ISTE PLN

JOURNAL

Photo by Chandan Chaurasia on Unsplash

January 2020

Vol. 1, No. 1

Table of Contents

  1. From the Editorial Committee                                                        Page 2

  1. Literacy Education for a Post Text-dominant,  TikTok Infatuated World

by Mark Gura                                                                             Page 3

  1. Use text-to-speech readers to enhance secondary students’ access to

reading, listening, and viewing

by Lynn Shafer Willner and Kouider Mokhtari                                         Page 6

  1. Grammarly’s Tone Detector: Multimodal Literacy In Action

by Joe Hutcheson                                                                        Page 9

  1. Building MultiModal Text Sets & Building 21st Century Skills

by Michele Haiken                                                                        Page 11

  1. Starting Young

by Rob A. Burggraaf                                                                        Page 12

Are you interested in contributing to the next ISTE Literacy PLN Journal? We will be publishing four times a year and would love to include more voices in future editions. Please email Michele Haiken at michele@theteachingfactor.com with your submission topic and 50 word abstract with your idea. 

Contest . . . Win a $25 Amazon Gift Card

What should we name the ISTE Literacy PLN Journal? We are looking for a name for our journal. Email your title to  michele@theteachingfactor.com for a chance to win a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Winner will be notified via email on or before February 28, 2020.

                 

Welcome to a New Year and a new decade. Literacy, in all its forms has taken on multiple forms and formats. The ISTE Literacy PLN continually examines the depth of  literacy instruction across grade levels and content areas with this idea in terms of teaching, learning, and educational technology.  Reading, writing, speaking, and listening are the basis of all the content we teach and today, teaching is dominated by functional literacy. The leadership team for the ISTE Literacy PLN decided to bring back a quarterly newsletter with the intention of broadening our conversations about literacy today.

Our first issue for the new year addresses multimodal texts. Today we glean information in school and out of school not only from print texts, but visual, audio, digital, and virtual texts as well. Our access to information has expanded exponentially. Our intentions as educators is to help students navigate these texts and be critical consumers as well as creators of information and text.

This first edition of the ISTE Literacy PLN Newsletter consists of five articles with the idea to spark a discussion among the learning network and your colleagues. The first article in this edition is by our own editor, Mark Gura. Tik Tok is one of the hottest social media apps among young people and our students. Mark examines this app through the lens of literacy and what that means for teaching and learning of diverse texts.  Lynn Shafer Willner and Kouider Mokhtari write about text to speech extensions and apps as a doorway for students to access texts, they can be utilized for more than just writing and universal design learning. Joe Hutcheson looks at Grammarly’s tone detector as more than a writing tool to help our students’ literacy skills. Michele Haiken shares a multimodal text set she builds in her eighth grade English Language Arts classroom and how you can build your own for deep understanding. Without leaving out early learners, Rob A. Burggraaf writes about starting young with picture books to develop multimodal literacy.  Within each article, tools and strategies are provided to support and empower our students as literacy learners and creative communicators.

-- Michele L. Haiken & Mark Gura, Editorial Committee

Quote to Ponder

“Teachers should think about how we can redesign schools so we can have a healthy relationship devices—teach students to think and build the world using these devices, and how to interact with the world in intelligent, responsible, ethical ways.”

  • Jordan Shapiro

Literacy Education for a Post Text-dominant, TikTok Infatuated World

By Mark Gura (markgura@verizon.net)

Recently, I reviewed the NCTE’s position statement titled “Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age.” I found it to be thought provoking. The piece includes statements like “Literacy has always been a collection of communicative and sociocultural practices shared among communities. As society and technology change, so does literacy. The world demands that a literate person possess and intentionally apply a wide range of skills, competencies, and dispositions. These literacies are interconnected, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with histories, narratives, life possibilities, and social trajectories of all individuals and groups…”

On the one hand, I found the piece to be encouraging, bringing into focus the new and powerful ways we communicate ideas and feelings; Literacy now involves digital media use. But on the other, admittedly, my technology cured futurist’s interest and heart had me ‘loaded for bear’. I read the piece with antenna cocked for the term ‘text’, which to me indicates adherence to the most conservative, old guard understanding of Literacy.

Indeed, I was impressed with how the NCTE embraces the new media and technologies in what it considers to be a very contemporary and forward thinking take on the current nature of Literacy. I was left unsatisfied, though. Perhaps it’s my ever over-the-top view of things, but my feeling is that the piece doesn’t go nearly far enough. It seems to me that while text is only one variety of communications media, the piece ascribed to it more currency than it actually merits.

As I cruise through my world I realize that if we aren’t already fully living a “Post Text-dominant Literacy”, then we are racing toward one.

What’s Post Text-dominant Literacy? Simply stated, the state of people expressing and communication through language that no longer reflects absolute faith in the supremacy and omnipotence of text as the most effective and impactful manifestation of communication; a belief that that was universally held a mere decade ago.

We’ve moved on; and hopefully Education will embrace and accommodate this new understanding and find a new status and role for text in its universe.

What?

It’s true, look around; the communication that’s surrounding us consists of digital audio (the recent explosion of podcasting is a good example), digital video (Youtube rules!), digital images (Facebook, is a clear example of not only the power of images, but of their superior appeal and function for communication)… There’s more, of course, but just these three items that account for billions of exchanges between people daily are enough to paint a picture of how today’s humans are literate in a post text-dominant way.

This is not to say that text has disappeared or is going to disappear. On the contrary it is probably produced in greater volume than ever before. What I’m ranting about is text’s change in role; in status. Even old guard exponents of high value text, like the NY Times understand this. The Times does still put out a hard copy, text prominent, paper, but it’s business survives and grows and its manner of expression broadens and becomes richer in the paper’s online version, which mirrors the observations about Podcasting, Youtube, and Facebook, above.

Where does all of this leave Literacy Instruction in our schools? In need for some change, I’d say!

For one thing, if the world around our students is going to deeply and increasingly engage in literacy that makes use of other means than text, while there is no reason to stop teaching reading and writing in text, there is very good reason to teach the more recently and increasingly popular digital means of communication and expression. Schools should embrace the teaching and learning of digital media and its uses.

These media formats and applications are already in place in many classrooms, although most strongly in the guise of students’ passive consumption of content. In other words in the world of schools, a world in which hard copy texts are still present to a high degree, publishers as well as a number of hands-on educator users supplement and enrich hard copy materials with digital audio, video, and graphic media items. A good thing, but when viewed against the backdrop of the reality of the current state of the universe of Literacy;  realistically, a token effort.  

What’s very largely absent in the majority of classrooms is the creation of these items as the day in /day out work of learners. What’s actually done currently is that in all but the most advanced classrooms, on occasion students’ usual, routine work is set aside in favor of such work that is considered as a special project… OR, students work on such projects in their Technology Lab ‘minor class’ where authoring such media items may be done consistently, but is lamentably divorced from what is traditionally considered more important, core curriculum subject classes and their work.


How Kids Are Literate These Days

Recent youth technology use has been marked by much fascination and buzz around the things like the  hyper-popular app TikTok, which was the most downloaded app worldwide in the year of its release, 2018.  This trajectory of popularity continues.


TikTok’s appeal is its usefulness in what youth perceive as the legitimizing dimension of personal recognition through participation in digital media. Of course, it is inevitable, though, that individuals will emerge who put this remarkable resource to other, higher purposes.

TikTok’s popularity is a good example of how our world continues to gravitate toward other than text communication media. In a nutshell, TikTok enables its community of users to create, upload, and appreciate short video messages, as well as follow, message, comment, do all of the standard social media things, around them.

For one thing, the app is very easy to use with intuitive features that make formerly challenging content generation, enhancement and editing chores easy to perform. The quality of product one can create is very impressive as is the app’s ease of navigation. One can launch, shoot video, edit and upload in a smooth continuum of quick and easy to accomplish moves. And, if you think about it, this is the crux of the issue with the shift in literacy medium selection and preference. Now that doing all of this is so easy and inexpensive (or free in the case of  so many resources), I often wonder what Shakespeare, himself,  would opt for if he were living and working among us today. While often considered as a sort of gold standard for the worth of text-based literacy, his work was about entertaining the masses through storytelling and  I think resources like YouTube and TikTok would win him over quickly.

Will TikTok and its copiers eliminate the use of text? Of course not. In fact to register for, to navigate, and to participate in the Twitter-style short message exchanges around social videos that are so appealing to users, text is part of the mix, an important part, but simply no longer the dominant medium.

I think this leaves literacy educators with much to ponder and no doubt with many opportunities to take advantage of, as well as new responsibilities to address.

I think that smart, responsible educators will accept this shift as they figure out its dimensions and their significance. Further, wise ones will likely do so in conversation with their students.

Mark Gura, a life-long, passionate learner and teacher, persists in his efforts to re-map reinvigorate, and redefine instructional practice in order to provide the world's students with an educational experience truly worthy of their lives.

Photo by Kym Ellis on Unsplash

Use text-to-speech readers to enhance secondary students’ access to reading, listening, and viewing

By Lynn Shafer Willner (Lynn.Willner@wisc.edu) and Kouider Mokhtari (kouider@gmail.com)

The annual request to the school tech teacher: Can you help me set up my students’ online testing accommodations?

At this time of the year, many middle and high school technology educators are being asked to procure low-cost text-to-speech readers (with no access to the Internet) in order to simulate how this particular accommodation might be used during state online testing.

  • Quick Option 2: While it's important for kids to practice using the same software they'll be using during the test, a quick and easy way to simulate a computer-assisted read aloud in classroom settings (with earbuds) is to turn on the embedded read aloud accessibility feature in the computer’s accessibility panel. Check in either the preferences or settings for Accessibility. (Directions for Chromebook, PCs, Mac)  

But hold on for a moment! This is an opportunity for you, not just to meet current practice in your schools, but to transform it: Improve students’ opportunities to think more deeply about what they are reading, listening, and viewing.  

Why use of accommodations (only) falls short

If you only treat text-to-speech reader as an add-on (to be provided on the side for just a few students), you miss the opportunity to show teachers and students how to connect decoding work within a text to their thinking beyond a text (e.g., making inferences, summarizing and synthesizing).  Making the leap to deeper comprehension is the major challenge for most readers during middle and high school.

Why use text-to-speech readers to improve student access?

There are secondary students who will evade their assigned accommodations out of embarrassment -- accommodations are reminders of how they are “different” or “dumber” than their classmates. The irony here is that school teams spend hours meeting together to assign accommodations and then students often refuse or don’t know how to use them. If the students don’t use accommodations during daily instruction, all that staff time has been for naught.

21st century learning requires training in how to effectively extract and construct meaning using multiple modes of communication – including textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual resources. Learning through these multiple communication modes requires that teachers move beyond teaching with only printed text.

How you might help support deeper reading, listening, viewing, and thinking in your school

  1. Help teachers in each content area identify and gather digital samples of narrative, informational, explanatory, and argumentative texts  
  2. Show how to set up computer interfaces for digital reading, not only to the text-to-speech reader you’ve identified, but also to digital annotation tools -- highlighter, line guide, annotation/comments and extending to more advanced tools. (For ideas, see list at the end of this posting.)
  3. Reframe accommodations as accessibility features and extend them to all students:
    Connect use of online annotation tools and text-to-speech readers to close reading/thinking lessons -- not just during the pre-test to the computer lab to do online practice items. Why? There are many accessibility features that we all use as part of daily life (e.g., text-to-speech, curb cuts, captions [speech-to-text], automatic doors, line guide or a horizontal bookmark. [    More accessibility background shared here)
  4. Partner with content teachers use technology tools to support reading and analysis -- not just the ELA teachers...all subject areas require kids to read to learn.

Benefits  

By normalizing the use of accommodations and accessibility supports and providing more opportunities to practice using them, students have an increased opportunity to learn how to use multimodal thinking tools meaningfully during daily instruction.

 

Let us know: What works well for you?

What other approaches might help teachers use digital tools to enhance the access of a broader range of students?  

Links to explore

This posting draws from this article: Improving Meaningful Use of Accommodations by Multilingual Learners

Lynn Shafer Willner works at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where designs and develops language standards and accessibility approaches for K-12 multilingual learners

Kouider Mokhtari is the Anderson-Vukelja-Wright Endowed Professor and Director of the K-16 Literacy Center at The University of Texas at Tyler.

Photo by Ben Mullins on Unsplash

Grammarly’s Tone Detector: Multimodal Literacy In Action

By Joe Hutcheson (jhutcheson@montgomeryschool.org)

If you’re a devotee of using AI to check your grammar (and aren’t we all), you may have noticed a recently-added feature to your writing arsenal: Grammarly Tone Detector. While it is currently available to check only email messages, its function brings up numerous pedagogical implications, especially in relation to multimodal approaches to literacy.

Grammarly contends that “tone is key to effective writing” and that “by analyzing your word choice, phrasing, punctuation, and even capitalization,” it can make your writing “polished [and] effective.” Any writing teacher would agree to these ideas, and most teachers may agree that tone is the most overlooked trait in student writing. Organization is taught across the board, and what would your memories of English class be without rooting out the passive voice and diagramming sentences. But tone? It’s often seen as a pretty subjective part of the writing process. The emotional interaction between the reader and audience is seen as secondary to thesis statements and embedded quotes.

How, then, can Grammarly’s Tone Detector (GTD) create teachable moments to impress upon students the importance of tone? Here are some instructional takeaways:

  • The emoticon. GTD uses emoticons to provide the writer with a quick and unambiguous appraisal of the writer’s tone. Along with checking the usual grammatical mistakes, GTD will also display emoticons that reflect the tone of the writing:

The writer then has a chance to appraise GTD’s findings. The example above was for Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. Formal? Spot on. But how does GTD reach this conclusion? Here is where the teachable moment begins. Taking the GTD result and dialoguing with students about word  choice may impress upon them how important every word is in a text. On top of that, how could the class change Lincoln’s tone from formal to confident? Pulling out words that create a formal tone and replacing them with words that create a confident tone would be a great way for student-writers to understand (and more fully appreciate) the writer-reader relationship.

  • Textual meaning goes beyond mere diction (a.k.a. word choice). An author’s purpose often resides in the nuances and interplay of language. For example, Denise Levertov’s poem “The Secret” is a heart-filled response to the beauty of and need for innocence. Yet, GTD’s results come back as follows:

I hardly think this was Levertov’s intention, but we’ve all misinterpreted or poem or song, right?  Once again, this teachable moment would reside in talking about the misinterpretation of texts, which is often as important, and maybe even more important, than sharing the correct interpretation with students. Unpack the language. Talk about strong diction. Catalog the words in the poem that may have caused GTD to misinterpret Levertov (words such as “sudden,” “forgotten,” and “death”). These conversations will lead to students’ awareness that words do matter.

  • Scaffolding for emerging readers. Much like when they use the Wong-Baker FACES Pain Rating Scale at the pediatrician’s office, young children can choose an emoticon that reflects the tone of an author during a read-aloud. If a teacher reads an excerpt from The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and comes across the conversation between Lucy and Tumnus ("Oh—oh—oh!" sobbed Mr. Tumnus, "I'm crying because I'm such a bad Faun."), students could respond to the tone of the story by choosing the emoticon that best fits the author’s tone. Likewise, students could identify their feelings after hearing the dialogue from Mr. Tumnus. And there you have a complete reading lesson that is grounded not in students’ ability to read, but rather in students’ abilities to use visuals in expressing their thoughts about tone (and mood!). The emoticons could be on the end of popsicle sticks that students hold up when the tone of the reading matches the emoticon, or teachers could create “emoticon stations” that students would move among during a read-aloud.

While it remains a feature that’s available only on email, GTD remains an important tool for broadening the scope of literacy instruction. It’s a tool that can be used at the secondary level to assess the Transcendentalist rantings of Thoreau or as a way to introduce at the primary level how language creates emotion (such as in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Do You See?). While there are limitations (will it ever be able to detect a sarcastic or ironic tone?), GTD remains a tool whose visuals impress upon students the importance of tone in writing.

Joe Hutcheson currently serves as the PK-8 Language Arts Department Chair at Montgomery School, an independent school in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania.

Building MultiModal Text Sets & Building 21st Century Skills

By Michele Haiken (michele@theteachinfactor.com)

We live in a world where information is presented in multimodalities: visual, print, audio, digital. Yet, in schools, most teachers are still dependent on print text. Maybe there is some visual and digital texts. Audio is slowly entering the field of education with the array of informative podcasts and audiobooks to listen to great reads. If we are truly going to help students build 21st century skills according to the ISTE Standards for Students and Next Generation Literacy Standards than we need to provide more multimodal text sets for student learning and understanding. This is more than universal design learning, it is about helping students access information in all its forms, become critical thinkers of these texts, as well as creative communicators.

When you enter my 8th grade English classroom in Rye, New York you will find students reading paperback books as well as some listening to the same text on Learning Ally or reading it on a Kindle or Chromebook. My students interact with all different types of texts depending on the unit they are studying. For example, when students are reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, a classic text taught in most middle or high schools today, I supplement their historical, political, and socio economic understanding of the text by building  text sets to expand world knowledge.

According to Achievethecore.org, “A text set is a collection of related texts organized around a unit topic, theme, concept, or idea. The set is focused on an anchor text,­ a rich, complex, grade ­level text. The anchor text is the focus of a close reading with instructional supports. What is important is that the texts in the set are connected meaningfully to each other to deepen student understanding of the anchor text.” Text sets should go beyond print and digital texts. Photographs, audio text, and video can also be integrated into text sets. It is important to note text sets evolve and should be revised and updated regularly.

The text set I have built around To Kill a Mockingbird includes an audio of FDR’s 1933 inaugural speech referenced in Chapter One of Harper Lee’s book.  Students view Dorothea Lange’s photographs from the Great Depression. Using material from Facing History, I partner with my social studies teacher to include primary and secondary sources about Jim Crow Laws and the Scottsboro Trial which influenced Lee’s writing.  When we get to the trial scene in the book, students complete an Edpuzzle and view a video of Richard Peck playing Atticus in the 1962 film adaptation. As students are watching Atticus’ closing argument they track his use of ethos, pathos, and logos. I have graphic novel versions of the text for us to dive deep into craft and structure specific chapters and use Actively Learn, a digital reading platform, for jigsaw activities when we read poetry that connects to the text and characterization.  To build in some computational thinking, this winter my students will be creating a cardboard city of Maycomb and will code Finch Robots to travel through Maycomb representing the Scout, Jem, and Dill’s journey throughout the novel.

I am excited to add robotics and extend students’ literacy learning in my classroom. Although some parents have expressed their concerns of not focusing solely on literature in my English Language Arts class,  layering classical texts with multimodal text sets provides all the students in my classroom ways to access the text, understand the text, and engage in critical conversations about the text.  

Michele Haiken is a passionate educator of all things literacy and educational technology and ISTE author.  

Starting Young

By Rob A. Burggraaf (rburggraaf@lex2.org)

David Weisner once wrote, “Before they read words, children are reading pictures.” As a parent of a three-year-old, I see this played out whenever she picks up a book to “read” a story to me. She flips through pages, using the pictures to craft her version of a story, regardless of how her words relate to the author’s printed text. Already she realizes an illustrator uses pictures to communicate and she attempts to derive meaning from components that catch her attention.

As a parent, these interactions around picture books offer an opportunity to begin emphasizing the multimodal interplay of words and images to tell a story. Simply reading a story and showing her the pictures would ignore valuable teaching moments and leave any deeper understanding to chance. A more purposeful, structured approach can be used to develop even small children’s ability to interpret multimodal texts and take story time from pure entertainment a time of shared meaning-making.

Begin by instructing young readers in the elements of design used in illustrators’ work (Glos, 2017; O’Neil 2011; Serafini, 2015; Thomas, 2011; Wilson, 2011). Common elements such as color, line, shape, and style provide starting points for analyzing images (O’Neil, 2011). For example, children can learn how certain colors represent or evoke different emotions. Strategically placed lines may indicate movement, barriers, or connections between image elements. Children initially need explicit instruction in interpreting characters’ facial expressions and how they can sometimes match printed text or conflict with an author’s words, and what the illustrator is conveying in each situation. As an adult reader, modeling discussion of story images exposes children to key vocabulary they can in turn use when explaining their thinking (Serafini, 2015). Children begin to understand thought processes used in designing images and that all decisions, from color to spacing to shape, serve an intentional purpose.

A second multimodal component to examine is gleaned from the words on the page. Though young children are not yet able to read the actual words, they can gain meaning from font size and style to supplement their understanding of the story. Typeset in a story can indicate emotion, volume, emphasis, and intonation (Bearne, 2009). Is the character scared? Do multiple fonts indicate more than one character speaking? Once they understand font characteristics, young children quickly pick up on where to raise their voice to a yell or lower their voice to a whisper, even as they open a book for the first time.

At an early age, shared reading experiences around picture books allow for encouragement of multimodal approaches to understanding texts. As young children enter schooling, however, measuring reading levels and tracking progress has often emphasized the ability to accurately decode and comprehend printed text while minimizing other modalities (Leigh & Heid, 2008; Vincent, 2006). We cannot sacrifice these conversations about text and images at the critical juncture where children are beginning to make meaning from the text half of the relationship.  Picture walks and picture clues should not be treated solely as strategies to decode printed text, but as equal contributors to comprehension.

Multimodal texts do not solely belong in the realm of middle and high school.  By strategically reading picture books with my daughter, I’m helping her interpret author’s and illustrator’s craft, and laying the foundation for recognizing multiple modes at work to convey a message.  Tomie DePaola said, “A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, as they’re often the first art a young person sees” (Rosen, 2013).  He could just as easily have been talking about multimodal literacy.  

~~

Bearne, E. (2009). Multimodality, literacy, and texts: Developing a discourse. Journal of Early

Childhood Literacy, 9(2), 156-187. Retrieved from

http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uwyo.edu/10.1177/1468798409105585

Glos, M. L. (2017). Stories beyond words: Research and practices for multimodal literacy (Plan B project, University of Wyoming, Laramie, United States). Retrieved from https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11919/1563/STUW_LTED_2017_Glos_Maggie.pdf?sequence=1

Leigh, S.R., & Heid, K.A. (2008). First graders constructing meaning through drawing and

writing. Journal for Learning Through the Arts, 4(1), 1-12. Retrieved from

http://www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=EJ1094945

O'Neil, K.E. (2011). Reading pictures: Developing visual literacy for greater

comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 214-223. Retrieved from

http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uwyo.edu/10.1002/TRTR.01026

Rosen, J. (2013, October 31).  250 children’s books and counting: A conversation with Tomie dePaola. Retrieved December 23, 2019 from https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/59792-250-children-s-books-and-counting-a-conversation-with-tomie-depaola.html

Serafini, F. (2015). Multimodal literacy: From theories to practices. Language Arts, 92(6), 412-

422. Retrieved from

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Thomas, A. (2012). Children's writing goes 3D: A case study of one primary school's journey

into multimodal authoring. Learning, Media And Technology, 37(1), 77-93. Retrieved

from http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uwyo.edu/10.1080/17439884.2011.560160

Vincent, J. (2006). Children writing: Multimodality and assessment in the writing

classroom. Literacy, 40(1), 51-57. Retrieved from

http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uwyo.edu/10.1111/j.1467-9345.2006.00426.x

Weisner, D. (n.d.). Introduction to show me a story: Why picture books matter. Retrieved December 22, 2019 from http://www.davidwiesner.com/introduction-to-show-me-a-story-why-picture-books-matter/

Wilson, A. (2011). A social semiotics framework for conceptualizing content area literacies.

Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 54(6), 435-444. Retrieved from

http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uwyo.edu/10.1598/JAAL.54.6.5

Rob Burggraaf has been in education for fourteen years as a teacher, technology coach, and now an elementary assistant principal in South Carolina.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash