Literacy Now

StoryCorps, the national non-profit oral history project, launched the National Teachers Initiative on Monday, September 19, 2011. The Initiative celebrates the brilliant and courageous work of public school teachers across the country. By recording, sharing, and preserving their stories, StoryCorps hopes to call public attention to the invaluable contributions teachers have made to this nation, honor those who have embraced the profession as their calling, encourage teaching as a career choice, and unify the country behind its teachers—helping all recognize that there is no more important or noble work than that of educating the nation’s children.

The National Teachers Initiative will partner with local education and community organizations and public school districts across the country to record stories, placing special attention on the work of teachers striving to increase the number of students who graduate prepared for college and careers. StoryCorps will visit cities throughout the country during the 2011-2012 school year to record stories honoring at least 625 teachers. These cities include: Zanesville, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; New York City; Orlando, Florida; Fort Riley, Kansas; Mobile, Alabama; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Baltimore, MD; McComb, Mississippi; and New Orleans, Louisiana. 

Major funding for the National Teachers Initiative is provided by the Corporation of Public Broadcasting and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with additional funding provided by The Joyce Foundation. The National Teachers Initiative is part of American Graduate, a public media initiative supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to help local communities across America address the dropout crisis. 

The mission of StoryCorps is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of their lives. They accomplish this by recording high-quality interviews between friends or family, in which one person interviews the other. A trained Facilitator guides the interview, if necessary, and handles all the technical aspects of the recording.

StoryCorps travels across the country and has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. It is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind. StoryCorps currently has four major initiatives: StoryCorps Historias collects the stories of Latinos throughout the United States and Puerto Rico; StoryCorps Griot preserves the voices and experiences of African Americans; the Memory Loss Initiative reaches out to people affected by memory loss disorders and their families; the September 11th Initiative honors and remembers the stories of survivors, rescue workers, and others most personally affected by the events of September 11, 2001.

The first StoryBooth opened on October 23, 2003, in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. In May 2008 the new flagship StoryBooth opened in Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square. StoryCorps currently operates StoryBooths in New York City, San Francisco, and Atlanta. Two StoryCorps MobileBooths travel across the country, partnering with local public radio stations in various cities for one month at a time. StoryCorps’ first two MobileBooths hit the road May 19, 2005. StoryCorps also provides a Door-to-Door service where trained Facilitators travel with recording equipment to collect stories on-site. More information can be found at Bring StoryCorps to Your Community. StoryCorps participants receive a broadcast-quality copy of their interview on CD at the end of their session. The suggested donation for an hour-long StoryBooth session is $25 ensuring access to everyone. StoryCorps fundraises throughout the year to help cover costs of recording, archiving, and preserving each interview. 

With the permission of the participants, edited stories from each booth are broadcast on a partner public radio station. One story is broadcast nationally on NPR’s Morning Edition every Friday morning. Recorded interviews are added to the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. 

StoryCorps launched the first National Day of Listening in 2008 to encourage all Americans to record an interview with a loved one on the day after Thanksgiving using equipment that is readily available in most homes—from cell phones to tape recorders to computers or even pen and paper. This year’s National Day of Listening is November 25, 2011. Visit http://storycorps.org for more information. 

by Jill Castek

The Friday Institute at North Carolina State University was the site of the fifth New Literacies Teacher Leader Institute from July 25 to 29, 2011. The event was organized around the theme “Inquire, Collaborate, Create: New Literacies for Teacher Leaders.” NC State professors Hiller Spires, Carl Young, and John Lee, along with other presenters, used innovative instructional techniques to showcase ways that digital tools can create challenging and motivating learning opportunities for teachers and students. 

Across the week, participants engaged in hands-on, minds-on, project-based inquiries. In the process, they made plans for distributing new knowledge to their extended learning communities in their respective schools and districts.

Keynote addresses sparked new ideas for implementation. Professor Don Leu’s talk invited a closer look at New Literacies, Inquiry, and Equity:  Teacher Leaders for a New Educational Era. Steven W. Anderson’s address promoted Education, Enduring and Everlasting. Meredith Stewart’s keynote explored Digital Cross Training: Teachers as Students and Students as Teachers. 

Digging Deeper sessions encouraged participants to explore how social networking environments can enrich the classroom and how video can be used as a creation tool to amplify student engagement, creativity, and complex thinking. 

Cool Tools sessions featured Voicethread, Prezi, Xtranormal, Google's Collaborative Literacy Tools and much more. Across the institute, Twitter, and Ning were used as dynamic communication and reflection tools.

Each day included time for teachers to create innovative inquiry lessons based on curriculum standards. To celebrate and showcase their learning, teachers shared their innovative inquiry projects during a Participant Showcase. 

The New Literacies Teacher Leader Institute at NC State was an innovative learning experience that inspired participating teachers to tap students’ curiosity and unleash their creativity while at the same time become agents for change in a new educational era.  Creators Hiller Spires, John Lee, Carl Young, Don Leu, Julie Coiro, and Jill Castek have seen momentum for the institute grow as new generations of teacher leaders share their knowledge with colleagues and put into practice what they’ve learned. Organizers are planning for the next institute in 2012. To get involved contact Hiller Spires at haspires@ncsu.edu.

Michael Stern Hart, who invented electronic books (e-books) in 1971, passed away on September 6, 2011, in his home in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 64. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for e-books. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4, 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was Hart's life's work, spanning over 40 years. 

You can find a series of recent writings by Michael online in the Public Library Blog Newsletter.

Realizing that student engagement is a major component of learning, teachers attempt to design instruction that includes active participation. Many love the idea of using chart paper and sticky notes to have students brainstorm ideas, react to a story, record unfamiliar vocabulary words, summarize newly learned ideas, and pose new wonderings.

Often, however, teachers don’t readily have needed quantities of these paper resources, and after the lesson is finished the adhesive seldom continues to adhere to the wall. Additionally, without prodding, students infrequently reference these resources.

As an alternative, have you considered Wallwisher, which is a motivating, tree-saving, digitized, note posting way to engage students individually and collaboratively with purposeful instruction at any point throughout the lesson? Using Wallwisher, students can post, edit, and elaborate their work while sharing the thinking of their classmates.

The following examples illustrate how Wallwisher can support student learning in the content area of science. Teaching and learning science is being given very needed attention since the recently released draft of A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas from the Committee on Conceptual Framework for the New K-12 Science Education Standards and the National Research Council. This Framework, like the Common Core Standards emphasizes attaining rigorous learning goals including being able to comprehend, evaluate, and communicate information learned through inquiry and text supported content study.

For years the science community has been lobbying for more inquiry-based instruction in school characterized by the promotion of the real world practices of critical thinking and problem-solving (American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1993; National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment & National Research Council, 1996; Rutherford & Ahlgren, 1989). This characterization continues to be promoted as evidenced through the call for students to expand and revise their knowledge, thinking, and literacy while engaging in scientific inquiry, (The Committee on Conceptual Framework for the New K-12 Science Education Standards and the National Research Council (2011).

Wallwisher is the perfect tool to facilitate such inquiry and critical thinking within any area of study.

What is Wallwisher?

Wallwisher is an online notice board maker. It can be used to convey birthday wishes, make announcements, take notes, reflect on a reading, or brainstorm what is known, learned, or questioned during a unit of study. Think of Wallwisher as a digital bulletin board.

How does Wallwisher work?

The teacher logs in (it’s free!) and poses a question or topic to the class. Once the bulletin board is customized with different information, colors, fonts, icons, etc., it is ready to be shared. Students read the teacher-posed question or topic, and create/write a sticky of their own. All of the responses appear on one “wall space” so students can see each others’ ideas as they create their own sticky note.

A big advantage is that the users do not need to have accounts themselves to post a response so it is quick and easy to use in a group situation. Messages can contain up to 160 characters and can include hyperlinks to other sites. Multimedia that is hosted online on other sites, such as images, videos and sound files, can also be added to a sticky note by using the URL.

Once a wall has been created, you can also embed the wall in other online spaces such as wiki pages or blog posts. Click on this link to see a YouTube video on how Wallwisher works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBn1EVzh6wk

Wallwisher in a 3rd grade classroom: Supporting Initial Planning and Formative Student Assessment

Before beginning science units in her classroom, Angela Harrison likes to assess the base of knowledge her students have on a topic. To do so she often invites them to use KWL charts to record this information. To assess their growing knowledge throughout a unit of study, she has them return to their charts to continually chronicle their learning and questions.

Unfortunately, many charts are often lost through the study. She solved this problem with Wallwisher. Once the students were familiar with using paper sticky notes she moved them into digital sticky notes. Her students recently used Wallwisher at the beginning of a unit of study on weather. Some of her student’s “sticky notes” said: “I’ve seen evaporation at work after a rain storm because the puddles in my backyard get smaller and smaller.” Another wrote “Hail is like hard snow.” A third comment was “I wonder why different parts of the world have different weather at the same time.”

By having her students use Wallwisher to share their ideas and wonderings about weather, Mrs. Harrison was able to frequently assess their learning, and then tailor the upcoming lessons to meet their individual and collective needs. Using Wallwisher, she was able to post different questions to different students throughout the unit and assess if and when re-teaching was necessary.

Click on the following link to see Mrs. Harrison’s class wall: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/msharrisons3rdgrade

Wallwisher in 9th grade Earth Science classroom: Creating Text-supported Summaries

Ninth grade teacher Adam Renick used Wallwisher to support his students as they summarized and shared different articles about ecosystems. He asked small groups, to each read and summarize a different article about an ecosystem.

Using the allotted 160 characters, student groups carefully synthesized ideas in order to provide appropriate summaries. The students were also tasked with adding a related link that would help their peers learn more about an ecosystem.

After all sticky notes were posted, students were to go to the site again (this time individually), read all the sticky notes, and click on two of the links to learn more about the ecosystem with which they were least familiar. They were then to individually post one note identifying a newly learned fact or an additional wondering they now had.

Mr. Renick was also able to respond to some of his students’ wonderings by creating sticky notes of his own. As his students used their texts to create summaries, Mr. Renick was able to also continually assess their growing base of knowledge and provide additional instruction as needed.

Click on the following link to see the wall from Mr. Renick’s class: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/9thgradescience

Benefits to Learning

The goals set forth by the Committee on Conceptual Framework for the New K-12 Science Education Standards and the National Research Council (2011) is calling for learners to gain sufficient knowledge of the practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas of science in order to be able to engage in discussions and to become critical consumers of scientific information. Wallwisher, as a tool that facilitates digital publication within a classroom, is an innovative and engaging way for students to share ideas, curiosities, and thoughts in a collaborative fashion. This type of creative, critical thinking is the hallmark of scientific problem-solving—an aspect of education that is rapidly becoming a central area of focus and concern at both national and local levels.

For educators seeking ways to promote engaged participation and inventive thought, Wallwisher is just the right tool.

References

American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. (1993). Benchmarks for science literacy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Committee on Conceptual Framework for the New K-12 Science Education Standards & National Research Council. (2011). A framework for k-12 science education: practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas (Prepublication copy). Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=13165&page=1

National Committee on Science Education Standards and Assessment & National Research Council. (1996). National science education standards. Retrieved from http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4962&page=1

Rutherford, F.J., & Ahlgren, A. (1989). Science for all Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.



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Millions of children in low-income neighborhoods don’t have books in their homes, missing out on the chance to develop crucial early literacy skills that affect their success in the classroom and in life. We Give Books, a digital reading initiative from the Pearson Foundation and the Penguin Group, is on a mission to change all that.

We Give Books makes it easy to help people enjoy reading together, at the same time providing books to those who may not have access to them. Anyone with access to the Internet can visit the site (www.wegivebooks.org) to read one of the free books available in its online library, and We Give Books donates a book to a leading literacy group on his or her behalf.

Now We Give Books has introduced a new initiative which takes that concept and adds a twist: Read for Our Schools is tied directly to Jumpstart’s Read for the Record campaign, which is presented in partnership with the Pearson Foundation. The annual Read for the Record campaign draws attention to the importance of early literacy by setting a new record for the most people reading the same book on the same day. Through Read for Our Schools, for each free book read online at www.wegivebooks.org between now and October 6, the Pearson Foundation will donate a copy of Llama Llama Red Pajama – this year’s official Read for the Record title. These donations will enable children who otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to participate in the day’s events. Through We Give Books’ Read for Our Schools campaign, the foundation will donate 50,000 books to 150 participating school districts.

“I commend the We Give Books campaign for its creative approach in promoting the importance of reading in our children's lives,” said Florida Education Commissioner Gerard Robinson. “By making free online books available to families, and linking the use of that free material to this year's Read for the Record, we are engaging our children in the reading process in imaginative and compelling ways.” 

“Jumpstart’s Read for the Record shines a spotlight on our obligation to ensure that young people everywhere have an equal chance to succeed,” said Pearson Foundation President and CEO Mark Nieker. “We Give Books and Read for Our Schools add an important digital element that provides another way for people to show they care.”

Visit www.wegivebooks.org/readfortherecord to learn more and to register for this year’s Read for the Record.

We Give Books is a philanthropic program from the Penguin Group and the Pearson Foundation that helps children become lifelong readers and givers. Together, Penguin Group and the Pearson Foundation support literacy through programs that engage entire communities. Working around the world through programs like Booktime, We Give Books, and Jumpstart’s Read for the Record, Penguin and the Pearson Foundation have touched millions of lives in thousands of communities. To learn more about the We Give Books program and its nonprofit partners, go to we.givebooks.org. 

Jumpstart is a national early education organization that helps children develop the language and literacy skills they need for school, setting them on a path to close the achievement gap before it is too late. Read for the Record allows Americans to demand that all children receive the quality early education they deserve. For more information on Jumpstart and Read for the Record, visit www.jstart.org. 

The Pearson Foundation, a 501(c) (3) nonprofit, extends Pearson’s commitment to education by partnering with leading nonprofit, civic, and business organizations to provide financial, organizational, and publishing assistance across the globe. The foundation aims to make a difference by sponsoring innovative educational programs and extending its educational expertise to help in classrooms and in local communities. More information on the Pearson Foundation can be found at www.pearsonfoundation.org.