by William Yang

Want to engage your students with literacy and content in a unique way? Conduct an interactive e-book study to support literacy and learning in your classroom!   

Interactive e-books are a popular medium for reading and learning on mobile devices. Unlike a traditional book that contains only text and pictures, an interactive e-book can display multiple media such as video, 3-D objects, and animations that transform the experience of reading. Students interact with the text or media and often that interaction further informs the reader or is fundamental to the telling of the story.   

Through this unique format, interactive e-books can be a wonderful learning tool. 3-D artifacts or interactive science models embedded within the page bring abstract concepts in social studies and science to life. Modifying content and text within e-book authoring programs can attend to diverse learning styles and help students with reading difficulties. E-books also provide students with the opportunity to learn some of the new skills and strategies with eReading as they access a variety of tools such as an online dictionary, social highlighting, and text-to-speech features to aid comprehension. Most e-books allow the reader to take notes or create their own study aids that make learning personalized.

There are many fiction and non-fiction e-books students can examine as they study this format. For young students, the Reading A-Z web site provides leveled e-books to show how media can simply be used to enhance the story. Others, such as “The Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” app by William Joyce, model how reader interaction is integral to the story. There are also many nonfiction apps to examine through online encyclopedias or magazines on mobile devices. One great example for secondary students is “Snow Fall: The Avalanche on Tunnel Creek” by John Branch in the New York Times app. Examining the features of an interactive e-book and learning how different e-book authors use media to tell a story can guide students as they construct their own e-books.

There are several authoring programs available for students and teachers. One of the most accessible programs is iBooks Author, a free download for the MacOS platform. You can embed videos, 3-D objects, and slideshows within the e-book. Another free program available for all platforms is Moglue, which allows you to program objects and pictures to create interactive animations within the e-book. E-book authoring programs allow you to send e-books to an online location where your students can download on to their mobile device.

As they create e-books, it’s easy for students to get carried away with the novelty of embedding media in text. Students need reminding that the telling of a good story or the presentation of a compelling argument is ultimately what grabs the attention of an audience—not the “glitz” of an interactive e-book. By engaging students in researching the features of a great interactive e-book and authoring their own, they may craft new ways to tell a good story or inform an audience while learning along the way.

William Yang is an educational technology facilitator for the Scarsdale Public Schools in Scarsdale, New York.

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

by Joan Rhodes

What do the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and Martin Luther King, Jr. have in common? How might a student find the answer to this question? In today’s classrooms, students would immediately suggest that we “Google” to find the answer. (See http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus and www.martinlutherking.org for further information.) After a cursory look, both sites appear to be organized and informative. However, upon further examination, a critical reader notes that the sites are full of misinformation. Along with other hoax web pages, these sites are examples used to demonstrate the importance of teaching students to consider the accuracy and authenticity of Internet information.

Educators who utilize hoax sites offer students excellent opportunities for developing critical thinking skills as they evaluate Internet content. For example, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus web page, a fictitious site created by Lyle Zapato, was included in a study conducted by the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut. The study found seventh grade students lacking in their ability to recognize an Internet hoax (Krane, 2006). The website called Martin Luther King, Jr. – A True Historical Examination, categorized as a counterfeit site, pretends to be a legitimate source for the purpose of disseminating misinformation (Piper, 2000). In addition to fictitious and counterfeit sites, students need instruction that helps them identify political parody sites (see http://whitehouse.gov1.info) and product sites that  narrow content to avoid damaging information related to product performance (Piper, 2000).

What steps should teachers take to ensure that their students can identify credible sources in on-line environments? A number of on-line resources are available to support student learning. The Western Australia Department of Education offers a rich resource for evaluating websites at www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/curriculum/ict/webeval/index.htm#criteria. Teachers can locate relevant readings, links to selected bogus (hoax) websites, and classroom activities to enhance their instruction related to analyzing Internet sites. Additionally, this site offers a number of links to assist teachers and students as they consider criteria for evaluating websites.

One excellent linked resource is Internet Detective, a free, on-line tutorial program located at www.vtstutorials.ac.uk/detective/. The tutorial offers information for critically evaluating websites and quick tips and practical exercises for testing one’s ability to identify credible, accurate information. The site also provides copyright information and the correct citation procedures needed to avoid plagiarism. Offering opportunities to evaluate and create hoax sites using the aforementioned websites enhances students’ ability to recognize reliable sources of information for course work and research.

References

Krane, B. (2006, November). Researchers find kids need better online academic skills.  Retrieved from http://advance.uconn.edu/2006/061113/06111308.htm

Piper, P. (2000). Better read that again: Web hoaxes and misinformation. Searcher, 8(8), Retrieved from http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/sep00/piper.htm

Joan Rhodes is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Reading Program group at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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

by Vicky Zygouris-Coe

Can e-readers reframe student learning? Although I don’t have a definitive answer to this question, I would at least like to say that they have the potential to do so. I believe three key factors that influence the potential of e-readers include: 1) having an understanding of e-readers and instruction using Mishra & Koehler’s technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) framework; 2) having knowledge about how children and adolescents learn in a highly networked world, and 3) using ebooks as an important part of a curriculum that values 21st century learning. With these conditions, exciting things can happen using e-readers.

E-readers are used extensively in many school districts around the nation for many purposes, ranging from motivation to supporting students with disabilities. E-readers are practical, mobile, portable, and some are highly interactive. E-readers’ built-in features (e.g., text-to-speech, speech-to-text, magnification) provide support to all learners, and especially to students with disabilities. Students can use e-readers to read books of their choice, read classroom e-books, conduct research, access primary and secondary sources, listen to books online, use dictionaries, and access and construct all kinds of information. E-readers can support and extent reading and learning, and can be used to exchange and present information, and collaborate with others on problem solving.

Literacy is a personal, relational, and social process. I like to think of literacy as an apprenticeship; this perspective implies that the role of the teacher is one of a facilitator and the role of the student one of a mentee. In that context, some questions I consider when thinking about the potential of e-readers with students include the following:

• How can I use e-readers to support students’ interests and learning goals?
• How can I design my instruction to facilitate critical thinking skills that enable students to read, comprehend, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, create, and share new information?
• Am I using e-readers in my classroom to gradually shift the control of learning to the student?
• How can I promote readers’ self-awareness and comprehension monitoring when reading text on an e-reader?
• Do I model how students use e-readers to read and comprehend literary and informational text? 
• Do I teach my students how to text-code using e-reader features, make and exchange notes about a book and/or project, and critically analyze text?
• How would I use technology to teach students how to use e-reader features to “fix” meaning when it fails? 
• How might e-readers be used in my classroom to promote student-student collaboration (peer reading and writing, literature circles), exchange of information with others, and collaborative development of projects, reports, and ideas?

Although we should continue to learn, use, and incorporate more technology into our classrooms, let’s move it from the periphery to the center of learning in the 21st century classroom. By offering students systematic instruction and support in using e-readers for personal and collaborative learning purposes, we will also be fostering their motivation to learn and go after their own questions, goals, and interests. E-readers have the potential to make the reading and learning process interactive, motivating, and meaningful. However, simply adopting e-readers is not a guarantee for increased independent reading and improvement of the reading process. Success with e-readers depends on our ability to find ways to use them in the classroom to support, extend, and reframe student learning.

References

Mishra, P. & Koehler, M. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054

Vicky Zygouris-Coe is an associate professor in Reading Education at the University of Central Florida, School of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership, Vassiliki.Zygouris-Coe@ucf.edu.

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

by Alexandra Panos

In this blog post, I hope to add to the growing number of voices advocating the importance of multimodal, digital poetry in the ELA classroom. As a middle school teacher in Chicago, a pulsing center of competitive high school choice, I have had to advocate strongly for an immersive poetry experience in my classroom. My school first transitioned to standards based reporting two years ago, and is now in the midst of a transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). But, because of the ongoing scholarly arguments for poetry instruction and the quality work students produce, my administration has joined me in my endeavor to fully embrace poetry in my classroom. 

Ryan’s Poetic Glogster

Students and teachers who engage in poetic exploration often immerse themselves in the reading and writing of poetry and poetic language. In a time of standards-based grading practices and curriculum design, the need for this exploration has grown, rather than diminished. Other scholars have made this argument better than I could, and I encourage classroom teachers to read, read, read the academic and classroom-tested literature available.

In Mark Dressman’s recent book, Let’s Poem, he directly addresses the world of multimodal poetic response and creation.  Any teacher tackling poetry as either a new area or making the case for its inclusion in their CCSS classroom would benefit from his detailed, classroom tested, and exciting approaches to poetry, some of which I describe below.

Bridget Dalton’s recent piece, “Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards” in The Reading Teacher lays out a framework for the integration of technology into the writing classroom. She argues that the open-endedness of the CCSS gives educators space to promote thoughtful multimodal, composition in the ELA classroom.

Most recently, Julie B. Wise wrote an encouraging piece on this blog directly aligned to the grade 5 CCSS classroom. Her plan for intertwining reading and writing digital poetry is accessible and adaptable for any classroom. The use of PowerPoint as a publication strategy emphasizes student language choices.

Ultimately, the argument comes down to the inherent importance of careful language study in the standards-based or CCSS classroom. Any way you teach it, poetry instruction should reflect the complexity of choices available to poet and reader, from which students have the right, and need, to make meaning in ever expanding and increasingly digital modes.

Audrey’s Poetic Glogster

Why Multimodal, Digital Poetry?

An added benefit of the shifting nature of literacy education is the emphasis on digital and multimodal literacies in the ELA classroom. Poetry reading and writing often require complex literacy events to unfold for students to make meaning. Luckily, with the expanding nature of the digital world, we are now better able to give our students quality methods with which to respond and create.

As with all multimodal responses and compositions, they have clear ties to pedagogical principles most ELA teachers already employ in their classrooms. Ties to the dramatic and fine arts have always been multimodal ways to engage with poetry, but we also can weave into our classroom practice new digital methods that support and extend our facilitation of student learning. I hope this brief list of more “traditional” multimodal ideas can further encourage teachers to either take up multimodal poetry as an integral component of their classroom culture or extend to digital modes as well.

Lilly’s Poetic Glogster

Choral Poetry

Reading poetry aloud is one of the original multimodal methods of approaching poetry in the ELA classroom according to Mark Dressman. In my classroom we do choral readings of The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe, blues poems by Langston Hughes, and, if requested, my students’ writing. The shared nature of the readings help students learn from and with one another. Let’s Poem has a wonderful breakdown of how to engage in choral reading. 

To extend to digital work, try using Garage Band to create poetry podcasts!

Spoken Word Poetry

Folding spoken word poetry into the classroom can mean a greater awareness of both the aural and figurative natures of language. In my 8th grade classroom, we watch portions of the fantastic documentary Louder than a Bomb which follows students as they compete in the largest spoken word poetry slam in the country of the same name. It is inspiring and motivating for student writers. As we workshop our own poems, we also make time for daily mini-slams. Sharing poetry orally inspires critique of language as well as reaches out to other modes of art, such as rap and music. Let’s Poem also has great resources for application in your own classroom.

To extend to digital work, have students create “music videos” to accompany their own spoken word poems!

Artistic Interpretations

Students have visceral responses to many of the images they find in poems we read and write in my classroom. I’ve found that artistic response is often a powerful way for them to demonstrate their emotions as well as create meaning. They do this for a range of poems, from Hurt Hawks by Robinson Jeffers to Naomi Shihab Nye’s Sifter to the lyrics of their favorite songs. In particular, their own writing lends itself well to artistic interpretation as it provides them a means of broadening the figurative language found in their poems.

To extend to digital work, have students create Glogsters of images, sounds, and video!

Franny’s Poetic Glogster

Publishing Multimodal, Digital Poetry in my Classroom

My students and I enjoy reading and writing poetry throughout the school year, but place special emphasis on it in the cold Chicago winters, when we dive into the depths of poetic language. This brief month of intense focus has led to carefully crafted poems which we publish digitally using Glogster.com. 

While I am not writing here to share a unit plan, I hope solid examples of some student work and my grading tool might benefit others who hope to facilitate the publication of multimodal, digital poetry. To create these detailed poetic Glogsters, students must meet several criteria, and make careful choices about their work. The most important of these criteria include:

• Purposeful edits through independent work as well as peer and teacher conferences
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.5 With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on how well purpose and audience have been addressed
• Intentional use of figurative and aural language, poetic form or line break, and sensory devices and images
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.3d Use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events
• Appropriate synthesis of information through writing, images, video, sound, and use of space
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas efficiently as well as to interact and collaborate with others.

Seventh and eighth graders wrote, designed and published the pieces shared here. I have my students for three years, as such this is either the second or third year these students have had an immersive month of multimodal and digital poetry. Some students, such as Lilly, add music, video and moving images, fully embracing the digital nature of Glogster as a medium. Others, such as Audrey, look at their Glogster as a still canvas. Rather than force students to use specific media, I ask that they write a reflective paragraph which explains the choices they made. This provides more formal writing practice as well as cements the meanings they are making.

My immersive month of poetry with my students is my favorite time of the year. Our final step is to embed our Glogsters into Edmodo.com, an education social networking site. Here students comment on one another’s work, discuss the language chosen, and feel the real sense of accomplishment which comes with publication.  Students learn, standards are assessed, and we grow as a community of readers and writers because of the intricacy of choices we make in our study and creation of poetry.   

Josie’s Poetic Glogster

Resources

Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010). Common Core State Standards forEnglish Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and TechnicalSubjects. Washington, DC: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Accessed from:http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards

Dalton, Bridget. "Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards." The Reading Teacher 66.4 (2012): 333-39. Print.

Dressman, Mark. Let's Poem: The Essential Guide to Teaching Poetry in a High-stakes, Multimodal World. New York, NY: Teachers College/Teachers College, Columbia University, 2010. Print.

"Edmodo | Where Learning Happens | Sign Up, Sign In." Edmodo | Where Learning Happens | Sign Up, Sign In. Web. 25 Feb. 2013. 

"We Are Celebrating!" Glogster. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Wise, Julie B. "TILE-SIG Feature: Digital Poetry Bridging Common Core Standards with Multimodal Instruction." TILE-SIG Feature: Digital Poetry Bridging Common Core Standards with Multimodal Instruction. International Reading Association, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Alexandra Panos is a middle grades Language Arts teacher in Chicago. Her future posts will focus on multimodal approaches which support digital literacy.

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

by Paul Morsink

At what point does a new technology become so ubiquitous, so familiar and taken-for-granted, that assessing students’ performance in the absence of that technology is seen by researchers, educators, and students themselves as artificial or unfair?

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) offers different answers, depending on whether we’re talking about reading or writing.

In 2010, the authors of the NAEP Writing Assessment clearly felt a tipping point had been reached. They voted to deliver the 2011 Writing Assessment in a fully digital format and, for the first time, to give students the option of accessing a variety of digital writing supports (e.g., copy/paste, text-to-speech, spell-check, thesaurus).

The rationale for this move (laid out in the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework document) makes for interesting reading. After describing at some length the reality that new “communications technologies [have] changed the way people write and the kinds of writing they do,” the authors asserted the following:

[E]liminating access to common word processing tools on the computer would create a highly artificial platform for composing, since a writer normally has access to and uses at least some common tools when composing on a computer. The purpose of assessing writing produced on the computer comes into question when access to such common features of word processing software is eliminated. (p. 9)

The authors acknowledged that some students “who are not comfortable with electronic composition” may be disadvantaged by the digital format. At the same time, they pointed out that “a paper and pencil assessment would create similar issues of bias for students who commonly use computers to write” (p. 8). At the end of the day, then, they decided to go digital and allow digital writing supports because the “NAEP Writing Assessment [should reflect] the way [most of] today’s students compose—and are expected to compose—particularly as they move into various postsecondary settings” (p. vi).

So much for the design of the 2011 NAEP Writing Assessment. (See Dana Grisham and Jill Castek’s October blogpost for discussion of the 2011 Writing Assessment results—in particular the finding that students who used digital tools scored, on average, higher than students who did not use them.)

By contrast, the authors of the NAEP Reading Assessment see the world differently. In the 88-page Reading Framework document they do not devote a single sentence to acknowledging the fact that in U.S. classrooms, and especially outside school, K-12 students starting in Kindergarten are today spending more and more time reading on screens, in an expanding array of genres and formats, for traditional and new tasks and purposes (e.g., studying for an upcoming test as well as exploring a friend’s social media platform profile), and with access to a variety of digital reading supports (text-to-speech, online dictionaries, etc.) (e.g., Barone, 2012; Beach, 2012; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010; Lenhart, 2012; Rainie et al., 2012).

Indeed, the Reading Framework document uses the word computer only once, simply stating that, “it is difficult to include [computer-based electronic texts] in ways that reflect how students actually read them in and out of school” (p. 6). (The paragraph does not elaborate on the precise nature of the difficulty.)

For these authors, apparently, the tipping point has not yet been reached. For now, in their view, a paper and pencil assessment of “what students know and can do” is still fair, accurate, and valid. Eliminating the tools that readers normally have access to and use at least some of the time when reading on a computer, tablet, or mobile device does not pose a problem.

Figure 1. Two contrasting visions of 21st century literacy. Half of these photographs are from the NAEP Writing Report; the other half are from the Reading Report. Can you guess which are which? (Move your cursor over the image to see answers.)

As of next year, however, the Writing Assessment and Reading Assessment will no longer be the only NAEP literacy games in town. NAEP is currently developing a new assessment, the Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment, to be inaugurated in 2014. Among other things, it will contain questions and performance items pertaining to Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Students will be assessed for their ability “to employ technologies and media to find, evaluate, analyze, organize, and synthesize information from different sources” (p. 8).

In many ways, this new NAEP assessment looks like what could be the future of the Reading Assessment—a future that the authors of the Reading Assessment have so far refused or ignored. Consequently, it appears that—for a time, at least—we may have two different sets of NAEP data to turn to when we want to know how well U.S. students are reading. The NAEP Reading Assessment will tell us about students’ levels of proficiency with traditional print literacy. The NAEP Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment will tell us about their proficiency with the new literacies of ICT-enabled reading and learning. And this may be a very positive development. If nothing else, it may deepen our understanding of the idea that, today more than ever, reading and writing are non-unitary constructs (Duke, 2005).

Figure 2. Area 3 (“Information and Communication Technology”) of the NAEP Technology and Engineering Literacy Assessment contains five “sub-areas” in which students are assessed. Area B covers “information research.” Source: 2014 Abridged Technology and Engineering Literacy Framework.

References

Barone, D. (2012). Exploring home and school involvement of young children with Web 2.0 and social media. Research in the Schools, 19(1), 1-11.

Beach, R. (2012). Uses of digital tools and literacies in the English Language Arts classroom. Research in the Schools, 19(1), 45-59.

Duke, N. K. (2005). Comprehension of what for what: Comprehension as a nonunitary construct. In S. G. Paris & S. A. Stahl (Eds.), Children's reading comprehension and assessment (pp. 93-104). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kaiser Family Foundation. (2010). Generation M: Media in the lives of 8-to 18-year-olds. Menlo Park, CA: Kaiser Family Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.kff.org/entmedia/entmedia012010nr.cfm

Lenhart, A. (2012). Teens, smartphones & texting. Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Teens-and-smartphones.aspx

National Assessment Governing Board. (2010). Reading framework for the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Washington, DC: National Assessment Governing Board.

National Assessment Governing Board. (2010). Writing framework for the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Washington, DC: National Assessment Governing Board.

Rainie, L., Zickuhr, K., Purcell, K., Madden, M., & Brenner, J. (2012). The rise of e-reading. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & Family Life Project. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org

Paul Morsink is a doctoral student in Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University, morsinkp@msu.edu.

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