Models of Technology and Literacy in Secondary Ed. Classrooms

In this entry, I will again reference the article by Justine Cassell, “Towards a model of technology and literacy development:  Story listening systems.”  Mostly, I found her thoughts on student collaboration to be most appealing when I was reading the article, so I’ll start there.  Peer involvement for literacy, especially at an early age, is very important.  There are very few, if any at all, instances when we aren’t sharing literacy in order to express something to someone else.  In fact, my favorite quote in the article states literacy “… as the ability to communicate with an audience not in the immediate physical or temporal context.  Literacy, then, is the ability to make meaning for others across space and time” (p. 77). 

Let’s assume that this definition of literacy is accurate (it sure sounds cool).  Who are students communicating with in a traditional secondary education setting?  In traditional prompt-then-essay paper formats, students are traditionally writing for the purpose of getting a grade, with the exemption of peer-reviews.  I remember during student teaching, an essay prompt I assigned asked students to reflect on a day they believe changed their outlook on life forever.  Even though they were hesitant writers, I was confident that they would take to the essay with zeal. I thought I had understood from other classes that if the subject matter was relevant to the student, then the student would take to the assignment without many problems in attention or clarity.  That assumption was half-wrong.

After allowing students to free-write for 15 minutes, I assigned them partners to share their stories.  And boy did the classroom buzz with talk about everyone’s stories, and questions about their partner’s stories.  But as soon as I asked students to separate again to begin formally writing their rough draft, half of the class went back to their seats to scribble on paper.  It was fine with them to collaborate with peers, but to them the writing portion was terrible.  They weren’t writing to a peer, or for a peer.  They were writing for a teacher, and for a grade a majority of them at that time didn’t care about. 

I can imagine telling students that they would be posting their final drafts to a blog, where their peers would then be required to make comments on their finished project (hypothetically of course; there were no computers in the room, or in the computer lab at that point in the semester).  Would the effort have increased?  I believe it possibly could have.  Even if a handful more students became more engaged with the activity, it would have been worth-wile.

“Literacy, after all, is about participating in a community of meaning-makers” (p. 102).   That is the final statement of Cassell’s at the end of the article, and it resonates with what I have written earlier about blogging.  There are many ways to increase student motivation in the classroom, and to me placing meaning behind assignments and activities can prove to be the most challenging.  However, I believe technology can be a useful tool in accessing meaning behind learning.

Cassell also mentions, albeit for ages 4-7, that most technology for literacy promotes an “inside-out” approach, rather than a “more social and functional approach” (p. 81).  In an age where cognitive and collaborative thinking are gaining more emphasis in the workplace, it only makes sense that student writing should be approached from this “outside-in” direction, at least in most circumstances.  Otherwise, there simply isn’t much meaning as to what students are doing in the classroom.  Blogging, and technology in general, can definitely change that.

Cassell, J. (2004). Towards a model of technology and literacy development:  Story listening systems. Applied Developmental Psychology, 25, 75-105. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.lib.iastate.edu:2048/science/article/pii/S0193397303001369

Story Listening Systems: Emergent Literacy without Computer Screens

Kind of let the blog get away from me these past two weeks, but now I am here to present an interesting article by Justine Cassel, titled “Towards a model of technology and literacy development:  Story listening systems.”  In this post, I wish to generalize what “story listening systems” are, and to elaborate on some specific examples which I found interesting in the article (altogether, there are 6).  In the post after this, I want to tie some of the ideas of this article with my own ideas pertaining to literacy in Secondary Education.  For the most part, this article is geared towards literacy for children 4-7 years of age.

The article first sets out to define what Story Listening Systems (SLS) are.  In short, the main goal of using story listening systems is to help foster emergent literacy by:

-asking children to tell a story (orally)

-to share these stories with a partner, or even use a computer as a partner (collaborate)

-to avoid using a desktop or laptop (no conventional computers with keyboards)

-making sure children are coming up with their own stories, and not repeating prompts

                                                                                                                                            (p. 76).

Cassell argues that placing students in front of computers “…makes it difficult both for children to collaborate, and for them to involve their bodies in play” (p. 79).  Without collaboration, children aren’t able to fully access their capacity to share language while appropriately conveying context.  What might be a highly detailed and contextualized story between two peers may potentially be dumbed down into a fragmented and decontextualized story on paper or on keyboard.

This is the last piece of intro text that I’ll include before I go on to explain a few of the SLS, as it sums up the goal of the project nicely:

“Thus, the SLS model relies on two features of childhood and two features of new technology:  children’s inherent ability and desire to tell stories, which may contain within them the skills required for writing; the support that children provide to one another in the narrative play arena, which may be as good as, or even superior to that provided by adults; the ability of new technology to be removed from the old screen-and-desktop context; and its capacity to support children as producers as well as consumers of content” (p. 82).

The SLS, TellTale, is a segmented recording system which uses the segments of a caterpillar as a symbol.  Children are to record their story into 5 segments, using each piece of the caterpillar as a segment of their story.  After two tries (most of the kids recorded their whole story in only 2 segments), the experimenter attempts to prompt them to use all segments of the caterpillar to record different parts of a story.  The article itself points out a child who made short recordings on her third try, and then took the same story and elaborated on it for her fourth try.  She was able to find the structure of her own story, which provided “… an example of metalinguistic awareness of discourse segmentation” (p. 85). 

Same the CastleMate is a computer program where children interact with an androgynous figure projected onto a screen (the reason I state Sam is androgynous is because the article mentions most preschoolers were confused and wanted to know).  This program comes closest to the SLS ideal because it involves collaboration between the child and the program.  The program (Sam) starts out telling a story, and then asks the child to tell their own story, using a toy castle and objects inside as they tell Sam a story.  The main point of the exercise is to utilize computer prompts to tell a story which is more advanced in dialogue.  Cassell concludes that this form of “play” helps put the child into the zone of proximal development, because in it “children learn through their participation in activities that are slightly beyond their competence, with the assistance of adults or more skilled children” (p. 92).  Conversely, when children were left just another child to tell a story to, the stories they told each other were typically unorganized and scatterbrained. 

I will elaborate more in the next blog on the main tenets of the Story Listening Systems, and how I believe they can hold some merit when talking about a Secondary Education setting.  But the main point of this entry was to show how technology can be used in emergent literacy, and the importance of utilizing technology to enhance collaborative play-like activities to promote better overall literacy skills.  In this case, the basis was storytelling. 

Cassell, J. (2004). Towards a model of technology and literacy development:  Story listening systems. Applied Developmental Psychology, 25, 75-105. Retrieved from: http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.lib.iastate.edu:2048/science/article/pii/S0193397303001369

I_ _ _ _ _ _ ing with Blogging in the Classroom?

This is officially my post about blogging in the classroom.  I've had more than enough time to think about it, and it seems that every time we meet in class, the blogging gets brought up as a viable medium to share videos, collect student writing, and generally engage student interest.  The first and most malleable way I thought of using blogging in the classroom was to establish a multi-genre blog; a blog where students share different genres of writing and media they've made throughout the school year.

The multi-genre project was a concept I initially disliked during my junior year at Iowa State.  After being given the directions to "just go create different genres of works", I was lost in the sea of infinite possibilities of items to create.  So first and foremost, my students would have set examples and options to choose from in their projects to get them started.  After that, they may find a niche where they feel they can excel and gain interest in, which from there they could just clear genre ideas with me, and I could help keep them on track.

Just how many genres could students choose from?  Well, as many as you could think of.  Anything you would see in printed formats would be fair game (a chapter from a book, fan fiction, short story, anything you would see in a newspaper, how-to guide for activities and hobbies, etc).  Also, any media such as a news report, a how-to video, or a film short would be viewed as a creative entry into the blog site.

But let's get to the nitty-gritty:  How can I innovate the curriculum using a blog as the medium for the multi-genre project?  The best current idea I can think of is to use a system similar to what we grad students do here in blogger:  utilize the blogs for peer collaboration in and out of the school.  After they've completed several drafts of different genres, (and after they find their 'niche') I would be able to sort students into like-minded groups, where they could give feedback on their peers' works.

This would also set up student group work for success, as a group of students who are interested in journalism-oriented genres could collectively create a news broadcast together.  I would also keep these student groups in their own separate blog communities, to keep accountability high, and to keep unfocused feedback from outside groups low.   Students interested in short stories could come out with their own short book of collected works.  Much of the collaboration would occur online.  At the end of the year, student blog sites would then open to the public (or just the classroom), where students could then look at what other groups had been doing throughout the course.

I'd like to finish these thoughts on blogging with two items.  First, I'm a proponent of using the classroom to help students attain skills they'll use in the world, and to me this kind of project makes sense.  As an example, one of my friends who writes for the Iowa State Daily, commented that if he didn't have his blog of sports commentaries and summaries, he wouldn't have gotten his job.  Giving students a sense of those real-world perspectives helps them achieve an almost real-world satisfaction, while helping them acquire those skills to showcase later in their lives.

Second:  Is what I've said above really using innovation?  I still have trouble pinpointing what innovation really is, as I find my thoughts generally stray to implementation.  In the very first paragraph of this post, I deferred to the word 'using' in "using blogging in the classroom", which I initially wanted to say implementing blogging the classroom.  Thus the title of this post:  both words start with "i", but a lot of the time I feel lost when I'm trying to identify the difference between implementation and innovation.

Is it possible to innovate with blogging?  Is the multi-genre idea above more implementation than innovation?  I'd like to, by the end of this course, be able to generally pinpoint where blogging falls, when it comes between the two different "i" words.  Please feel free to express your thoughts.  But in the meantime, I'll suffice with saying blogging in the classroom should definitely be done whether it is done with i _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ tion or i _ _ _ _ _ tion.