A successful case study in teaching literacy with technology

Barone, D. & Wright, T.E., (2008). Literacy instruction with digital and media technologies, The Reading Teacher, 62(4), 292-302.


This is one teacher's experience of using laptops in his fourth-grade classroom demonstrates successful approaches to teaching with technology. Todd, the second author teaches at Fernley Elementary, a rural Nevada elementary school with about 565 students. In order to gain an understanding of what learning is like in this classroom, it is shared from a narrative centered perspective of a student, Michale, to bring the use of technology as a tool to life.

Routines in Michael's Literacy Instruction

As soon as Michael entered his classroom, he takes out his laptop to check the class webpage and pick up files that his teacher has prepared for the day, including learning centers, writing prompts, graphic organizers, digital worksheets, URLs, media files, or corrected work. He then synchronized his class calendar with the teacher's so he has the up-to-date homework and event schedule. Then, he checks to see what the morning sponge is (an activity to keep students engaged as Todd checks in with individual student). This activity, along with the class webpage, demonstrate teh hybridity evident in new literacy documents, where students use word processing, drawing, or music in a single document. (Lemka, 1998)

The teacher leads the class through a short lesson on a reading comprehension or vocabulary strategy. When the story is completed, Michael spends a substantial part of their literacy block arranged in a Seat-Center-Circle organizational structure, where technology is integrated throughout the first two parts in which students work independently. In Michale's case, he does one of the three things: respond to a writing prompt on his computer that is directly related to the story that day; complete a digital practice sheet or worksheet; or a book study where multiple titles of books related to the theme of the core program are offered.

During breaks, students can stay in classroom and engage in non-instructional activities, which is particularly enjoyable for those who do not have internet access at home.

Differentiated Literacy Instruction

It is expected for Todd to prepare students for high-stakes assessment, like the other teachers, therefore, students shifted to a differentiated literacy instruction, written. He has students read articles from the KidBiz website and then complete the thought questions which are questions or written prompts related to one article that call for students to use information from what they have read to write a constructed response, very similar to criterion-referenced test constructed response questions. Then, he leads students i a discussion about the writing traits, ideas and content before they actually start writing and confers with individuals about their writing and how to improve it while students are writing, which demonstrates the movement from traditional literacy practice, such as reading a book, to new literacy through web writing.

End of the Day Routines:
Michael picks up his homework from the server and tucks his laptop into his backpack, getting ready for out-of-school learning.

Do new technologies result in student learning?

Corio (2005) indicated that there were improvements noted in comprehension when teachers were give instruction in new technology use. Warschauer (2006) also documented gains in motivation, writing competency, and critical thinking when laptops were used in the classroom. However, the biggest hurdle when using new technology in the classroom is that most assessments evaluate student's performance on their traditional literacy and content knowledge. Teachers at Fernley routinely examine the assessments that students complete, both formative and outcome, and then refine their instruction. Since 2002, Fernley has made AYP (adequate yearly progress) each year and during 2006-7, they qualified as a high achieving school for the growth in students who reached benchmark criteria.

It's encouraging to see it happen at Fernley successfully taking students on the journey of new literacy through technology. It takes not only the fund and support from the principal/school. The more important issue lays on teachers' knowledge and attitudes about new literacy and the use of technology. In other words, helping teachers understand the advantages of using technology in their classroom and providing them professional training in the use and application of technology in classrooms are on top priority. As Dr. Schmidt and Denise mentioned in class last week, it has been found that students surrounded by new literacy instruction do not do worse in traditional assessments, which I think is critical. This at least has won us a ticket to bring technology into our classrooms. What we need to do now it to continue trying until we find ways for technology to take our students performs better, both in traditional as well as in real life assessments!

One word of note, this article is actually long. I chose to show Michael's typical day because the example speaks for itself in establishing new literacy among students through technology. If you are interested in reading the whole article, I can send you the file.

The missing piece of the technology integration course

Sosa, T. (2009). Visual Literacy: The missing piece of your technology integration course. TechTrends, 53(2), 55-58.


The author, Teri Sosa, discovered this missing piece through her redesign of an undergraduate instructional technology lass for preservice teachers. The purpose of this course was to teach how to use technology to design and enhance instruction, including both training in technology skills and instruction on how to apply technology to the classroom in a meaningful way, pretty much like our CI 201. The list of technology competencies includes a newsletter project, a PowerPoint project (including sound and video), a grade book project, a web quest project, and a portfolio web page. She found that students demonstrated mastery of skills and were able to translate these skills into projects that enhances instruction, however, "confusing and inconsistent visual cues of class-crated products often made navigation difficult." (p56) In other words, the products do not "look good!"

Realizing that students had done everything that they were asked to do, Sosa recognized that one important element was left out and additional instruction on "visual literacy" should be included in pedagogy, including balancing of images and text on a page, use of fonts, displays fo word art, color, selection of applicable images, and appropriate spacing. Experimenting with an action research approach that involves five steps covering the principles of visual design and analysis and comparison between pre- and post-instruciton products, Sosa found that students' products "look better" after receiving visual literacy instruction. One additional interesting result was the change in students' attitude toward their own work. The evidence was that students exchanged their URLs for their portfolio web pages and forwarded them to family and friends. The results of this study indicate that visual literacy truly is the missing piece of many technology integration course. Sosa stated that students in her experiment course produced work that was more usable and more professional looking when they attended to visual design principles. She also mentioned that the benefit of introducing design principles lies beyond the implementation, but in teaching students to consciously attend to the visual as an important element as well as to inspect visuals with a critical eye.

I personally agreed with Sosa in terms of including visual literacy in instruction, which will definitely enhance the products students produce to a more appealing level where they can be actually used in classroom. Teachers, who have gone through the complete production process, will understand better the advantages as well as the difficulties students might encounter in the process. Moreover, being able to show their own works puts in the same seat as students, which help build the collaboration and learning community mode, definitely a project based learning approach. I think it is worth some efforts and class time for instruction on visual literacy, which students can apply beyond classroom after all.

New Literacy? or Not?

Dr. Schmidt's comments about new literacy inspired me to look further in this subject. I have been working on one project for a literacy class where I conduct a discourse analysis in the differences between written text and spoken language. An extract about the term, digital storytelling, was extracted from the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website (hosted by University of Houston College of Education) for comparison with three interviews describing the same topic. Those three speakers are graduate students from TESL/AL/ALT program of English Department, of whom two are native speakers and one L2 speakers, therefore, considered high proficiency speakers. Upon the preliminary analysis, the spoken discourse are found to be filled with pauses, fillers, repetitions, false starts and discontinuity in thoughts, single clauses and syntactic fragments whereas the written text is well organized and constructed with grammatically accurate complete sentences, which is due to the nature of how two sets of discourse were produced. The discourse analysis confirms the existence of the linguistic differences between the two different modes of language, which I would really love to share with the students of the CI 201 Lab hoping to help them understand the characteristics and see the needs to improve their written language and style. Grading their first assignments got me wandering if they are aware of the fact that written literacy differs from spoken literacy. Nowadays with so much socializing for the young generation takes place in texting and chatting contexts where they practically write what they would say, therefore, the differences between spoken and written discourse may not always be obvious. Fang (2008) also pointed out that young generation can’t tell the difference between oral and written discourse because they are used to text and chat. Furthermore, according to Thompson (2009), 38% of the writing that Stanford students did took place outside of the classroom, in other words, life writing. Maybe technology has pushed us on the road to new literacy. That is to say, the only place where the differences between written and spoken discourse are significant is in schools (Crowhurst 1999). However, I agree that students need to gradually “reconstitute their lexical grammar in the more abstract written mode” (Unsworth 1994) to meet the written literacy standard of academic works. It is obvious that, with the practice of students’ new literacy with technology, it will take them some time to become competent in handling both the production and the comprehension of written language. What's important is that teachers are aware of the differences, so they are in a better position to offer support and help to their students. As Perez (2004) puts it, “When teachers can see the strategies that children are using to interact and make sense of print and when those strategies can be viewed within the context of a natural, ordered, developmental process, teachers can support, reinforce, and provide a context for the continued development of these processes. “ (p 71)

References
Crowhurst, M. (1994). Language and learning across the curriculum. Scraborough, ON: Allyn and Bacon Canada.
Fang, Z. (2008). Going beyond the Fab Five: helping students cope with the unique linguistic challenges of expository reading in intermediate grades. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 51 (6), 476-487.
Perez, B. (2004). Writing Across writing systems. In Perez, B. (Ed.), Socialcultural contexts of language and literacy (57-75). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Thompson, C. (2009). Clive Thompson on the new literacy. Retrieved September 11, 2009 from http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson.
Unsworth, L. (1999). Developing critical understanding of the specialized language of school science and history texts: A functional grammatical perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 42 (7), 508-521.

Modeling the TPACK Framework

Our class last Wednesday has set one terrific example of a class that is conducted in the TPACK framework! Instead of lecturing about it, Dr. Schmidt walked the walk adopting a constructivist approach where students play active and critical roles in making contribution to the knowledge generated and the learning occurred in classrooms. The three major elements of TPACK framework have been thoroughly planned and executed in instruction and I walked out of the classroom with confidence that the goal of understanding the TPACKI framework is absolutely achieved, which motivates me to get on with the revision of one paper about applying digital storytelling in language classroom within the TPACK framework for publication. I would like to extend my personal thanks to Dr. Schmidt. Solute!

Adventure in Literacy Wonderland

Have a safe ride!

Literacy is my theme of my Fall 2009 because I'm taking two literacy related classes, which gives me the opportunity to take a closer look at the subject and to be honest, it's been interesting and inspiring to some extent. The fundamental question raised was what exactly literacy is. From the second language learning perspective, I find it easy to define because learning and teaching English in an EFL environment,which is where I have been, has made it simple where English literacy happens in classrooms, which is an isolated and decontextualized environment. However, I have always had the feeling that there's something missing in the picture. Students do well in the exams, including those standardized tests, such as TOEFL and GRE, however,they found themselves lost win an English speaking environment, which has happened to most cases. I have come to realize that what's missing is the social and cultural aspects of literacy in the curriculum. Literacy evolves with time and generations and across societies and cultures, which I think is best described in our reading this week, "literacy is described as a 'moving target' that will continually change according to what society expects from a literate person" (Kinzer & Leander, 2003, p547, cited in Schmidt & Gurbo, ). In results, we, as teachers/educators, are responsible to keep ourselves on top of the latest and our students in touch with different faces of literacy, especially for EFL language learners. I can't wait to take on this adventure in the literacy wonderland where I will explore the subject from different aspects and hopefully discover ways to help my students become literacy both in classrooms as well as in the real world.

Theme of Fall 2009

Technology in Literacy- PK to 6? Or university level?

I have had worries that I won’t fit in this class because it is specified that this class is for PK-6 teachers and my target audience has always been EFL/ESL (English as foreign/second language) students at university level, which might make the direction of my thoughts and opinions deviate from the class. However, I have decided to stay in this class. It’s not that the worry has disappeared, but I felt like the discussion and the hands on activities motivate me to think harder and most importantly, outside the box. Even though technology applied for different level literacy classes should vary, I realized in the last two weeks that the foundation and the baseline are the same and some of the technology/software can be applied to all level literacy classes as long as the pedagogy content has been thought through and justified. Therefore, I have decided to take on the challenge from this perspective, which in fact is exciting. Wordle is one good example. Different uses of Wordle for PK-6 literacy classes have been identified in class, however, it can also be used as a tool to investigate the uses of vocabulary in writing classes at university level. Wordle makes it easy to identify the frequency of target vocabulary appeared in writing assignments of each individual and of the class, which serves as a check point that helps students understand their writing better and teachers learn about students’ status of vocabulary uses. Another example is the use of Webspiration. It definitely can be a useful tool for PK to 6 classes, yet, it can also serve the purpose for university level students, speaking from my personal experience. I have used Webspiration as a pre-writing tool to guide my students through their writing assignments. On this note, people use Webspiration to create their mind map by starting a chart most of the time. However, it can also work the other way around, which is very effective as well. Students can choose to start by writing down the outline, which then can be turned into a mind map in Webspiration. I believe there will more yet to come in class, which will challenge my creativity in pedagogy content knowledge and help me learn and grow. I so much look forward to it!