Integrating Technology in Literacy Instruction

Models and Frameworks for All Learners

Peggy Lisenbee, Jodi Pilgrim, Sheri Vasinda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000075823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text addresses the changing literacies surrounding students and the need to communicate effectively using technology tools. Technology has the power to transform teaching and learning in classrooms and to promote active learning, interaction, and engagement through different tools and applications. While both technologies and research in literacy are rapidly changing and evolving, this book presents lasting frameworks for teacher candidates to effectively evaluate and implement digital tools to enhance literacy classrooms. Through the lens of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), this text prepares teacher candidates to shape learning environments that support the needs and desires of all literacy learners through the integration of technology and literacy instruction by providing a range of current models and frameworks. This approach supports a comprehensive understanding of the complex multiliteracies landscape. These models address technology integration and demonstrate how pedagogical knowledge, content knowledge, and technological knowledge can be integrated for the benefit of all learners in a range of contexts.

Each chapter includes prompts for reflection and discussion to encourage readers to consider how literacy and technology can enable teachers to become agents of change, and the book also features Appendices with annotated resource lists of technology tools for students' varied literacy needs in our digital age.

SECTION 1
Foundations for Thinking about Literacy

1

Literacy in a Changing World

Mind Shift

Literacy is a broad term for being able to read, write, listen, speak, view, and visually represent information in order to communicate and understand. Consider all the different ways you demonstrated literacy today. Create a concept map with literacy as a center circle. Branch out from the center to list the multiple modes of literacy you used today. Use the concept map to think about the multiple modes available for communicating today that have changed over the last ten or more years. How has literacy evolved? Is it more effective? Why or why not?

Have you ever used a meme in a text to reflect a mood? Or listened to a podcast on the way to school or work? Students spend their time outside of school in similar ways. If you were to follow students home after school, you would see them blog, create videos, play games on smartphones, and communicate with friends through Snapchat or the newest app they have found to connect with others online. These young people are all engaged in literacy events using tools that amplify their voices, their efforts, their social circles, and more. The scope of literacy in a digital age is vastly expanding.

The term literacy, at its most basic form and function, is the use of various means to communicate and create. Consider oral language. From the time infants enter the world, parents interpret babbling as language and respond with language that children will acquire incrementally throughout a lifetime. The same holds true for written language as it developed from pictograms in cave dwellings to symbols, the alphabet, and eventually, the printing press. The invention of the Gutenberg press created a means for literacy across the globe.

Today’s students have an expanded repertoire of literacies from those of their parents or teachers (International Reading Association, 2009). The launch of the first iPads occurred in 2010. Now, children as young as two years old understand that swiping and tapping on glass screens can command songs, photos, animations, and videos. Young children demonstrate purposeful interaction by identifying the icons that will display desired content similar to the 20th-century child making meaningful marks with a crayon on paper. These forms of emergent literacy are powerful ways to understand, communicate, and create, and they demonstrate changes in what it means to be literate.

In the 21st century, the transition from paper-based to screen-based communication is changing the skills used for accessing and communicating information and ideas. Think about the online reading process of informational print. Readers need to understand how hyperlinked digital information is connected to get the most out of online reading. Clicking on the blue words or phrases leads to another webpage with related information and additional details. This information may be helpful or lead to distractions (Warlick, 2009). Readers need to understand this process in order to evaluate information encountered online. Today’s learners listen to podcasts or watch videos on demand, but they still need to evaluate the quality and reliability of online information, just as with print-based texts. As technology capabilities and access increase and expand, demands of literacy continually increase and change (Biancarosa & Snow, 2006).

The Link to Information and Communication Technology

As we address literacy in a changing world, we encounter varying terms used to reflect literacy as well as an expanded notion of literacies. The commonality in literacy terms described in this chapter is their potential link to Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Current trends related to ICTs gain worldwide attention due to potential opportunities and benefits to improve the quality of education globally. These benefits, also recognized as the affordances of technology, impact society in general. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “Modern societies are increasingly dependent on information and knowledge, with digital information and communication technologies as main drivers” (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, 2017, para. 1). Global policies promote technology integration in education as a major factor for future economic success. With an increased presence of ICTs in and out of the classroom, educators must understand the impact of technology on literacy and literacy instruction. Regardless of the terms used to describe 21st-century literacy skills, the current perception of literacy includes the use of ICTs, typically the internet, to gather and disseminate information (Leu, Forzani, Timbrell, & Maykel, 2015). Additionally, with increased exposure and access to the internet and mobile devices, the new skills needed to navigate in-school and out-of-school learning are not future-focused, they are how we live and function here and now.

The Shift from Reading to Literacy

Growing and changing concepts about what it means to be literate have influenced education in many ways across many disciplines. In the reading and language arts professional community, literacy became the term used to reflect a more broad and contemporary view of reading and writing skills. In 2001, the International Reading Association (now the International Literacy Association, ILA) began transitioning to the use of literacy in their position statements and standards, instead of the term reading. ILA completed this process in order to align with a more encompassing view of literacy that extends beyond traditional reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Literacy standards across the nation also reflect changing notions about literacy. For example, ILA’s (International Literacy Association, 2018) Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals include digital literacies. The expanding definitions of literacy address “the multitude of ways we read, write, communicate, and collaborate using print and digital technologies and is referred to in the plural, literacies” (p. 17). The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010) included literacy requirements in the content areas such as history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. The intent of the literacy standards in the content areas was to complement content standards to enhance skills all students need (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). Literacy terms presented throughout this book are cross-disciplinary because literacy is the foundation for communicating information. The acts of making meaning through listening and speaking, reading and understanding, writing and communicating, and viewing and creating, both with and without technology, occur in all disciplines. “Whether the domain is English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or music, 21st-century competencies and such expertise as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication should be woven into all content areas” (U.S. Department of Education, 2010, p. 9).

Multiliteracies

Multiple ways of communicating have shifted the boundaries of literacy from a singular concept to a plural concept of literacies. This expanded idea also shifts our considerations of how we teach and what materials we use. Multiliteracies correspond with theoretical and pedagogical shifts in thinking about the pluralities of literacies. Multiliteracies involve visual and audio modes of communication represented through print, photos, videos, or graphs (Kress, 2003; New London Group, 1996). Multiliteracies, also called multiple literacies, reflect the idea that we communicate in many ways or many modes. The world around us is multimodal. Think back to the Mind Shift presented at the beginning of this chapter and the ways you are literate. Daily communication encounters of any kind are literacy. Our focus on literacy and technology integration for this textbook is grounded in a multiliteracies perspective.

Literacy Terminology

Multiliteracies is one of many new terms associated with changing notions of what it means to be literate. It is also the literacy theory framing this text. We will continue exploring multiliteracies in the next chapter. As literacy terms evolve to reflect new technologies and new literacies, the new terms often overlap in meaning, causing inconsistencies and confusion in our understanding of these changes. La...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Author Bios
• Section 1 Foundations for Thinking about Literacy
• Section 2 Frameworks for Thinking about Technology Integration
• Section 3 Applications for Classroom Instruction Section
• Index