutopia.  From here, you can also read preliminary results of a study conducted among 770 seventh graders asked to make judgments about a website author’s level of expertise, his or her point of view, and the overall trustworthiness of the information provided.  Finally, there are several resources found at ReadWriteThink.org, including a strategy guide and a lesson plan, which both inform and help in lesson development. The common characteristic across the resources is that students are being taught to stop, plan, and reflect about websites and authors, actions they don’t normally take when seeking information.

As a final thought, let me share a comment from one of the German teachers in reference to Wikipedia. He said we forget some Wikipedia entries, such as one about The Beatles, have been edited and vetted by many experts on the band, thus providing factual information. So, instead of telling students they cannot use the website, he allows them to visit it first (which seems to be their natural inclination anyway) and asks them to consider the information on the site as well as the references. Rather than avoid sites that might be questionable, his message was that if we can teach students to effectively implement strategies for thinking about and examining websites and information, they can still effectively use the resources they are most comfortable with. In turn, we can be comfortable knowing that we have prepared them to be systematic, analytic, and critical, as they search for information in the digital age.

Michael Putnam is an associate professor and interim chair for the Department of Reading and Elementary Education at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).