Literacy Now

History comes in many forms: oral stories passed down from generation to generation, images capturing a specific time and place, documents representing written thoughts, and video clips revealing the sounds and motion of real people and events. Each form provides artifacts of the past for historical inquiry and interpretation. For decades, historians have engaged in online historical inquiry by conducting research with multimodal sources (audio clips, still images, video) to create a visual interpretation of the past through documentary film. Since access to digital archives and free video editing software has increased, it is exciting to think about how we might engage students in the online historical inquiry practices used by professional historians.

When implementing digital video composition in history classrooms, students first analyze and interpret sources by repeatedly entering online archives to select or reject sources that will answer their questions. Then, they shape their narrative for the purpose of representing the past through a short student-created documentary. Take a moment to watch the winning student-created documentary for the 2014 National History Day competition.

According to Kathy Swan and Mark J. Hofer, online historical inquiry is most effective when educators scaffold the digital video composition process through four stages: research, documentary treatment, storyboard, and film production. Additionally, providing formative assessment during all four stages through informal conferences and formal rubrics supports students’ historical thinking.

Research—Students enter online digital archives to select and interpret multimodal sources and then take detailed notes to document their interpretation of different historical perspectives. Throughout this stage, the teacher is modeling how to conduct a close reading with annotations and showing short clips of documentaries to analyze the digital video composition process. Educators can access most of the National History Day documentaries for free on YouTube.

Documentary Treatment—Students synthesize their notes into a script to facilitate corroboration and contextualization of sources. Educators may want to scaffold this process by having students work on one section of the script each day (the opening, the events, the defining moment, the conclusion, the resolution). After creating a script outline, students present their documentary treatment with the intention of receiving formative feedback about their main thesis and scene-by-scene overview.

Storyboard Phase—Students create a storyboard by aligning multimodal sources with the script. Next students blend music and recorded narration with filmmaking effects. There are numerous video-editing tools available for composing student-created documentaries that are software-based (iMovie, Garageband, Final Cut Pro, Photo Story 3 and Movie Maker) or Web-based (Animoto, PrimaryAccess, Weavly, Wevideo).

Film Production—Students take their digital video composition from private to public by presenting their work to their peers or outside audiences. By entering student-created documentaries in national contests or uploading their documentaries to public websites like YouTube or TeacherTube, students have the opportunity to add to the general body of historical knowledge.

Repurposing online historical inquiry to include digital video composition may serve as an innovative way to address several academic standards. Creating meaning from multimedia sources are increasingly important learning outcomes as defined by English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (CCSS), College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework, and National Council for the Social Studies Guidelines (NCSS). Students are expected to analyze how visual elements contribute to the meaning of a text and encouraged to include multimedia components in their presentations. Additionally, there is a stronger emphasis on embedding English Language Arts standards within history classrooms. In today’s high-stakes testing environment, educators do not have the freedom to ignore learning outcomes defined by state and local academic standards, nor do educators have time to teach them in isolation. Since online historical inquiry involves conducting research, asking questions, and analyzing multimodal sources, social studies classes may provide the ideal context for integrating digital video composition to develop 21st century skills and discipline-specific skills simultaneously.

Julie B. Wise is a doctoral student at the University of Delaware. She can be reached at jbwise@udel.edu.

The most recent Keeping Pace report of online and blended learning published by the Evergreen Education Group indicates that blended and fully online modes of learning have moved to the mainstream for K-12 students in the U.S. More than 740,000 students nationwide are enrolled in publicly-funded virtual schools. Blended schools that provide a mix of online and face-to-face instruction exist in 24 states and almost every state offers supplemental online learning options for their students. Four states—Alabama, Florida, Virginia and Michigan—even require an online learning experience for high school graduation.

Importantly, however, these “official” numbers do not reflect the number of teachers who, like Jeff Gerlach, self-publish websites to support their face-to-face instruction, or use free, subscription-based content management platforms such as Edmodo, Google Classroom or Haiku to support their face-to-face students’ learning. Fueling some of this classroom-based blending is the popular flipped classroom model that moves content learning to the online space and reserves class time for problem solving, inquiry and discussion. For Gerlach, who taught for eight years in public school classrooms before transitioning to an instructional design role, a flexible blended model that weaves a learning tapestry of online and face-to-face experiences is the most powerful instructional approach.

“I really always wanted to understand how my students interacted with the online learning objects that I created for them,” Gerlach said. “And I think that informed my designs because learning how a student interacts with a thing naturally helps you to come alongside their natural tendencies. That’s something that I was always cognizant of. I found that I just, I was more thoughtful and reflective as an educator when I utilized online spaces appropriately. And, really, my guiding principle was always to make learning better. I was always thinking, ‘what can I do to make this authentic, and engaging’ and just – that’s why you get into education in the first place, to reach students. I mean, that was the intention.”

Reflecting on his growth as a "blended teacher," Gerlach said he knew he was becoming more effective when he moved beyond forcing students to engage in a certain way. Eventually, he stopped telling students to “post two thoughtful comments in an online discussion” and he just started getting students to create, organically.

But how does one do that? To successfully design and then weave a tapestry of blended learning experiences that make the most of face-to-face and online affordances, teachers must tie together a complex array of thread. The technical, logistical, pedagogical, curricular, disciplinary, developmental, cultural, and contextual threads shape what’s possible for their students’ learning. Jeff noted his best choices for blended learning empowered his students to be in control of their own learning choices. Often, this meant thinking about the most seamless and accessible way for his students to get into the learning—and being willing to abandon a great idea when it became clear it wouldn’t work.

“There were several times where I would be trying out a submission process or a new skill that I wanted students to use around the social studies content,” Gerlach said. “I had the pedagogy that I wanted to go with it, and the tool was cool, and then I’d be making a tutorial showing them how to use it, and I’d realize there were 25 steps and I abandoned making the tutorial and tried to find a different solution because, it just wasn’t within the zone of proximal development for them.”

Based on my conversation with Gerlach, and other exemplary online and blended instructors, I’ve put together a list of key questions that seem to guide their design processes. Which of these are new to you? Which of them could help you weave a richer tapestry of learning across online and blended teaching contexts?

• What skills do my students need to have mastered to benefit from this learning experience? How can I teach them?
• What literacies will enable my students to construct meaning and participate fully in this work? How can I scaffold these?
• How does the sequence of learning need to change in a blended or fully online course? What parts of this activity will work best online? Which parts would work best in class? Why?
• To what extent does the digital context limit participation? To what extent can it expand participation? For whom? Why?
• Online, how can I approximate or even extend the levels of scaffolding and collaboration that would occur for students in my face-to-face classroom?
• What does this digital tool or set of tools offer my students in terms of supports for learning? To what extent can the technologies I’ve chosen enable learning that could not otherwise happen?
• By crafting an online version of this learning experience, what are the risks to learning outcomes? Is it likely for students to get lost? Overwhelmed? How can these risks be mitigated?
• How does this design empower students to regulate their own learning?

Michelle Schira Hagerman, teaches and designs online learning experiences for students in the Master’s of Educational Technology program at Michigan State University. She also coordinates MSU’s Graduate Certificate in Online Teaching and Learning.

Research in out-of-school settings suggests digital media is dramatically influencing children and young adults’ learning processes and literacy practices. In turn, it shapes their interactions with teachers, parents, and peers, as found in several research studies. Moreover, the challenges of the 21st century impose changes in the skills that young learners need to develop in an increasing participatory culture.

As researchers and educators, we argue that the growing prevalence of digital media has provoked changes in the interactions, tools, and spaces where learning takes place. Today, we are facing new challenges as well as new opportunities for schools. For instance, what is the role of the teacher when using technologies? What affordances of digital tools might support teaching and learning? Conversely, which are the limitations of such tools?

Scholarship suggests a focus on tools is not enough. For instance, Decoding Learning: Promise and Digital Education found that any digital tool on its own is unable to impact learning. Rather, the critical component is how teachers effectively use spaces and tools to support teaching and learning practices, including communication, collaboration, and content acquisition.

In our recent study, we explored how literacy and learning are enacted across physical and digital spaces in a case study of an Australian primary classroom for the journal Learning, Media and Technology. The blended classroom we examined includes a physical space where students and teachers interact in conventional face-to-face modes and an online space where students engage in asynchronous interactions. In this classroom space, pen, paper, and a whiteboard were combined with laptops, mobile phones, iPads, digital games, a learning management system, and Edmodo.

Our study suggests that teaching in a blended environment supports learning in four key ways: First, a blended classroom enables the distribution of knowledge and resources across students and the teacher as well as over space and time. For instance, students accessed Edmodo and the learning management system daily as a part of learning activities, to check on upcoming tasks, and to communicate with classmates and their teacher.

Second, it offers opportunities for students to engage in peer teaching. Blending synchronous face-to-face learning with an asynchronous digital learning offers more ways for students’ voices to be heard. Specifically, there were less constraints in terms of time for students to think about their contributions and questions and there were more opportunities for self-expression, according to Computers & Education.

Third, the blended classroom facilitates students’ independent and self-directed work, which allows them to navigate digital resources and choose what they need for achieving the outcomes set by the teacher. For example, when asked to create a mind map, students drew on pen and paper to make initial sketches before using applications such as Interactive Timeline, Trimble 3D Warehouse, Aspyr, SketchExpress, Mind Map, bubbl.us, and Stkyz.

Fourth, physical and digital spaces offer students diverse ways to engage in new literacy practices. We observed students using different reading paths, creating multimodal texts, interacting with audiences other than the teacher, and experiencing new forms of authoring enabled by digital tools. All of these are part and parcel of becoming literate in a digitally mediated world.

Our study also revealed challenges associated with teaching and learning in blended contexts. For instance, to successfully navigate multiple spaces and employ various tools, students need a metacognitive awareness about their learning, such as planning, selecting, keeping clarity of the tasks, and engaging in time management. For the teacher, this requires having knowledge about content, pedagogy, and technology; it also asks teachers to allow students agency in selecting tools and deciding on their learning pathways. We propose that within a blended classroom, teachers can foster the creation of a shared space that fosters new literacy practices and collaborative learning processes.

Jen Scott Curwood (js.curwood@sydney.edu.au) is a senior lecturer in English education and media studies at the University of Sydney, where she is a lead researcher in the Sciences and Technologies of Learning Network and affiliated with the Centre for Research on Computer-Supported Learning and Cognition. She is the supervisor of Patricia Thibaut (patriciathibautpaez@sydney.edu.au), a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

Each year the ever-popular IRA “What’s Hot in Literacy” survey provides a fascinating and often quite accurate prediction from literacy leaders about topics and trends in the field of literacy for the upcoming year (IRA Members, login to read the What's Hot survey here).   As a literacy educator and researcher with a passion for supporting struggling readers online, this year’s annual survey left me pondering the mixed prospects for the future. The topic of digital literacies/new literacies is “Very Hot,” which is promising; yet the topic supporting struggling readers is “Not Hot,” a disturbing trend indeed.

Why should we care?  Our struggling readers are ones for whom online reading offers tremendous possibilities, but who could quite easily be left behind.  We can’t afford to ignore struggling readers by allowing them to fall into a digital/new literacies gap, lagging behind their peers. It seems like a great time to draw attention to this issue and share ideas for educators seeking to support struggling students in online reading.

We know struggling readers need explicit strategy instruction. The following tips and resources offer educators effective ways to support online reading through strategy instruction.

Use Tried-and-True Methods 

When teaching new online strategies for reading, the gold standard would be methods already designed for and tested with struggling readers. One of the only current methods that meet this criterion is Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT). IRT extends Reciprocal Teaching, an effective method for teaching reading in print-based texts, and adapts the model for online reading. The TICA Research Project  provides an excellent starting point for resources including an overview of IRT, sample lessons, presentations and more.  Since methods specifically tested and deemed effective with struggling readers are limited, we must also draw on other methods that are conceptually designed with research and best practices that we know support struggling readers. Online reading strategies like the SEARCHing framework as described in Reading Teacher and the (PST)2+iC3 online reading formula as Michelle Schira Hagerman and Amber White wrote in Reading Today, as well as strategy guides and sample lessons on websites like ReadWriteThink and Common Sense Media offer promise because they are built upon a foundation of strategies that are been shown to effectively support struggling readers.      

Capitalize On Strategies Students Have Already Mastered In Print-Based Texts

Online reading requires new strategies, but also requires the use of many of the same strategies necessary for print-based texts. Strategies like summarizing, predicting, questioning, synthesizing, and evaluating text remain necessary in online reading environments.  An easy way to support struggling readers is to start with strategies they have already mastered in print-based texts and explicitly teach them to generalize and transfer these strategies to online texts. The CAST Strategy Tutor provides a good starting point for educators seeking a tool to integrate strategy instruction into any web-based content. It is easily customizable for many grades and subjects.

 Collaboration is Key

The most effective new methods for teaching online reading (including IRT) emphasize the importance of collaboration.  Reading online is complex and requires students to use multiple strategies in flexible ways, drawing significantly on higher order thinking.  Given the demands of online reading, it appears that peer collaboration benefits students in learning more strategies, applying them more effectively, and most importantly, allowing struggling readers to become active participants and even leaders in peer groups, as reported in Reading and Writing Quarterly. Therefore, when designing lessons that intentionally teach online reading, we should strongly consider building in opportunities for student collaboration.

As educators implement new methods for teaching online reading, an important final reminder is that many best practices for teaching strategies are relevant in any reading context:

• Start small—students should learn only a few strategies at a time.
• Model and “think aloud” as you introduce strategies.
• Allow time for practice, practice, practice.
• Provide opportunities for students to generalize and transfer strategies across multiple online reading sources.

Kara Sevensma is an assistant professor of education at Calvin College.  She can be contacted at sevensma@calvin.edu.

Close reading/deep reading and digital literacies/new literacies were rated as hot topics in the annual edition of What’s Hot and What’s Not in Reading Today. Reading professionals and classroom teachers alike are recognizing the importance of instruction that asks students to gather information from multiple texts and formats referred to in the Common Core State Standards. This piece explores how middle school students used Diigo, an online social bookmarking app, to digitally annotate texts and dialogue with each other to better understand science ideas.

Reading disciplinary texts can be difficult for adolescents. Not only is the content unfamiliar and conceptually challenging, the texts themselves contain features such as visual representations that are often crucial for gaining a rich understanding of the text. However, many students aren’t sufficiently prepared to analyze and think about these features, as was reported in Time to Act: Final Report from Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy. Also, in a 2008 article about adolescent readers, Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan suggest comprehension difficulties arise because of the students’ lack of familiarity with the content as well as their lack of familiarity with the unique textual attributes that reading in a given discipline requires. Finally, many adolescents lack the strategies necessary for monitoring their own comprehension so when they encounter difficult, disciplinary-specific texts, they aren’t prepared to read them closely, according to Carol D. Lee and Anika Spratley.

Annotation apps (iAnnotate, DocAS, Diigo, etc.) support active reading and provide students with features that allow them to mark texts as they engage in close reading. Students can employ these apps to help them target specific information and summarize key claims or findings related to their prior knowledge. When students use digital annotations to raise questions, they read more actively. By reading each other’s annotations, they are exposed to alternative ideas that may differ from their own, resulting in their appropriation of new ways to interpret texts.

While the use of apps has rapidly increased in schools, there remains little research on the ways annotations can be used to support close reading. This exploratory effort sought to begin to examine the possibilities. In their middle school science class, students were taught how to use Diigo to add sticky notes to online text in order to reflect on their thinking. As the class shared the same digital reading space, the digital annotations engaged their ability to clearly state their ideas, illustrate their thinking, and support their claims with evidence. Their annotations were coded and analyzed and it became clear students used annotations for multiple purposes: to pose questions, formulate claims, and request evidence from peers to answer questions they had about ideas in the text.

About 77 percent of the students used annotations to respond to a peer while about 20% indicated a response to the text and 3 percent indicated response to a side conversation. The process of collaborative annotation encouraged students’ documentation, critique, and refinement of ideas, which can aid learners in close reading of science texts. Peer interactions involved defining terms, posing questions, responding to questions, stating a claim, summarizing what the text or other students shared, disagreeing or challenging a peer, extending a peer’s idea with more evidence, and clarifying peers’ ideas when misinformation or a misunderstanding was advanced. These purposeful exchanges indicate a high degree of engagement with the process of online argumentation through the affordances and features of collaboration that Diigo provides.

There is great value to the social exchange of questions. Laura Kretschmar, the classroom science teacher noted the questions students generated came from a range of different perspectives on the texts that “[individual] kids may not have on their own.” Collaborative annotation served as a means of building social connections and “served as an opportunity for more kids to participate.” The teacher remarked on the need to hold students “accountable to reading the text” by having them first read the text and post their annotations before responding to others’ annotations.
Teachers can use annotations as a diagnostic tool in order to see where students’ misconceptions lie. Collaborative annotation provides space for peer-to-peer learning. Implementing a new technology requires classroom and school-based infrastructure. Integrating an annotation tool such as Diigo pays off when it becomes a frequent part of classroom practice.
To sign up for a Diigo Educator Account:

1. Explore the Diigo for Educator site.
2. Post articles, or links to online content, on your classroom website. (examples: Ms. Swandby’s site, Ms. Kretschmar’s site).
3. Model the annotation strategy thinking aloud. This process may include questioning, clarifying, and making connections.
4. Summarize by preparing a list of annotation categories students can refer to as they read.
5. Invite students to annotate using the active reading guidelines.
6. Assess student engagement with texts by reviewing their annotations.

Diigo gave all students a voice. It promoted dialogue focused around working together to better understand the text. Approachability of peer-to-peer interactions provided useful peer scaffolding. Peer-interactions became a student-driven entry point, welcoming different perspectives to engage with the text. Self-analysis of dialogue invited student reflection on quality conversation.

Jill Castek is a Research Assistant Professor at Portland State. She leads the Literacy, Language, and Technology Research group. She can be reached at jcastek@pdx.edu.

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