Literacy Now

Designing thoughtful, continuous professional development (PD) is an important part of a school’s improvement process and culture, but has your school ever considered the benefits of video recording your PD activities? With the advancement of technology, many teaching professionals are using tablets and smartphones to make daily videos of their classroom lessons and happenings. You may be surprised to learn that recording any PD event your school organizes is just as easy: All you need is a laptop, webcam, access to Wi-Fi, and a free Google+ account linked to YouTube.  

Google Hangouts on Air (HoA) is a free, live webcast tool that allows the party hosting the Hangout to record his or her computer screen and audio and upload to a public, unlisted, or private channel on YouTube.

My school, Ruth Fox Elementary School in rural Michigan, is exploring HoA. Using instructional practice as the basis for literacy reform, the teaching staff at my school was interested in learning more about Socratic Circles and how this interdisciplinary strategy could help grow student conversation, community, and close and critical reading and writing, while addressing numerous Michigan Standards.

With this focus in mind, we arranged to have Matt Copeland facilitate three interactive professional development HoA webcasts about the thoughtful integration of Socratic Circles. This video is the first in the series.

In a second example, our school also participated in a HoA with the University of Michigan’s Digital Rhetoric Collaborative (affiliated with the Sweetland Writing Center) to discuss our district-wide PD plans for Digital Learning Day. This HoA session is available here.

Benefits of Recording Professional Development

Before the school year comes to a close or as you look ahead to your 2015-16 PD plans, consider the benefits for recording your school’s next PD session:

• All staff members can revisit the recording and learn more from it, ultimately helping address a key problem with PD—the challenge of keeping it alive for future staff meetings, PLC, and more.
• When PD activities/events involve teachers learning by doing (e.g., Socratic Circles), access to the live recording can be referenced in whole or through selected excerpts to examine crucial aspects of the craft of teaching.
• A recording affords the opportunity to greatly improve future PD activities/events by having outside or in-house PD organizers revisit the recording in specific ways to help make sure there’s clear connections made.
• Colleagues who miss the event/activity can still experience it.
• PD learnings (or excerpts) can be shared easily with colleagues at other schools, conferences, and so forth.
• Participation and focus within the PD are likely to improve. In a nonthreatening way, colleagues know they are being recorded and will more than likely get involved in the PD session.
• The HoA webcast provides an opportunity for parents and other education professionals to get a view into the professional learning teachers are engaged in.
• A webcast creates an opportunity for schools to learn from an expert speaker who may have been unreachable in the past because of such factors as distance, allocations, and time.

Key Points to Consider Before Recording a PD Session With Hangouts on Air

Although it is relatively easy to record and store in the Cloud any PD activity your school could possibly organize, there’s still a few points to consider when using HoA to record your PD session:

• PD can and should be interactive in a HoA format.
• Decide whether your school would like to make the professional development HoA a public webcast (open to all—other educators, parents, and more) or unlisted (you must be invited to view or participate). You may change the privacy settings on YouTube once the HoA is uploaded.
• A handheld microphone is helpful in capturing staff conversation during the recorded PD session.
• If another party is involved in presenting, hooking the laptop/tablet to an LCD projector will allow everyone in the PD to see the computer screen and hear the guest speaker(s) clearly.
• Consider doing a test run with your guest/s beforehand to explore the numerous apps that can be used inside the hangout: screensharing, polls, question and answer, as well as other amenities you may want to include in the recording of the PD session.
• The host party must have a Google+ account (free) linked to YouTube (consider setting up a Google+ Community account to have more privacy and control).
• All invited guests and viewers must have a Google+ account.
• The host and all participating guest(s) should have access to a microphone and webcam on their device—beneficial to have a camera on both ends for recording purposes.
• HoA video can be edited in YouTube or can be downloaded and edited using another digital tool.
• Take a look at all the HoA tips Google offers.

 

ILA’s next Google Hangout on Air will be April 28 at 8 p.m. ET. Donalyn Miller and Teri Lesesne will discuss “‘Model’ Behavior: How You Can Encourage Wild Reading.” The Hangout will stream live on the ILA YouTube page, but an archived version will be available on demand afterwards.

Amber White is a reading specialist/literacy coach for North Branch Area Schools and a teacher consultant for the Saginaw Bay Writing Project. You can reach her on Twitter or at awhite@nbbroncos.net. This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Each year, I look forward to my annual physical for one reason: My doctor is an avid reader. Without fail, when I visit her office we talk as much about what we’ve been reading as we do about my health. This year was no different. During the past month, she had finished The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker and said she couldn’t put the book down. Within the week, I found myself mesmerized by this story of a young woman’s quest to explain her father’s disappearance, prompted by my doctor’s suggestion, leading me to a book I would not likely have encountered on my own.

So it is with book recommendations. We typically learn of selections we love from other readers whose interests we share. Although youngsters might rely on parents and teachers for reading choices, valuing what peers read takes place late in elementary school and solidifies in adolescence. For those who read avidly, reliance on the reading opinions of friends and acquaintances rarely wanes, even into adulthood. Struggling readers, too, are much more likely to pick up a selection recommended by a peer. Employing the use of Web tools, one’s own peer circle broadens when linked to a virtual audience with more diverse experiences, greatly increasing the likelihood that a reading suggestion will strike a chord with a reader and prompt a connection with a perfect book, series, author, or genre.

Savvy teachers build upon the power of reading recommendations. Although face-to-face conversations about favorite selections can serve as powerful reading motivators for many students, social cataloging websites allow readers to connect, share, discuss, and archive their reading suggestions within and beyond their school settings. Online book communities such as Goodreads and LibraryThing appeal to older readers, offering possibilities for secondary students or teaching colleagues to catalog book selections, form groups, share reviews, and discuss favorites. Shelfari builds virtual bookshelves for readers at all levels, displaying books read in addition to books of interest. Groups can be created, discussions organized, and recommendations sent to other users, making the site friendly for classroom or small book group use. Bookjetty moves beyond the typical reach of most social book cataloging websites with its capability to search for book titles at more than 300 public, school, and university libraries. Although the site includes book selections for readers of all ages, Bookjetty allows users to share what they are reading on Facebook and Twitter, a feature that may dictate cautious use in some school settings.

Public library systems, such as Sheppard Memorial Library, are building on the power of shared reading interests by integrating “read-alike” suggestions within their online catalogs via book recommendation databases such as NoveList. SML Director of Libraries Greg Needham says users have benefitted tremendously from the library’s “if you like this” website feature, which mimics familiar services offered by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Available 24/7 from any computer or mobile device, library patrons report finding “more of what they are looking for” in addition to “terrific reads they didn't know they were looking for.” Availability of reader advisory features within virtual library resources is one of many reasons that forging stronger connections between school students and public libraries is worth continuing attention.

Finally, North Carolina State University Libraries’ The Best Book I Read This Year blog is worth mention, as it features students, alumni, faculty, and staff members who recommend their favorite reads of the year. Although this site likely has limited utility in school settings, it offers a fine model for creating similar classroom or school blogs saluting its own students, teachers, and selected guests as experts whose suggestions have value and the potential to guide and influence other readers.

Terry S. Atkinson is associate professor in 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 International Reading Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Technology has a profound impact on the way we collaborate and it will become vital for students to collaborate effectively in online communities of practice. While students may appear adept at navigating digital environments, collaboration is not something they do naturally or with depth. Educators need to provide online experiences to help students develop the unique skills and strategies for collaborating online. Consider scaffolding their experiences by teaching the “three C’s” of online collaboration throughout the year.

Students need to learn to communicate effectively through online tools. Using video conferencing platforms such as Skype or Google Hangouts, even our youngest students can practice their speech, tell compelling stories, or interview people from around the world through online “face-to-face” interactions.  Besides conferencing, they will also need experience communicating in non-linear and asynchronous text environments such as blogs or social media. Blogging is a wonderful way to begin scaffolding these types of interactions. Students can also use sites like Blogger, or KidBlog to publish entries and receive feedback from peers using a simple post and reply. Social networking sites such as Edmodo allow a network of students to participate in multiple online discussions. Through these online interactions students develop their voice, dialog with peers, and learn to interact using unique modalities.

Students also need to learn the skills necessary to evaluate, organize, and share content—curate—online. Shared sites such as Google Drive or DropBox help students manage files in a way that is accessible to the collaborative group. In addition to sharing, students need to learn how to organize and evaluate content in order to narrow down valuable information for their collaborative group. Diigo, and other social bookmarking platforms, can help students collect, annotate, and update online content according to their needs. Students can also utilize these spaces to create collaborative study guides or research guides for peers. There are so many opportunities for students to broaden their thinking about new topics through collective content curation.

One of the most exciting aspects of collaboration is to create online and there are so many tools from which to choose. Some of the best tools allow students to access their workspace simultaneously or at different times. Young students can begin to collaboratively draw using one of the many simple online drawing tools such as Flockdraw, Twiddla, or Cacoo. Google Docs is one of the most popular tools for co-writing texts simultaneously. As students begin to work effectively with illustrations and text, consider challenging them to explore multiple media creations. Digital tools such as Prezi, used to create collaborative slideshows, or Glogster, a site where students can co-create online posters, offer a nice bridge between traditional texts and multimedia environments.

As you provide collaborative online experiences, ensure each student is able to construct their own thoughts before merging them with others. Be sure to model and allow students to share their strategies and reflect on their learning as they are communicating, curating, and creating online. Once students become adept with the three C’s, consider participating in an online collaborative project to apply these skills. One example is the Global Enterprise Challenge in which students from schools around the world collaborate to design team products. Global teams need to communicate, share, and design to develop a product to present to a panel of judges. There are also a number of online collaborative projects that can be found through iEarn and GlobalSchoolNet.

By teaching online collaboration, students can develop online literacy skills as well as begin to formulate a personal learning network. If facilitated effectively, we can shift the dynamics from the teacher being the only source of knowledge to students competently using online tools to generate a global community of knowledge builders.

William Yang is an assistant principal at the Roaring Brook School in Chappaqua, NY. You can follow him on Twitter.
This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

 

How often have we heard our colleagues use “information overload” to describe the frustration they feel seeking online learning resources? Alvin Toffler coined the term in his book, Future Shock to describe the challenges associated with the overwhelming amount of information that confronts the public on a daily basis.  The avalanche of information continues to grow with increased use of information technologies and threatens our performance by dulling our cognition and impairing the quality of our decision-making. In Too Much Information: How to Cope with Data Overload, readers are encouraged to use filtering as one method to overcome information overload. Filtering can include the use of technology to narrow down information that arrives in our inbox, but it also requires self-regulation of our own behaviors when it comes to attending to the glut of available information.

How does filtering really work when seeking information? When preparing a lesson on teaching digital literacy skills for a university reading course, an initial Google search on the terms “teaching digital literacy skills resources” turned out more than 3,300,000 potential resources in 0.22 seconds! Clearly, finding reliable information in this pool would be an insurmountable task. The university library system search was more manageable with the same terms producing 85 results. Further filtering on the library system allowed for both targeting of the type of resource (peer-reviewed journal, book, etc.) and the publication date. Use of the filtering system provided a more appropriate set of resources to review for instructional purposes, a total of 20.

The university system was particularly helpful for providing a starting point. Through skimming the article abstracts and references, an online government resource was located for teaching digital literacy skills.  DigitalLiteracy.gov is a portal where resources for teaching digital literacy skills are openly available to business leaders, educators, librarians and community members.  Educators have a dedicated page which allows readers to further filter resources by topic or the targeted digital literacy skill. Literacy is a listed topic and currently includes 21 resources. Users are able to rate the many lesson plans, activities, videos and curriculum materials available on the site.  DigitalLiteracy.gov is a good site for modeling the use of built in filters while providing current information and instructional support related to teaching digital literacy skills.

The greatest challenge of employing filtering can be self-regulation. There is an inherent temptation in all of the interesting titles, images and videos that appear in search results. Surviving (and teaching) in a world of excessive information requires a thoughtful approach to search procedures, careful analysis of information for credibility and timeliness, and relentless monitoring of our own information seeking behaviors. By utilizing filtering strategies educators can cope with information overload!

Joan A. Rhodes is an associate professor and co-chair of the Early/Elementary Education program at Virginia Commonwealth University. She can be reached by e-mail.

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

Graphic organizers, also referred to as semantic maps, webs, thinking maps, structured overviews, etc., are a powerful learning strategy that can be used to:

• represent students’ background knowledge about a topic,
• provide a framework for the topic concepts to be learned,
• deepen analysis of the topic, and/or
• organize newly acquired information about the topic

In The Power of Retelling: Developmental Steps for Building Comprehension, Carrice Cummins and Vicki Benson emphasized how students learn to use graphic organizers as a way to prioritize and organize their thinking. This process then facilitates the activation of existing schema and helps students chart new knowledge. As a result, students are engaged in a continuous process of establishing cognitive categories, or schema, as they work with the graphic organizers.

In this age of accessible digital resources, there are a variety of easy graphic organizer applications to support our students’ thinking.  Students can use these tools to create graphic organizers to facilitate brainstorming ideas, create outlines, illustrate topics or concepts, and plan presentations. Many applications are either cloud-based or available for download to your iPad, iPhone, or Android, making the apps readily accessible to students.

Inspiration is probably the most widely known program in terms of graphic organizers used in educational settings. Inspiration has also shown that it can grow with the digital age and the basic version can be downloaded as a free application available for the iPad. Features include adaptable templates or templates built from scratch as well as a variety of fonts, colors, styles, shapes, and graphics.  One especially neat feature is that students can add audio to different elements of the graphic organizer they create.  The graphic organizer can be shared through iCloud or emailed. 

Popplet is a cloud-based application designed to make textual and visual experiences available to users. Students can draw or add pictures to illustrate, and they can include lines to show relationships between each element. Once students are done creating, they can save the Popplet to their account, or they can export as jpeg or PDF. Students can either use Popplet through the cloud or download to their iPhone or iPad. 

Idea Sketch enables students to create a graphic organizer with the additional capability of switching back and forth from visual view for your more spatial learners to outline view for your more linear learners. Students can insert pictures, change text size, add connecting lines, and use the color feature to show relationships between key thoughts or ideas.

A fourth tool, iBrainstorm, facilitates students’ ability to capture and share information.  As sticky notes are added, then each note can be dragged to change the hierarchy or order, colors can be assigned to indicate relationships, and the freeform drawing tool can be used to add lines or arrows indicating relationships. This application can also be shared between devices.

Graphic organizers are a time tested learning strategy that can be used by students to arrange information about a topic, identify patterns and relationships, and apply labels to signal those relationships.  In their book, Cummins and Benson emphasized that the power of the graphic organizer is not as much in the product as in the process of learning to organize information. This type of technology application enhances processes for digital learners as they become more adept in creating new understandings, mapping out their learning, demonstrating their understandings, and developing their cognitive organizing 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 email. 

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 and is a past President of the International Literacy Association. She can be contacted via email.

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 interests include content area literacy, writing workshops, and curriculum design and development. Manning can be contacted via email.

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