Focusing on Literacy, not Technology

norris tech checkin survey

Yesterday, we began an after-school inquiry group with teachers around literacy instruction and technology. There is a small group of us planning various sessions and I was up first. So, I brought up the Draw a Stickman site (episode two) on my interactive board and asked the teachers to help make the story, referring periodically to the ways in which I use the site with my students early in the year to talk about the main literacy concepts we will touch upon: protagonist/antagonist, setting, foreshadowing, conflict/resolution, etc.

I offered up the view that we need our students with the interactive pens in hand, not the teachers. And here is a perfect site with an engaging activity with many points for discussion about literacy, and even the opportunity afterwards for students to retell or write the story of the hero stickman.

What this allowed us to do with the 15 or so teachers who stayed after school, on their own time, to do is to think in terms of literacy, not technology. In fact, we are working to frame the inquiry group around the ideas of teaching literacies in all of its varied forms through the lends of using technology to engage students. The point is that the focus is not the technology. That’s no small thing, I would argue, and we often fall into the trap of the tool shaping instruction as opposed to the instruction using the tool.

After our interactive story activity, which broke the ice nicely, we shifted into using Edmodo for an inquiry space that I had set up for us as teachers. Our challenge is that we have teachers from kindergarten right through sixth grade, and that is a wide span. But we are all teachers and learners, and one of our goals is to create a community of learners that is built on sharing, reflection and exploration. You can see from the survey results above that we all have a mixed group in terms of their own perceptions of technical savvy (and also, that they want to focus on writing instruction in our sessions). So we went slow and methodical, and Edmodo worked well for our goals (easy set-up, easy to use, familiar format to many), and in very little time at all, we were all busy writing and sharing and replying, and building the connections.

Their writing task was to create a Technology Autobiography, where they were to write about their first brush with technology that made them step back and say “wow.” The responses were fantastic, from one who wrote about remembering an earlier career in programming (who knew?) to another remembering an early version of Logo programming (the Lego-styled system that Scratch is built on), to others whose first brush with Skype opened up a range of possibilities.

And they were writing, which is the literacy connection. The technology — Edmodo — allowed us to connect as writers but we all agreed that, as best as time would allow, we would return to our writing space to share resources. I know that is easier to promise than it is to do, and there are ghost towns of online spaces all over the place. But we facilitators will see what we can do to encourage us to keep coming together as writers and learners (and one colleague reminded us that our new teacher evaluations require some reflective writing, and so, why not our Edmodo space?)

Peace (in the inquiry),
Kevin

 

6 Comments
  1. Just the inspiration I was looking for this morning. I want to follow your school’s work in this regard as it is exactly what my colleagues and I are trying to do. I hope you’ll continue to share stories and reflections of your work. Currently I’m working on employing iMovie to help students crreate movies about poems that “speak to them.” I’m excited about this project as the students will be meeting all the standards with a wonderful tech venue that they can share with others. I’ve started thinking of this as “Multimedia Literacy Studio.”

  2. Hi Kevin, I’m just growing “multimedia literacy studio.” It’s based on what I know about related to Ellin Oliver Keene’s work. Here’s a post I wrote about Keene’s work: http://teachwellnow.blogspot.com/2012/02/ellin-oliver-keenes-literacy-studio.html

    And here are a couple of posts about the Multimedia Literacy Studio: http://teachwellnow.blogspot.com/2012/08/creating-multimedia-literacy-studio.html and http://teachwellnow.blogspot.com/2012/08/multimedia-literacy-studio-structure.html

    If your team has ideas, let me know. Thanks for all you do to forward our thinking and work.

    And have the MTA Talks been published yet? I want to share with my colleagues.

  3. Kevin,

    I love Edmodo! I use it with my fourth graders every week. Our main focus is on literacy and developing our own awareness of what an appropriate response looks like. Students in fourth grade are just learning how to type so everything needs to be modeled and taught. The students get so excited to respond to their reading using an interactive website. We have also used it as a “drop box” for their work. They love to post to their own library. I love added articles I find that may be of interest to them as well.

    Our team also loves using Edmodo. We have a group set up for fourth grade teachers. We post interesting links etc. to the wall of the group. Most of these links come from Pinterest, which is banned at school. Since most of the links on Pinterest are blogs, we are able to post the link to the blog on Edmodo and access it from home or school. Have you thought about using it to post/share resources from colleague to colleague? I know you said you do it through writing and reflection but it may be great as just a sharing tool as well.

  4. I use Edmodo to communicate with our Writing for Change Club and for each of my periods at school. It is a great safe place to introduce how to respond appropriately, and I love the fact students can submit links and work through the site. You can even edit student work and send it back and that has worked well. I am learning to use the grade book to score student work to keep track of what has been turned in.

    The kids love posting links and photos to the wall as we study a variety of topics. The frustrating part is you can’t focus the conversations as well as you can on a blog, hence our exploration of blogs this year.

    We are currently using it a lot with our Writing for Change Club as some of our writers from the summer have continued to remain in our group and participate via Edmodo. We even have on student who tries to log in during our club writing time and posts conversations with her fellow writers as she had to suddenly move to a small outskirt town. This has unexpectedly created quite a support system for her.

    So I am looking forward to seeing how you use it.

    P,S, Are you presenting at the NWP conference in Las Vegas? I will be there and would love to see your work and share some ideas in person.

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