by Tammy Ryan

Summer is the perfect time to collaborate with co-workers to hone important instructional techniques. Learn how Lynn and Cassie, two second grade co-teachers, created informal, internet professional development journeys to deepen instructional understandings on effective ways to bring robust vocabulary into their classroom environment. 

First, Lynn and Cassie joined Delicious to collect and share vocabulary links found during their Internet journeys. For instance, they found and bookmarked Literacy Essentials and Reading Network (LEaRN). The site offers opportunities to read research on vocabulary, hear expert commentaries, and view movies on vocabulary instruction, such as Lisa Worthy demonstrating how she uses Text Talk to teach robust words. The teachers also discovered ways to create and use interactive word walls to nudge their students into producing targeted words. 

Because Cassie and Lynn wanted to bring digital technologies into the classroom experience and use photographs to capture students engaged in hands-on activities that depict instructed words, they found, read, and discussed Digital Language Experience Approach located on Reading Online. Then to acquire funding to purchase digital cameras and printers, they completed a Best Buy Program Store Donation application.

During later sessions, Lynn contributed a lesson plan she found on ReadWriteThink titled Blast Off! Vocabulary Instruction Using a Virtual Moon Trip. It uses virtual field trips to authenticate word learning experiences. Cassie shared a site she discovered on Florida Center of Reading Research called FAIR Student Activities Search Tool. The site offers numerous grade-level vocabulary games and activities to nurture word learning during literacy stations. Also, the teachers used Pinterest to view photographs, charts, and ideas on creative ways to bring vocabulary experiences into the classroom environment. 

Later in the summer after learning through Internet discovers, Lynn and Cassie used Google Docs to collaboratively compose plans meaningful to everyone’s word learning experiences the following year. In sharing these experiences, we hope you, too, create and learn from Internet Journeys this summer. 

Tammy Ryan is from Jacksonville University, Jacksonville, Florida. 

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

by W. Ian O'Byrne

As the Internet increasingly becomes the dominant text of our society, we have the ability to take advantage of new opportunities to read and write with a global audience. Through the use of blogs we can read and share multimodal information on a variety or topics, for a variety of purposes. For example, I require my pre-service teachers to maintain a reflective blog in several of our classes, and as a result I try to maintain my own blog. I also daily read several dozen blogs by aggregating them in Google Reader and reading them on my computer, phone, and iPad using a tool like Feedly. 

One blog that pops to the top of my Feedly list daily is the collaborative work of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. The focus of the work of the research hub is on “analyzing and interpreting the impact of the Internet and digital media on education, civic engagement, and youth.” The work of the research group, and initiatives like the DMLcentral blog are supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. 

The DMLcentral collaborative blog features a panel of a fascinating blend of leaders in the fields of literacy, technology, and education. This collaboration results in an eclectic mix of various topics. These include new and digital literacies, open education, critical literacy, social media, etc. DMLcentral has a very healthy subscription of readers, many of which comment regularly. The end result is a community of learners and researchers focusing on the core values of the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. This blog is resource that I frequently use to inspire my own thinking when considering the authentic and effective use of technology in the classroom. 

W. Ian O'Byrne is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of New Haven. You can follow him on Twitter (@wiobyrne), at Google+, or contact him at wiobyrne@gmail.com.

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

by Marjie Podzielinski 

Google Lit Trips are free downloadable files that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature on the surface of Google Earth. At each location along the journey there are place marks with pop-up windows that contain a variety of resources including relevant media, thought provoking discussion starter, and links to supplementary information about “real world” references made in that story. Google Lit Trips have been developed by teachers and students. They allow the reader to utilize the technology of Google Earth and put them in the exact location and travel of the characters in historical fiction.

First, start by downloading Google Earth to your computer. Then log in to Google Lit Trips. With my fifth graders we looked at the extensive resources provided on the Orphan Train with A Family Apart by Joan Lowery Nixon. My students read the novel and then were amazed to follow the path of the Orphan Train from New York to stops in the Midwest where children were chosen to live with families. Quotations from the story and historical photographs bring this novel to life. Students can actually see the trains and the orphanage, and have a much clearer look at what life was like at the turn of the century. 

My sixth graders utilized the Google Lit Trip for Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever 1793. This Lit trip details the marketplace, the coffeehouses, and farm life during the Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Students can see the obstacles facing these characters by incorporating Google Lit Trips with their studies. 

The site now also offers walking tours for Cannery Row. 

Jerome Burg is the founder of Google Lit Trips. This resource is expanding all the time. Templates are available for download. Students and teachers from all over the world can create their own Google Lit trips. This challenges the student to use higher level thinking skills and evaluate what is truly important in the story. Google Lit Trips range from K-5 and go all the way through college. This resource is an exciting way to connect kids and reading. 

Marjie Podzielinski is the librarian at Coulson Tough School in The Woodlands, Texas.

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

by Kimberly Kimbell-Lopez

In this era of cloud-based applications, Glogster (http://edu.glogster.com/) is one must-have resource for classroom teachers to use with students. Students can create a Glog, short for graphical blog, which can be a poster or web page. The drag and drop interface makes it easy for students to add multimedia features to the “poster”, including text, links, photos, graphics, audio, video, data attachments, and drawings.

The Glogster web site describes this online interface as “the leading global education platform for the creative expression of knowledge and skills in the classroom and beyond.” Without a doubt, Glogster makes it easy for teachers to invite students to share what they have learned in one content or across multiple content areas (i.e., English/Language Arts, social studies, science, math, music, etc.). Most importantly, the Glog can be used by students across all grade levels—PK-12 up through postsecondary.

In the example shown in Figure One, Rhea-Claire Richard created a Glog that documents multimedia elements she developed as part of a graduate course. Multimedia components she included in her Glog were an All About Me movie, an author vodcast , a storybook vodcast created by her students, a podcast, a vodcast, and links to other projects she created as part of her weekly assignments. As is evident in Rhea-Claire’s Glog, the user can select background features and other graphical elements that make it easy to carry through a theme for the Glog. 

Figure One: Example of Glog found via http://rheaclairerichard.edu.glogster.com/rhea-claire-richard-ect-510/.  

Creating your Own Glog

To create your own Glog, go to http://edu.glogster.com. Teachers can actually register for a free individual account to create private Glogs only, but these free accounts do not offer any student management features. If you would like more options in terms of student accounts, then more information can be found at http://edu.glogster.com/product-information/. 

After you have created your account, then you are ready to create a Glog. One of the first steps is to change the background color. Click on “Wall” to display the numerous options that are available (refer to Figure Two). You can scroll through pages of options that can then be selected to serve as the background for the Glog. The same is true for graphics. 

Figure Two.  Example of Background Options.

The next screenshot (Figure Three) illustrates the number of options that are available for graphical elements that can be added to the Glog. The options that are shown are the graphics listed for EduRandom, and there are seven pages of graphics that can are listed as options. 

Figure Three.  Example of Graphic Options.

The tool bar that is displayed also illustrates how easy it is add different multimedia component to the Glog. If you want to add a movie or vodcast, then select “video”. If you want to add a podcast, then click on “sound.” Once you have created a Glog, then it is easy to share with others. You can send the Glog link by email, the Glog can be embedded externally in Wikis or Blogs, or the Glog can be shared through social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. 

Don’t waste another minute—get started on your own Glog today!  

Kimberly Kimbell-Lopez, Ed.D., is the Hubberd H. & Velma Horton Boucher Endowed Professor in the department of curriculum, instruction, and leadership at Louisiana Tech University. 

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

by Julie Huskey, NBCT
IRA Teacher Advisory Panel

It was the end of the school year in 2010 where I was laboring in the dreaded “pack up the room” bit…piling boxes to the ceiling, shoving items into cabinets so that I would have absolutely no idea where I put it at the beginning of school next year, and frantically ripping posters down off the walls to begin my summer vacation when I had the revelation to move out of the elementary classroom and begin a new journey.

An art position had opened and I floored my principal when she jokingly asked if I would be interested with an overly excited YES! Although, I had one catch…I refused to give up my love of literacy. Literacy has been my backbone for teaching. After teaching 14 years in elementary, serving in every office in my local reading council, doing many years including President of our Arkansas Reading Association and now serving on the International Reading Association's Teacher Advisory Panel I just couldn’t walk away from literacy.

So I made a plan to submit to my principal and school board that I wanted to begin a new art program in my school and I would title it RAW ART. Raw has so many meanings are perfect for my program but initially the acronym was designed for Reading And Writing with Art. RAW ART is now my passion in life and I can’t wait each day for all 500 of my kindergarten to sixth graders to come into my room and experience it with me.

Connection to Common Core

Sometimes in art colors just mix together to create the perfect blend and my RAW ART program followed the same blending with the incoming Common Core. The Common Core State Standards insist that instruction in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language be a shared responsibility within the school. Much of the motivation behind the interdisciplinary approach to literacy drew from extensive research establishing the need for college and career ready students to be proficient in reading complex informational text independently in a variety of content areas. The creation of my program blending art and literacy is like the paint brush to the paint, you can’t have one without the other. 

Using a variety of art, children’s books both fiction and nonfiction, poems, magazine articles, newspapers, and dictionaries to engage us in reading, discussions, analyzing, forming opinions, group work, comparing, and contrasting—these are but a few of the many simple ways I integrate art and literacy. There are times when the text is the basis for our art work and other times when the art is the basis for our writing. In Children’s Literature in the Reading Program: An Invitation to Read published by IRA, Cyndi Giorgis of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, discussed the importance of manipulating the power of visual literature that both children and adults are so drawn to and extending appreciation and understand of how illustrations matter in interpreting text. 

Great Projects to Try

My second and third graders used the book Trucks by Patricia Hubbell and fabulous collage illustrations of Megan Halsey. Introducing the book to the students led to so many discussions with the format of the text, the caption bubbles, the story itself, and the clever illustrations the students uncovered. Next I shared with my students an old alphabet rhyming game that my mother taught me years ago where the students filled in the blanks with items that matched the letter. My name is ___ and I am very ___. I’m going to ____ with a truck load of ___. My students quickly caught on and I would hear them chanting the rhyme and making up silly words all day long in the hallways. Their objectives were to use maps, draw a truck inserting their photo, create a collage that was inspired by Halsey’s illustrations, and write their rhyme using their name on the piece. 

My sixth graders designed and created these fabulous Greek columns with a self expressive sculpture resting on the pedestal. We began with research on the three main types of Greek columns. The students selected one style to create their column with and then wrote about their column as well as how the sculpture expressed them. 

Whether you teach RAW ART or any other subject, integrating literacy into everything we do and teach is crucial to advancing our students above the bar. Language both oral and written are the two most important factors putting our creativity in motion every day. Let your imagination run wild and create an innovative way to add a little literacy splash to all content areas.

For those interested I have an art blog with many of my ideas, photos, downloadable power points and books all free and accessible at www.artjulz.blogspot.com or you can e-mail me at julie@arareading.org.