by Nicole Timbrell and Jenny Power

Every class consists of enthusiastic and reluctant recreational readers. Online book clubs provide a new way for teachers to use the enthusiasm of engaged readers to influence those who are indifferent towards reading. We (Nicole Timbrell and Jenny Power), two Sydney-based secondary school teachers, combined our professional strengths, as English classroom teacher and teacher librarian respectively, and set out to enhance our students' engagement with recreational reading by adopting online book clubs. We supplemented traditional reading promotion strategies with online book clubs hosted by Good Reads and Inside A Dog, to develop greater interest in recreational reading. By structuring our classes around these online tools, we extended the scope of our role as enabling adults  to provide a stimulating reading environment that reached beyond the walls of the classroom.

Both Good Reads and Inside A Dog provide extensive databases of fiction and non-fiction which allow users to access book covers, blurbs, reviews and ratings for each book. Users create a profile and add books to their "online shelves" as a record of their past, current and future reading patterns. Teachers are then able to construct groups within these websites and invite their students to become part of the class book club. By adopting the model of social networking sites, both Good Reads and Inside a Dog allow users to become online "friends" in order to view one another’s profiles and share reviews and recommendations. The promotion of shared reading experiences among peers, and the ability of students to gain reading ideas and motivation from the more enthusiastic and capable readers within the class were found to be the most appealing features of these websites.

We managed our online book clubs by asking students to:

• Construct profiles to display current, past and future reading choices
• Reply to discussion points posted on the online book club home page
• Set personal reading goals to extend their repertoire and display these on their profile
• Write book reviews 
• Read other students’ book reviews to make and receive recommendations
• Use the search functions of the website to seek recommendations for future reading

Benefits for students participating in these online reading communities include:

• Increased enthusiasm and inspiration to read books their peers had enjoyed
• An ability to better locate and select books for their interest and ability
• Improved knowledge of the etiquette of online communication

Benefits for teachers include the ability to:

• Monitor all students’ reading progress and keep a record for use during discussions with students and parents
• Personalise recommendations and provide individual suggestions for future reading
• Construct closed online reading communities which enable younger students to communicate in a moderated environment
• Set authentic writing tasks due to the publication of reviews and discussion posts to a real audience in a "live" online space

Nicole Timbrell is an English teacher (Grades 7-12) at Loreto Kirribilli, in Sydney Australia.

Jenny Power is a teacher librarian at Loreto Kirribilli, in Sydney Australia. 

Nicole and Jenny share an interest in adolescent literacy, online reading comprehension and new literacies and work together to incorporate ideas from these areas into the English classroom.

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

by Jen Scott Curwood

Learning is increasingly global, social, and multimodal. In school, students may use digital tools, including Prezi, Animoto, VoiceThread, and Glogster to engage in collaborative learning and to communicate their content knowledge. More than that, students’ learning may partially or fully take place in online environments. Consequently, I think we need to ask: What does learning look like in a digital age? What motivates young people to learn? What spaces and tools support critical thinking and collaborative learning?

To explore these questions, I draw on the concept of affinity spaces. According to James Paul Gee, these physical, virtual, and blended spaces facilitate informal learning where both newcomers and masters interact around a shared endeavor. Affinity spaces are spread across multiple sites, and can include in-person meeting spaces as well as online websites and social networking tools. In a recent article, Jayne C. Lammers, Alecia Marie Magnifico, and I updated this concept to further define nine key features of affinity spaces:

1. A common endeavor is primary.
2. Participation is self-directed, multi-faceted, and dynamic.
3. Portals are often multimodal.
4. Affinity spaces provide a passionate, public audience for content.
5. Socializing plays an important role in affinity space participation.
6. Leadership roles vary within and among portals.
7. Knowledge is distributed across the entire affinity space.
8. Many portals place a high value on cataloguing and documenting content and practices.
9. Affinity spaces encompass a variety of media-specific and social networking portals.

We argue that learning within affinity spaces is primarily self-directed and interest-driven. Moreover, there are multiple ways that people can participate within the space and explore their passion, whether it’s knitting, running, or traveling.

In my research, I’ve spent the past two years looking at how affinity spaces support young adults’ engagement with literature. As a former high school English teacher, I firmly believe that it’s important for youth to find a book (or an author or a genre) that speaks to them. I don’t want today’s students to equate literature with study guides and vocabulary quizzes. Rather, I want them to read something that changes how they think, how they feel, and how they see the world around them.

Through my research on The Hunger Games, I’ve talked to young adults around the world who love having choice in how, when, and why they respond to literature. Out of school, on their own time, these fans have read The Hunger Games trilogy and are avidly participating in the affinity space. What does this kind of learning look like?

• Through fan fiction, fans explore missing scenes and alternative points of view. To do this, they need to closely analyze the mentor text, understand characterization, and use dialogue as an important part of the plot. FanFiction.net features over 28,000 examples of Hunger Games fan fic.
• Through fan art, they can consider the characters, settings, and events. There are countless examples of Hunger Games fan art, including on DeviantArt and the maps of Panem.
• Through videos, they can storyboard, re-enact pivotal moments in the plot, and share on YouTube.
• Through games, they can closely analyze the text in order to authentically portray a character and engage in role plays, like The Hunger Games RPG.
• Through music, students can write lyrics, compose songs, and share them on Panem Radio.

In many ways, affinity spaces challenged traditional assumptions about the design of learning environments as well as the purpose of digital tools in content area learning. More than anything, I think affinity spaces offer us an idea of what learning truly looks like in a global world.

References: 

Gee, J. P. (2004). Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling. New York: Routledge.

Lammers, J.C., Curwood, J.S., & Magnifico, A.M. (2012). Toward an affinity space methodology: Considerations for literacy research. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 11(2), 44-58.

Jen Scott Curwood is a lecturer at the University of Sydney in Australia. Her website and blog are at jensc.org.

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

In November 2012, the Pew Internet Project published the first of three reports designed to explore teachers’ views of the ways today’s digital environment is shaping the research and writing habits of today’s middle and high school students as well as the instructional practices that teachers use in their classrooms. The study compiled data from two main sources, including 1) an online survey of more than 2,000 middle and high school teachers drawn from the Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) communities; and 2) a series of online and offline focus groups with middle and high school teachers and some of their students.

The first report, titled How Teens Do Research In The Digital World, builds on prior research that has shown just how deeply search engines, mobile devises, and other Internet technologies are woven into the lives of today’s adults and teens. Some of the most interesting findings from this first report include the following: 

• Over three-quarters of survey participants (77%) say the impact of the Internet and other digital technologies on students’ research habits is “mostly positive.”  Virtually all teachers (99%) reported that “the Internet enables students to find and use resources that would otherwise not be available to them” and the majority of teachers (65%) believe that “the Internet makes students more self-sufficient researchers who are less reliant on adult help.“ For example, one teacher commented on the most positive aspect of being able to conduct research online with the statement, “Students have quick access to some of the best available research online…and when they come across information they don’t understand…the Internet allows them to conduct, quick, tangential searchers to learn needed information in support of their primary search.” In addition, a majority of teachers “somewhat agree” or “strongly agree” that the internet and digital technologies encourage learning by connecting students to more resources about topics that interest them (31% “strongly agree,” 59% “somewhat agree”), enabling them to access multimedia content (24% “strongly agree,” 52% “somewhat agree”), and broadening their worldviews (23% “strongly agree” and 49% “somewhat agree”).
  
  
• However, the findings are not all positive.  In fact, the large majority of teachers also agree to some extent that “the amount of information available online today is overwhelming for most students” (83%) and that “today’s digital technologies discourage students from finding and using a wide range of sources for their research” (71%).  When asked what was believed to be the most negative aspect of students today being able to conduct research online, one teacher commented, “Same as the positive! Students have access to a seemingly endless amount of information…They don’t know how to filter out bad information, and they are so used to getting information quickly, that when they can’t find what they are looking for immediately, they quit.”   Another wrote, “Students have a hard time reading online for extended periods of time. They get distracted so easily with the computer screen as opposed to salient, extended reading in books/texts.”
  
  
• Notably, the majority of teachers (60%) agree with the idea that “today’s digital technologies make it harder for students to find and use credible sources of information.” Teachers are concerned that students are not skilled enough in thinking critically about or synthesizing the information they find online. In fact, 93% of those surveyed somewhat or strongly agreed with the statement “courses or content focusing on digital literacy must be incorporated into every school’s curriculum.”  Some of the essential skills that teachers indicated students need for the future included judging the quality of information (91%), writing effectively (91%) and behaving responsibly online (85%). However, there was less agreement among teachers when it came to deciding when these skills should be taught and by whom.
  
  
• Perhaps the most troubling finding is that for many of today’s students, research has become synonymous with the fast-paced short term process of “Googling” to locate just enough information to complete the assignment as opposed to a slower long-term process guided by intellectual curiosity and discovery. In follow-up focus group discussions, many teachers noted that the time constraints that today’s students face in their lives more generally have begun to impact the very nature of what many would consider as “doing research.”

To learn more about current approaches used to teach critical research skills as well as secondary teachers’ concerns about the broader impacts of digital technologies on their students, you can access the full report at http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Student-Research.

Julie Coiro is from the University of Rhode Island, jcoiro@mail.uri.edu.

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

In the December 2012/January 2013 issue of Reading Today, Fenice Boyd wrote an insightful piece about diversity in the list of text exemplars in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Below are more authors to continue the sidebar that accompanied that article.

African American Writers: 

• Maya Angelou
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• Lucille Clifton
• Christopher Paul Curtis
• Sharon Draper 
• Ernest J. Gaines
• Eloise Greenfield
• Nikki Grimes
• Virginia Hamilton
• Angela Johnson
• Julius Lester 
• Frederick McKissack
• Patricia McKissack
• Walter Dean Myers
• Angela Davis Pinkney
• Connie Porter
• Lesa Cline Ransome
• Jewell Parker Rhodes
• Margaree King Mitchell
• Mildred Taylor
• Rita Williams-Garcia
• Jacqueline Woodson

African American Illustrators: 

• Ashley Bryan
• R. Gregory Christie
• Bryan Collier
• Floyd Cooper
• Donald Crews
• Leo Dillon
• Tom Feelings
• E. B. Lewis
• Christopher Myers
• Kadir Nelson
• Brian Pinkney
• Jerry Pinkney
• Sean Qualls
• James Ransome
• Synthia Saint James
• Charles R. Smith
• Javaka Steptoe
• Latino Writers
• George Ancona
• Alma Flor Ada
• Francisco X. Alarcón
• Julia Alvarez  
• George Ancona
• Anilu’ Bernardo 
• Carmen T. Bernier-Grand
• Diane Gopnzales Bertrand
• Sandra Cisneros
• Carmen Agra Deedy
• Margarita Engle
• Julia Ortiz Cofer
• Ina Cumpiano
• Francisco Jimenez
• Victor Martinez
• Guadalupe Garcia McCall
• Meg Medina
• Nicholasa Mohr
• Patricia Mora
• Nancy Osa
• Pam Muñoz Ryan
• Gary Soto
• Ana Veciana-Suarez
• Latino Illustrators
• George Ancona
• Robert Casilla
• Joe Cepeda
• Raul Colon
• David Diaz
• Lulu Delacre
• Enrique Flores-Galbes
• Carmen Lomas Garza
• Susan Guevara
• Rafael LopezYuyi Morales
• Sara Palacios
• Enrique O. Sanchez
• Duncan Tonatiuh
• Eric Velasquez

Asian and Pacific Island American Writers: 

• Debjani Chatterjee
• Ying Chang Compestine
• Demi
• Chen Jiang Hong
• Cynthia Kadahota
• Marie Lee
• Thanhha Lei
• Grace Lin
• Lenore Look
• Adeline Yen Mah
• Ken Mochizuki
• An Na
• Lensey Namioka
• Linda Sue Park
• Yoshiko Uchida
• Janet Wong
• Lisa Yee
• Wong Herbert Yee
• Lawrence Yep
• Ed Young

Asian and Pacific Island American Illustrators:

• Yan Nascimbene
• Alan Say
• Ed Young
• Native American Writers
• Sherman Alexie
• Joseph Bruchac
• Michael Dorris
• Louise Erdrich 
• Cynthia Leitich Smith
• Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve
• Gayle Ross

Native American Illustrators: 

• Shonto Begay
• Christopher Canyon
• Murv Jacob
• George Littlechild
• Leo Yerxa
• Arab American Writers
• Randa Abdel-Fattah
• Ibtisam Barakat
• Hena Khan
• Naomi Shihab Nye
• Marjane Satrapi

Reference:

Galda, L., Sipe, L., Liang, L., LA, and Cullinan, B. (2013). Literature and the Child (8th edition). Beverly, MA: Wadsworth Publishing.

This article is an addendum to an article from the December 2012/January 2013 issue of Reading Today. IRA members can read the interactive digital version of the magazine here. Nonmembers: join today!

by Janice Friesen

One of the most prevalent buzzwords in education today is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). In the United States, many argue that schools are not turning out enough people, especially women, who are equipped with STEM skills. To address the issue, educators at the University of Texas Elementary School decided that STEM was so important that they actually created a position called the STEM teacher. The students go to STEM class just like they go to any special classes such music, art, or PE.

But when STEM becomes so important, one begins to wonder what happens with reading or text literacy? Does instruction in literacy skills fall by the wayside in the wake of the growing emphasis on STEM skills? In this post, I share two sets of observations about interesting practices that lead me to think that when STEM skills are taught correctly, they may actually help foster success in reading as well.

1. SCRATCH

At the University of Texas Elementary School, STEM class students in third and fourth grade are creating programs using SCRATCH. Scratch is a program created by MIT to help children learn computer programming skills. The application is very powerful and yet very simple for children to use. Students write sections of code designed to tell a cartoon character what to do on the screen. While creating these projects, the students practice many reading skills that appear to transfer to their practices when picking up a book.

The most obvious of these reading skills is sequencing. When students use programs like SCRATCH, they learn to think carefully about what needs to happen first, second, and third – often by writing out or drawing a storyboard that shows what they are planning to create. In turn, these sequencing skills transfer over to aid reading comprehension using similar processes.

2. TO GOOGLE, OR NOT TO GOOGLE

Another class at this school is working on a very interesting year-long project. Second grade math and science students are learning that although just about everything can be “Googled,” this may not always be the best strategy. These students are discovering that sometimes reading a book or talking to an expert is a better way to find out something. To inform their decisions, students use a bulletin board divided into two sections: one side is labeled “Googleable” and the other side is labeled “Not Googleable.”

During the school year, students begin each of their thematic units by learning about a problem, asking questions, and trying to find answers. They start out by writing their question on sticky notes and then they place their question on what they believe to be the correct side of the bulletin board. Once they have specific questions, they begin looking for answers. Sometimes their search involves finding a book and other times it involves doing an experiment or talking to an expert.

This is another example of STEM teaching that leads to text literacy. While engaged in these activities, students become fascinated with non-fiction books because they are curious about what they can find out from them. They are motivated to read articles online and in journals and newspapers that are too difficult for them. They are actively reading for meaning, so they eagerly seek help when they need it. They do not skip past words they do not understand, which might cause them to gloss over the big ideas. Often, they read with a parent or other adult who can bring things to a level that they can understand.

Recently, students at the school performed quite well on their mid-year benchmark tests in reading. Their performance caused me to wonder: Could the emphasis on STEM skills have anything to do with that? I think the question is worthy of further consideration as we move forward with a focus on developing STEM skills as part of the elementary school curriculum.

To learn more about what is happening with second graders at The University of Texas Elementary School, read their blog.

Janice Friesen is a self-employed teacher. Her business I’m not a Geek.com helps people to be successful using technology. Her searchable blog http://helpimnotageek.blogspot.com offers tips for successful use of technology.

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