Engaging Digital Literacies
Belief Statements as Infographics
Created using Venngage
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Created using Venngage
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One of the culminating activities of our Coaching Practicum course is the creation of a one-page document to articulate central Coaching Belief Statements. In the past, this assignment has taken a traditional, text-based format. As we hoped for this document to serve an authentic purpose at participant sites, we wondered if a visual representation might better support these aims. Using a variety of different technology tools, our students created visually-appealing belief statement representations that pushed them to clearly and succinctly communicate their vision for coaching.
Multiliteracies Book Response Project
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For the past five years, I have taught a book response project that attempts to stretch traditional ELA boundaries by expanding notions of “text” and engaging students to think about meaning making through the multiple modalities provided through the format of podcasting (see Rozema, 2007 or Hicks, 2013 for examples). In middle, high school, and college settings, we have constructed podcasts as narrative book trailers and as persuasive reporting. But I found myself wondering about the limits of these projects and how they might be enriched through the lens of a multigenre project that allowed the digital texts to interanimate each other—especially those which might speak through different genres, modalities, and digital affordances/limitations. Thus emerged the Multiliteracies Book Response Project and the accompanying Digital Salon that features student work. Since implementing this project in my "Teaching ELA" methods course, I have collaborated with my students to present this project and led related workshops at a variety of venues including teaching conferences and district teacher-inservice days.
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Podcasting
I am very lucky to have recently contributed to a pedagogically creative and important new book exploring digital literacies in real teaching contexts. The book is titled Crafting Digital Writing and written by Troy Hicks, a professor at CMU and director of CMU's Chippewa River Writing Project. His book details not only ideas for composing texts across media and genres, but pays critical attention to the pedagogical decision making process that is essential to developing intentional use of educational technology in the classroom.
Chapter 5, Crafting Audio Texts, details some of the work and examples done by my students in creating podcasts. You can also listen to our EdTechTalk on Teachers Teaching Teachers to hear more about planning and implementing similar projects in your own classroom.
Chapter 5, Crafting Audio Texts, details some of the work and examples done by my students in creating podcasts. You can also listen to our EdTechTalk on Teachers Teaching Teachers to hear more about planning and implementing similar projects in your own classroom.
Student Work
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The Wolf Hunt, by Katie Turtle
This podcast was produced by one of my English 100 students in response to a persuasive research project. |
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Sold, by Jayne Holman
This podcast was produced by one of my English 311 students in response to a narrative YA book project. |
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Multimodal Essays
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Exploring Literacy in Action
This presentation from WCTE's 2014 fall conference highlights a remixed version of the traditional literacy autobiography created by students in the Secondary Teacher Education program at UW-Madison, one very similar to the vivid stories told through interviews in the essays written by Deborah Brandt in her book, Literacy and Learning. For this digital version, students were challenged to consider forms of multi-modal data collection as representation of their stories. Later, these stories were analyzed in terms of "sponsorship" as students critically reflect upon their literacy journeys and explore the role of identity and culture in literacy development. Student samples can be viewed on the C&I 313 page. |
Blogging
Homepage to our classroom Ning site
My students have created blogs using educational blog-specific sites (such as 21classes) to share poetry, a Ning social networking platform to respond to literature, and our school supported Moodle site to engage in research inquiry. Entries are written in response to important themes and questions raised within our units. They are also designed to target specific writing skills, such as including quotations to support arguments or refuting a counter-argument, to be used as a form of scaffolding for larger writing assignments that will utilize these skills at a later date. Finally, a key component of instruction has been blending learning across our digital classroom sites and our face-to-face classroom settings. This often takes place in the form of "Hit List" discussions, where we bring interesting posts and emerging conversations from our blog site into the classroom.
Publishing Digital Portfolios
One of the greatest affordances of Web 2.0 technology is the use of immediate and authentic audiences for publishing student creations. Through the use of digital portfolios, my students have been able to share their writing and multimedia projects with a wide-ranging audience. Digital portfolios can be created using any version of web publishing tools. A few specific tools my students have used include: Google Sites, Wix, Weebly, and Wikispaces.
In English 10B, students created portfolios to showcase their work throughout the semester, as well as to see and learn from peer work. Specific projects included partner-created podcasts for independent reading pages, creative writing related to Catcher in the Rye, and an Academic Vocabulary page documenting the use of key terms throughout our literary endeavors.
In English 10B, students created portfolios to showcase their work throughout the semester, as well as to see and learn from peer work. Specific projects included partner-created podcasts for independent reading pages, creative writing related to Catcher in the Rye, and an Academic Vocabulary page documenting the use of key terms throughout our literary endeavors.
Graphic Writing
Bit Strips in the Classroom:
This past week in my Language & Literacy in Elementary Content Areas course we discussed the multiple forms that text can take. We discussed different genres of digital text, from podcasting to digital book covers and graphic representations, and the potential for not only engaging students but providing opportunities for them to see, understand, and respond in new ways–beyond the linear formatting of printed text. Referencing Troy Hick’s new book Crafting Digital Writing, we used the MAPS approach to consider the features of craft present in a variety of digital and multimodal projects. We then put our discussion into practice as students crafted their own comics as a form of reading response.
The Process
Typically, we begin our class with a freewrite journal entry to focus thinking and allow time to reflect upon and synthesize important ideas from our readings. To fully embrace the topic at hand, I decided to use BitStrips for Schools as an alternative form of opening reflection. It was easy and free to create a class and student accounts, and using the tool required no formal explanation of how to get started. Rotating and answering individual questions was enough explanation, as students used their peers to troubleshoot many of the early questions around navigation.
For the activity, I wrote a series of reflection questions based on our readings (just as I usually do for written responses). Then, I asked students to respond in the form a of a BitStrip comic, for which they were only given 20 minutes to create.
The Prompt
In response to the article Hicks, T., & Turner, K. H. (2013). No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait. English Journal, 6, 58–65.
The authors begin by highlighting some common woes around teaching for digital literacies–or really the lack thereof. Did any of these common practices resonate with you or bring back “fond” memories of your own experiences?
Graphic Writing Reactions
Overall, students were very engaged and had fun during this activity. A few students were unable to use BitStrips on their tablets and instead drew comics on paper. The biggest challenge seemed to be the way students were forced to rethink their thinking. Whereas during a typical freewrite students are encouraged to write about whatever “pops into their heads,” constructing a graphic representation required greater focus and clarity of the idea to be represented. Students mentioned the need to pare down their thoughts to the most essential level–then consider what that would look like both in regards to mixing image and words and the limitations represented by the tool (ie: which background pictures were available, how much space they had, etc). While maybe not the most conducive format for brainstorming, we could see how this would be useful for demonstrating relationships between characters or concepts, creative storytelling, explaining content understandings, or even as vocabulary activities. The one thing students did need more of was time–20 minutes was not nearly enough and not everyone was able to finish. But now that we’ve spent time both reading and constructing graphic stories, it definitely has broadened the range of what constitutes constructing meaning in the classroom.
This past week in my Language & Literacy in Elementary Content Areas course we discussed the multiple forms that text can take. We discussed different genres of digital text, from podcasting to digital book covers and graphic representations, and the potential for not only engaging students but providing opportunities for them to see, understand, and respond in new ways–beyond the linear formatting of printed text. Referencing Troy Hick’s new book Crafting Digital Writing, we used the MAPS approach to consider the features of craft present in a variety of digital and multimodal projects. We then put our discussion into practice as students crafted their own comics as a form of reading response.
The Process
Typically, we begin our class with a freewrite journal entry to focus thinking and allow time to reflect upon and synthesize important ideas from our readings. To fully embrace the topic at hand, I decided to use BitStrips for Schools as an alternative form of opening reflection. It was easy and free to create a class and student accounts, and using the tool required no formal explanation of how to get started. Rotating and answering individual questions was enough explanation, as students used their peers to troubleshoot many of the early questions around navigation.
For the activity, I wrote a series of reflection questions based on our readings (just as I usually do for written responses). Then, I asked students to respond in the form a of a BitStrip comic, for which they were only given 20 minutes to create.
The Prompt
In response to the article Hicks, T., & Turner, K. H. (2013). No Longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t Wait. English Journal, 6, 58–65.
The authors begin by highlighting some common woes around teaching for digital literacies–or really the lack thereof. Did any of these common practices resonate with you or bring back “fond” memories of your own experiences?
- Counting Slides
- Use a Blog without Blogging
- Criticizing Digitalk
- Asking only questions that can be answered by a search engine
- Using “Cool” Technology to Deliver a Planned Lesson
Graphic Writing Reactions
Overall, students were very engaged and had fun during this activity. A few students were unable to use BitStrips on their tablets and instead drew comics on paper. The biggest challenge seemed to be the way students were forced to rethink their thinking. Whereas during a typical freewrite students are encouraged to write about whatever “pops into their heads,” constructing a graphic representation required greater focus and clarity of the idea to be represented. Students mentioned the need to pare down their thoughts to the most essential level–then consider what that would look like both in regards to mixing image and words and the limitations represented by the tool (ie: which background pictures were available, how much space they had, etc). While maybe not the most conducive format for brainstorming, we could see how this would be useful for demonstrating relationships between characters or concepts, creative storytelling, explaining content understandings, or even as vocabulary activities. The one thing students did need more of was time–20 minutes was not nearly enough and not everyone was able to finish. But now that we’ve spent time both reading and constructing graphic stories, it definitely has broadened the range of what constitutes constructing meaning in the classroom.