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Notes from “Pre-Service English Teachers and Web 2.0: Teaching and Learning Literacy with Digital Applications”

Luke Rodesiler and Lauren Tripp, University of Florida

• Helping pre-service teachers re-imagine what it means to be literate
  • Tools including VoiceThread, PBWorks, and Xtranormal
  • Theoretical framework including social constructionism, interactional elements of effective literacy instruction and how texts are constructed
• Primary research questions:
  • What understandings of technology do prospective English teachers receal when they are describing their technology use in public school classrooms?
  • How do prospective English teachers understandings of technology change as they become familiar with Web 2.0 applications?
  • How do prospective English teachers understand the role of Web 2.0 applications in teaching?
• Data sources:
  • Surveys with open and closed ended questions to gain understandings of their technology use in the classroom
  • Classroom observations of student teachers in context
  • Artifacts of student work, including assignments and reflections
  • Focus group interviews at the end of the semester
• Data analysis
  • Quantitative analysis of survey data
  • Qualitative analysis of classroom observations, student work, and focus group interviews
• Findings
  • Student teachers were using technology in narrowly conceived ways
    • Accessing web content to search for and/or enhance lessons
    • Using Power Point to present information
    • “When I was in my internship, YouTube and Google was all I thought of using…”
  • Understanding how Web 2.0 technologies could foster collaboration and support teaching and learning where enhanced
    • Recognized collaborative tools
    • Their own facility with technology
    • Own discourse about teaching
    • Future organization and distribution of student work
  • Collaborative effort — how this experience could work as a method for professional learning
  • Made connections between the affordances of Web 2.0 applications and literacy practices valued in English language arts
    • Potential for student collaboration, revision of student writing, engaging students
• Conclusions
  • Many students were unaware, yet were nudged toward more nuanced views of technology, texts, and literacy practices
  • We saw a shift in perception from “web-for-consumption” to “web-for-production” (using wikis, for instance)
• Concerns
  • Lack of computer and internet access in schools
  • Expanding definitions of literacy
  • Personal use of technologies vs. professional use
• Further questions
  • How can we support pre-service teachers in recognizing the availability of the tools
  • How can we expand their notions of literacy outside of technology
  • How can we help them build their personal learning network

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Doug Hartman, from MSU’s Literacy Achievement Resource Center, spoke at MRA 2010 on “The Future of Reading and Writing at the Present Time: Preparing Students and Teachers for the 21st Century.”

Update – 3/30/10 – Embedded Slideshare Presentation

He outlined four shifts that are happening as we continue to think about new literacies and technologies:

• Shift 1: The technologies students use for reading and writing are changing
  • Student whose experience with Alice in Wonderland, and her viewing of the new version from Tim Burton
    • International Children’s Digital Library — she is able to see the original version of Alice in Wonderland as it was printed
    • Finds a 1903 silent movie version of Alice in Wonderland
  • Kaiser Family Foundation Report suggests that teens are reading more online now than they are reading offline
    • 64% of American teens are online creators
    • 35% of girls who are online are blogging, 20% of boys; about 50% read blogs
  • NYT story on a reading family
  • How students apply to college — students using digital videos to create a college application “essay” (from NPR)
  • 6000 year history of literacy in just a few minutes (note: technologies don’t just go away… some features may return over time; e.g. “scrolling” and “tablets”)
    • finger writing in the earth
    • sticks and brushes
    • hieroglyphics
    • clay tablet
    • scroll (moving from clay to scroll was a dazzling shift at that time — length and durability)
    • codex/book
    • now we are moving from the book to the screen
  • Medieval Help Desk Video
  • Linguistic texts to semiotic texts (images, audio, etc)
    • The balance is tipping towards semiotic texts
    • Semiotic texts are increasingly digital
    • Digital texts are ever more online
    • Reading and viewing across these texts
  • Questions to pose:
    • Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of technologies that our students use?
• Shift 2: The strategies that students use to read and write these texts are changing
  • Looking for information to supplement what they are able to find in textbooks and is able to find so much more
    • Reading the book, looks up words he doesn’t know, and may use a secondary source
    • Reading online requires different strategies — moving from one web page to another, back to the original, and one way leading on to another; the potential for his comprehension to be expanded is enormous
    • This second type of comprehension places a higher demand on people’s cognitive abilities than typical book reading
  • Types of knowledge for reading: declarative, procedural, and conditional; once online, also adding identity, locational, and goal knowledge. Read more on his Slideshare document. (NOTE: He said that the slides from this presentation will be posted there later today.)
  • Do our curriculum, standards, and assessments include the range of strategies  that our students use?
• Shift 3 and 4 — ran out of time in the session, but “moment to moment instruction” and “professional development” are the third and fourth shifts

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Earlier this month, I blogged about some sessions from the Wisconsin State Reading Association on the NWP Walkabout Posterous site and I am (finally) cross-posting them here with links to the original posts… sorry for the delay!

2/7/10 - Cinch from Coiro and Kajder

I really enjoy it when new technologies challenge me.

Honest…

Figuring out how to embed a Cinch into a Posterous, as strange as that all sounds, has been a challenge. I thought that Posterous only allowed posting from email, as that is how the technology had been introduced to me. That was my mindset, and I was struggling because I asked Paul how to post a Cinch and he said it couldn’t be done via email. I scratched my head as I worked from my iPhone, moving between Cinch, looking at Posterous on Safari, and reading Paul’s tweets… why not?

So, Gmail wouldn’t let me do it and, until I finally logged into Posterous, I couldn’t figure out how my NWP colleagues had done it. I didn’t see a “Publish to Posterous” button on Cinch, nor did I realize I could compose a “traditional” blog post through Posterous until I did some searching around today after Paul told me it could be done. Couldn’t figure out how at first, but I finally figured it out. It all goes to show that even the techies amongst us have our conceptions of how new literacies work challenged from time to time.

At any rate…

On to the real reason I am writing this post today — the Cinch recordings of Julie Coiro and Sara Kajder speaking directly to an NWP audience about their latest thinking related to reading and writing in digital environments, straight from interviews that I snagged with each right after their presentations at the Wisconsin State Reading Association Conference last week. Thanks to both of them for sharing their time and expertise.

Enjoy!

(Additional note: even though the Cinchs are appearing as Flash embeds in my web browser, they don’t seem to be showing up when I actually post this. So, here are stable URLS for each, too. Coiro: http://www.cinchcast.com/hickstro/wsra-2010/21082 and Kajder: http://www.cinchcast.com/hickstro/wsra-2010/21096

2/5/10 - Notes from Sara Kajder’s Session on Bringing the Outside In

1. Instructional challenge – find readers. Engage reluctant readers to create a book trailer via digital movie making in three class periods.

- examining movie trailers and dissecting them
- discussing how to craft a trailer for the book
- creating the book trailer in movie making program (or via the sims and using Jing to create a video)
- “Dr. Kajder, I don’t like to read and write, but I like to make movies… You tricked me!”

2. Instructional challenge – summarizing. Creating podcasts. What do you have to say about this book? It is a synthesis -you need to teach something to the other kids in the room. Then, the entire school votes to decide which podcasts go up on the school website.

- example of fifth graders podcasting about the six traits of writing

- in inviting other people into classroom literature circles via skype

- podcast with an expert (submarines in the American Revolution with Harvard Professor); listened to interviews on NPR as examples

- want to make kids “googleable” for the good, smart work that kids do (ala Bud Hunt), depends on where we save things and how they are archived

- creating visual “mentor text” via iMovie. Choose just a small portion of the text. Recite from the text (checking for understanding) and also thinking aloud with text-go-world connections. It is an assessment, but this is the least “assessy” assessment they have ever done.

- using delicious and diigo with kids to create their reader’s identity. This gives digital readers a way to hold on to texts and show what is important to them.

Many resources and ideas. We need to appreciate the ways in which kids work and play. How do we figure out a way to build curious readers?

Kajder’s “Promise into Practice” Wiki

Sent from my iPhone

2/5/10 – Notes from Julie Coiro’s Session in Internet Reading

Listening to Julie Coiro talk about “How Does Reading and Learning Change on the Internet? Responding to New Literacies” at WSRA 2010

Examing students’ reality of multiple and overlapping literacies – how can we capture some of that same excitement in schools?

She just cited Tom Freidman’s “The World Is Flat” as the source for the phrase “racing to the top.” I didn’t realize that, but sitting here next to Sara Kajder and we both agree that this makes the clear economic focus of RTTT

Online readers and offline readers are successful in different ways. What’s the difference?

1. Identifying important questions – yes, we have a curriculum to follow, but students can ask questions that they are curious about that will likely meet the objectives, too. For instance, why do cats cough up hairballs? As this moves into MS and HS, the questions become deeper and more substantial.

2. Locating information – for instance, finding a website bit then searching within it (can’t rely on a site’s navigation bar alone any more, espe ially with graphical interface). Teach kids to be flexible to take what they know about layout and design to seek out new info. Using kid’s search sites vs regular search engine. What about limited engines or visual searches like Kartoo? Tag clouds?

3. Evaluating Search Results – how many sites found? Who sponsors the sites? What sites may not be available in a few months? How can you tell, in the results, what search terms are used? What disadvantages would visiting the sites have?

– play a game with kids to make the number of search results go down (refining the search) of making it go up. Looking at the number to make it go up or down is a process of adding and subtracting words to refine.
– Teaching about context clues to help students to read URLs — why is it important to know who sponsors the site before you even view it? Do you make predictions when you read inthe Internet? We do so all the time with stories, sometimes in content area texts, and rarely online? Put a label on it — call it predicting, and help them know what they are doing? This can “take all the fun out of searching,” but if helps students pause to think. Need prior knowledge about URLs and how sites are housed. — prior knowledge if the topic used to be critical to comprehending texts, but know google can give you prior knowledge in a snap and bring you to that level.

4. Where do I read first? — am I on the homepage? Like a book walk, help students take the “brain steps” to preview a website. Who is the author?

Great ideas, had planned for two hours, but had to end!

Sent from my iPhone

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Tomorrow, I will be presenting two sessions at the Sessions at Wisconsin State Reading Association Conference. Here are descriptions of the sessions and the related presentations:

From School to Screen: Why Digital Writing Matters (9:30 – 10:45)

Without question, writing continues to change in the twenty-first century. Teachers, administrators, parents, and other stakeholders value the teaching of writing — and see that our very notion of what it means to be literate is evolving –  yet continue to wonder how best to teach writing in a digital age. Based on work with the National Writing Project, we will discuss practices that hold promise as we develop understandings of what it means to write digitally, create spaces for digital writing in our schools, and extend assessment practices that account for the complexities of writing in a digital world.

Creating Your Digital Writing Workshop (1:30 – 3:30)

Digital writing tools such as blogs, wikis, digital stories, and social networks can contribute to what you are already doing in your writing instruction as well as appeal to a new generation of students. Building on the principles discussed in the first session, we will explore how new ways of thinking about well-established practices in the writing workshop—student choice and inquiry, conferring on writing, examining author’s craft, publishing writing, and broadening our understandings of assessment—could be updated for the digital age. With examples of how to teach digital writing throughout, this session will help you create your digital writing workshop. Join the Ning!

For both of these presentations, I want to acknowledge and thank my many colleagues from the National Writing Project with whom I have been able to collaborate in my research, teaching, and professional development work.

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Image from www.lansingstatejournal.com

My friend and RCWP colleague, Marcus Brown, has been working for about a year to open the Village Summit in the house next door to his Lansing home. You can read about many of the trials and tribulations that Marcus, his wife, and everyone involved in creating the Village Summit have had to endure in this article from the Lansing State Journal.

In trying to figure out a way that I could help Marcus and his cause, he suggested that I spend some time with him and help develop a website for the center that highlights its services and activities. And here is where the power of  digital writing comes into the picture…

Marcus and I began talking about this last year and began a Google Site for his organization. As it does, time slipped by, we both neglected the website for a long while, and kind of forgot about it. But, when talking with him over breakfast in December, and trying to figure out how I could help, he began discussing all the ways in which we wanted to use a website to reach out to his community — people in his neighborhood helping with the Village Summit, other community organizations, the Lansing Mayor’s Office and City Council, and beyond. I was thinking about the software that he could use to compose this site, immediately moving my mind to the suite of tools that Google offers including Sites, Picasa, Maps, and Calendar. After working together for the better part of two hours, we updated the site, adding images, maps, and a calendar, not to mention a good deal of Marcus’s writing and poetry that show his passion for education and serving his community.

And, so, in less than two hours, the Village Summit had a (revised) website.

On the one hand, we could look at this as nothing remarkable. Yep, we have Google Sites and can insert plug-ins and, wow, doesn’t that make life easier for us when we make web pages.

Yet, in digging a little deeper and thinking about the socio-cultural, technical, and political literacy practices associated with how Marcus composed a site about a community center for a variety of audiences and purposes, I find the digital writing task in which the two of us were engaged to be quite fascinating. To be sure, even a few years ago, he could have created a similar site with a variety of web-based tools or software. It would have taken awhile, and he would have likely had to use a site like Geocities that put ads on his work (or buy a domain).

But, using this suite of Google tools, and having a specific set of purposes and audiences in mind, he was able to compose a multimedia text — a website that employs text, links to videos, images, and maps — to distribute his message. Composing community. All in about two hours. In less time than it used to take us to design, produce content for, and upload a basic website using Dreamweaver and FTP.

And, it’s free.

And, it’s collaborative, so others can add content.

And, it’s a public voice for a community that, even a few years ago may not have had the time or resources to develop a web-based message.

To me, as a teacher of digital writing, this was really an epiphany. Yes, of course I knew that anyone could hop online and make a site, or a blog, or a wiki, or a twitter account. Yes, I realized that our digital writing can be collaborative and shared widely. Yet, I didn’t think very clearly, until that day when Marcus and I met, about the power of digital writing — in really just a moment — to compose entire communities, to bring something into existence in ways that would have been difficult or impossible even a few years ago. I had heard of it happening with different tools, over time. But, in just under two hours, we were able to take what Marcus had started a year ago as a dream, and what we initially tried to capture on the web last summer, and brought them both together.

For me, watching Marcus connect his many literacy practices and personal passions to create this website show the heart of what it means to be multiliterate in a digital world.

Thanks, Marcus, for reminding me of it, and for all that you do to serve your community.

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After a wonderful week in Philly and while reflecting on my experiences at the NWP Annual Meeting, “Digital Is” Conference, and NCTE Convention, I was fortunate enough to engage with a Michigan colleague who, as a part of her master’s program, is doing an inquiry project on establishing her own digital writing workshop. She had picked up my book (thanks!) and then had some questions for me, specifically related to her teaching context. With her permission, I share excerpts of our email conversation here in hopes that it may be useful for some of you attempting to establish digital writing workshops in your own classrooms and schools. The exchange begins with her first question, and I have indented my responses for clarity.

1.  Access is my biggest issue.  Currently, I share a laptop cart of 20 with the whole school (about 220 kids).  I do have 5 computers in my classroom, but I am unable to sign out the cart on most days, leaving me one day a week (to compete with the whole school) to sign out the laptops.  I am currently dreaming and searching for grants to get more computers for my own classroom, but access continues to be an issue.  Not all of my students have access to computers or internet at home, and most aren’t able to use a computer during the school day.  (The competition to use one of the classroom computers can be pretty stiff, especially since many of my students have computer usage written into their IEP…  leaving all the others without class time access.)  How does one go “fully digital” without access?  Do I make blogging their weekly writing a requirement and then have them come in during lunch or after school?  Or do I wait on that part until I know everyone has fair access?

I am in a fairly fortunate position…  my class sizes are small.  But how much do I push the envelope?

You are welcome, and thanks for taking the next steps — I applaud your enthusiasm and professionalism. I look forward to hearing about your work.

Cross-posted on the Digital Writing Workshop Ning.



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Notes from “Integrating New Literacies into Classroom Practice and the Resulting Impact on Site Leadership”

NWP 2009 Annual Meeting

This session invited four teacher consultants/tech liaisons to discuss their personal experiences with technology and the ways in which these
experiences led to changes in their site’s work. Knowing two of these teachers through my work with NWP’s 2007 Tech Matters Institute, and
one as my wife and tech liaison for our site, I found the stories shared here very powerful. Each one of them talked about a key
technology and professional development experience that launched them into new work, both in their classroom and at their site.

• Shasta Looper, Upstate Writing Project
  • Used Voice Thread in her summer institute in 2008, then incorporated it into her classroom through the use of a persuasive writing assignment
• Paige Cole, Red Clay Writing Project
  • Experience at Tech Matters in 2007 which led to creation of tech team, the “Army of Dorkness”
  • Advanced institutes came from Tech Matters mini-grant
  • Learned iMovie and other technologies in support of classroom and site work
• Joe Conroy, NWP at Rutgers
  • Looking at the history of the writing project’s website over time; Joe’s history as webmaster
  • Use of Yahoo groups; began there many years ago and it has worked for us
  • But, the website didn’t filter into the site’s work — then attended Tech Matters in 2007
  • How can I use Web 2.0 in the classroom without having access to Web 2.0?
    • Podcasts were still accessible, use of NPR’s This I Believe and Audacity via Portable Apps
  • Shared work at site’s mid-winter writing conference through a technology strand and “Tech Thursday” workshop series
    • Topics for future Tech Thursdays
      • Bulletin boards for Socratic Seminars
      • Podcasting
      • Ignite
      • Voice Thread
      • Wikis
      • Blogging
  • The site has integrated technology into the core of “what we do.”
• Sara Beauchamp-Hicks, Upper Peninsula Writing Project and Chippewa River Writing Project
  • 14-year veteran special education teacher, TL for UPWP
  • Story about involvement in summer institute by organizing pictures in 2005 SI
    • Growth is not linear; there are all sorts of influences that impact your growth in technology use over time (created concept
      map/timeline with VUE and shared in Skim)
  • Site development at local level and through participation in the national network
    • Summer institute to annual meeting to advanced institutes next summer
    • Also incorporated outside funding from state professional organization grants to fund tech team, many of them TCs, in one school
  • Key Themes
    • Accessibility — trying new technologies and being willing to change; the issues are difficult for all of us in our own classrooms
    • Continuity — meeting regularly and sharing ideas and questions about tech use
    • Site Development — developing technology work at your site is a messy process
      • We are in a time where there is more questions than there are answers
      • You have to have patience and flexibility when you are in the tech world and with site development

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The Social Media Portfolio: Using Technology to Promote Meta-cognitive Skill Development

At NWP’s Digital Is

Rafi Santo, Amana Kaskazi, and Shonell Richmond

• Global Kids
  • 20 Years in existence and focusing on significant global issues
  • Issues: Local to global and global to local understanding
  • Leadership: Skills necessary to affect change
  • Technology: How does new media contribute to our mission of global citizenship; our mission to empower youth voice aligned well with the use of technology
  • Youth: We work with youth in a variety of contexts, both locally and from a distance through technologies and in virtual worlds
  • Afterschool: Need to overcome the stereotypes of afterschool technology programs that create “super geeks”; our students are not geeks, necessarily, but there is something much broader about how to use technology in these contexts
• Media Masters
  • Goals for addressing the challenges to media literacy
    • Giving students the means and skills to produce media who otherwise might not be able
    • Discussing ethical issues surrounding digital media production and participation
    • Promote active student reflection on skill development
  • Creating a “digital transcript“creating a portfolio with Voice Thread
    • Examining media use (music, web, etc)
    • Visualization, negotiation, and other key themes
    • Recognize the skill, utilize the skill, and enact the skill (Do it, recognize it, talk about it)
  • Discussion
    • Specific example of Harry Potter reading to discuss copyright, appropriation, and “whole life learning”
    • What can the assessment tell us — about students’ change in media literacy skills, attitudes, and abilities?
    • How can an assessment like this work in school contexts (very qualitative, not quantitative)?
    • How can we connect this to other academic skills?
    • Student preparation for portfolios — having earned the badges, it was easier to identify the project that connected to the skill, but then we had to add a reflection to it, and that was more difficult
    • Extending the assessments into different contexts; using this portfolio with meta-cognitive elements for other purposes, such as college admissions
    • Helping make explicit for young people the ways in which we are asking them to think
    • Power of ownership and the ability to hear someone’s voice, as well as the commitment behind the voice
    • How does having a framework help make the portfolio more powerful?
    • Using writing to teach critical thinking in different content areas

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