Using technology in the classroom

     Our fifth and final blog for the TCNJ Content Area Literacy course is on the HOT HOT topic of technology in the classroom, which we seem to be constantly discussing.  The current definition of a "good teacher" is one who incorporates technology into their practice while providing students models of tools, skills, and ethical and cybercitizenship.  If one could be bothered to "Google" the search term good teacher technology, or even to "GoogleScholar" it, one might easily choke on the millions of hits it delivers, as if all those billions of bits of data have become physical motes of dust infiltrating the blood-brain barrier and blinding us with sheer numbers.  For teachers like me, it can feel intimidating notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of these millions of hits will be complete rubbish.  Separating the useful wheat from all that fluffy and offensive chaff could strike a body with digital hay fever.
      But tech is here to stay, at least until some apocalyptic event befalls humankind and we are reduced to once again eking out a living without the internet.  So teachers need to be up on their tech skills, just like we need to know our stuff when it comes to knowledge about the subject we're teaching.  And when it comes to working cooperatively and thinking critically and communicating effectively.  But, you know, other than that it's a pretty easy job.

     Anyway, back to the readings.  Since teachers must get with the tech program if they want to have a future in teaching, the next step is to figure out how bringing some of this stuff into the classroom might work.  We had a lot of experiences with that in this course:  Prof. Lattanzi is a middle school math wiki-master.  The readings (listed below) gave several different viewpoints on how teachers can use tech effectively.


      The main theme linking them all seemed to be that if you're going to use technology, use it right.  Don't just slap it on top of what you're already doing.  Using social networking tools means an adjustment in teaching strategies so that our person-to-person connections with the students and with each other are authentic and meaningful.  If we're going to be more than glorified robots in the process, we need to place greater emphasis on individualizing our guidance to every student.  Teachers need to be aware of the tools available and comfortable using them; we need to be mindful of the students' security; we need to provide them with the knowledge and skills required to evaluate online texts critically; we need to provide students with clear expectations, guidelines, rubrics, codes of conduct, and goals.


     This is a lot to juggle … again, intimidating.  A couple of the readings admitted initial failures in trying to use blogging for English classes, mainly due to lack of consideration for the classroom's role as a "learning community."


     For a couple of decades I have approached all of this scholarly "community-building" stuff skeptically.  But during the second session class with Prof. Monroe, my classmates and I saw the mighty teaching power that lies behind the community.  Personal connections and bonds of friendship are strong natural motivators.  A leader who can facilitate these connections will consequently help everyone in the community feel respected and at ease.  For my money, whether or not you want to call it "technology," perhaps the most important "21st century skill" out there is understanding how to communicate with lots of different kinds of people.


     Back to the specific topic of blogs*, Witte describes them as "a crucial tool in developing 21st century skills."  The author noted that while students had little interest in completing writing assignments for class, during their free time they enthusiastically wrote for their own blog projects.  Through participation in the National Writing Project, and some trial and error, the author has successfully incorporated blogging into the classroom, which opens opportunities for positive and diverse collaborations with other communities.  Activities involving problem-solving and creativity through collaboration with other communities might provide a model for a more equitable society and might even help students learn more effectively.  At this point, I'm convinced.  Blogging is going to start happening in my classroom this year.… I just need to figure out how.


     Not so crucial, but oh so cool and interdisciplinary, is geocaching.  This is basically a real-world treasure hunt using GPS.  Participants use GPS coordinates and some series of clues to find a container.  Within the container is a token left by one of the previous groups, a register to sign, and possibly the first clue about the next location.  A teacher could design lessons centered around geocaching for just about any conceivable subject.  Even if the activity itself doesn't directly involve, say, music, a music teacher could contribute clues based on concepts or tunes studied in music class.


     In a similar multidisciplinary style, digital storytelling shows promise for helping students visualize and refine their writing.  The process of creating storyboards with pictures, narration, and dialogue provides scaffolding for them to succeed at writing.  Not all students are going to excel at producing grammatically correct prose full of succulent vocabulary words, and if you remind them of that then they just might decide writing's not for them.  Instead, digital storytelling offers an alternative but equitable assessment as the students are building the microskills they need to meet the general writing standards.  Moving from storyboard to technology adds a whole new level to the process as students convert their visions into slideshows and animations.


     Basically, if students are collaborating, using technology, problem-solving, and having a good time … where's the downside?  The downside for us teachers is twofold: the insane number of options out there, and the insanely pinched time we have to sort it all out.  But that's why they pay us the big bucks, right?



*  Here's a new word for the Mensa crowd (although it's probably not sufficiently pithy for their taste): bloth (the -th pronounced with a hard /ð/) - a portmanteau of "blog" and "blather"; the verb form would mean "to blog on and on and on about nothing particularly coherent," or it could be a noun meaning "any online post reminiscent of blathering."  In the present continuous: I am blothing about Taylor Swift's new hairstyle, which leads to the  gerund form as in My wife said that she prefers my blothing about fantasy football over having to listen to me talk about it.

 Readings discussed:
 Hungerford-Kresser, H., Wiggins,  J., and Amaro-Jiménez, C.  (2011).  Learning from our mistakes: what matters when incorporating blogging in the content area literacy classroom.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 55(4).  Dec. 2011-Jan. 2012.  PDF.


Hutchison, A., Beschorner, B., and Schmidt-Crawford, D.  (2012).  Exploring the use of the iPad for literacy learning.  The Reading Teacher, 66(1).  Sep. 2012.  PDF.

Jewet, P.  (2011).  Multiple literacies gone wild.   The Reading Teacher, 64(5).  Feb. 2011.  PDF.


Mills, K. A., and Levido, A.  (2011).  iPed: pedagogy for digital text production.  The Reading Teacher, 65(1).  PDF.


Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  (2013).  Framework for 21st century learning.  Retrieved from http://www.p21.org/overview/skills-framework.


Sylvester, R. and Greenidge, W.  (2009).  Digital storytelling: extending the potential for struggling writers.  The Reading Teacher, 63(4).  Dec. 2009-Jan. 2010.  PDF.


Witte, S.  (2007).  "That's online writing, not boring school writing": writing with blogs and the Talkback Project.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 51(2).  Oct. 2007.  PDF.

Thought without language?

     This most recent jigsaw experience was a bit different.  For one thing, under discussion was not a collection of readings but a trio of audio files from the WNYC series Radiolab: "Words that changed the world," "Voices in your head," and "New words, new world."  For another, many people listened to all of the files, not just the one they had signed up for, which would never happen with the readings.
     "Words that changed the world" was the longest and most varied bit, weaving together the voices of several personal narratives and expert insights.  We meet Susan Schaller, whose recovery from head trauma led her to become an interpreter of American Sign Language, which led her to meet a deaf man in his twenties who not only couldn't speak or sign but had no conception of language whatsoever.  Schaller explains that when she first met him, he would simply mimic her movements; it took many months of training before he was finally able to connect her signing with meaning.
     This led to a discussion about what thought would be like without language: before this man possessed the knowledge that words represent things and ideas in the world, what were his thoughts like?  Although the man is now able to communicate, he is either unwilling or unable to answer this question.
     Consider instead a behavioral experiment designed to compare the thinking of rats against the thinking of humans.  Take a rectangular room that's completely white, hide a treat in one of the corners, and then spin the subject around so there's no telling which way is what.  You've got a 50% chance of choosing the right corner.  Paint one of the walls blue, however, and it should be a lot easier to pick which corner the goody is in.  Turns out that's true for adults, but it's not true for rats and also not true for children younger than 6.  Apparently the ideas for "wall" and "blue" and "left/right" have no connection with each other in the brains of rats and babies, and in the case of babies these connections do not exist until their language skills advance to a certain point.  To prove that it's not a fluke, experimenters tried the blue-wall-with-a-treat-in-the-corner trick on adults whose language processing abilities were temporarily interrupted by a stream of blather pouring out of headphones.  The experiment showed that language is a necessary component to thinking.  One of the scientists even went so far as to say that babies don't think, or at least "not in any way that I would want to call thinking."

     So going back to the question, What is thought without language? - and a new question I would dare to pose, which is, What does this have to do with the Content Area Literacy class? - let's consider yet another question:  Can you imagine thinking without using language?  Think about it for a minute - if you are not allowed to use any words, what's left of your thoughts besides sensory representations?  Do we even have the ability to separate language from thinking?
     The idea they're driving at is that the way that we think about everything is so deeply connected with language that we cannot tease the two apart.  In order to think beyond the capability of a hungry rat, our brains must connect all the separate pieces of information about the world, and those connections don't exist without language to help us.
     The "Voices in your head" segment explains how this works in more detail using the holistic theories of Lev Vygotsky as a starting point and another diabolical experiment as illustration.  As explained in the audio, Vygotsky's notion of how we come to think goes like this: parents talk to baby, toddler imitates this dialogue by talking to self, child continues the "dialogue" by internalizing conversations with imaginary others.  Basically, we all hear "voices in our heads," just those of us who aren't categorized as schizophrenic tend to have an easier time remembering that those voices are really just our own selves.  If this model is true, then it would be impossible to conceive of thinking without the use of language.
     So, again - what does any of this have to do with literacy?  Assuming that it's true that high-level thinking requires language, then it stands to reason that the stronger one's language skills, the higher one's thinking will be.  The flipside is that people with low language skills will have a correspondingly low ability to think.  This puts students who struggle with literacy skills at a disadvantage, not just in the classroom but in the rest of their lives as well.
     Instead of viewing intelligence as a concrete and static ability, teachers especially need to understand people as "works in progress."  When we see a student struggling, we need to recognize that it is not his or her fault and that it's not always an indication of ability. Maybe it's simply that the student needs our help in developing the language necessary to be able to put it all together.

Teaching Vocabulary Effectively

     Today we had another jigsaw activity - each student reads one of five articles; people get in groups to discuss the article they read together, then everyone mixes up the groups to give the lowdown on the one they've become an "expert" on.  Summarizing effectively in the short time before people are tired of listening is good experience for all of us.

     Taking the readings overall, our goal is to answer the questions, "What does effective vocabulary instruction require?" and "Why is vocabulary instruction so important?"

     In answer to the second question, it is so important because, as statistics indicate, a student's literacy success at an early age is correlated with his or her future socioeconomic status.  From a more practical perspective, building vocabulary is necessary for learning in every subject as well as in the world outside the classroom.

     As for what vocabulary instruction requires, most of all it requires forethought and a plan, which should probably be better than doing it the way it was done to you back in the day.  The readings all agreed with the constructivist premise that learning only happens when students create meaning for themselves.  The readings also hinted at one of the constructivist corollaries: traditional teaching methods tend to fall far short of delivering the goods.  Students will create meaning, no doubt about that, but too many of them are inspired to create the meaning "skool sux" because they are set up to fail.

     Of course, we're not talking about the "independent" students, the ones who are self-effective and can learn by reading; we're talking about the "dependent" students who still need guidance and training about how to make sense of the strange and intimidating culture of school.

     Here's an idea from my experience: let's give students a list of words they've never heard of and will never hear again and then stick a dictionary in their faces and tell them to get to work copying?

     Fail!

     Okay, maybe that's not such a good plan.  Basically, this is what teachers do because it's what we were told to do as students.  Never mind that we hated copying definitions from the dictionary.  Not to mention the fact that it didn't do much to help us learn the words.

     According to the readings, here's what we could do instead:

     First off, make the students into partners.  You could allow them to take a long list of vocabulary terms and choose from them, for instance let the students select 8-10 terms out of 20.  Or you could brainstorm together about which words to include from a particular text.  The point is that the teacher needs to give students some ownership in the process.

     Next, teachers in all subjects should strive to identify the highest-priority words, the ones that students definitely need to know in order to succeed.  Lesson planning requires us to try to predict students' needs and gives us the opportunity to decide strategies for teaching in the most effective way possible.  In part this means not wasting time teaching what they already know.

     Another facet of effective vocabulary instruction, and another one requiring some amount of forethought and planning, is to teach across content areas, meaning to involve teachers in all subjects when planning what vocabulary to teach.

     The article I was most familiar with, "What's in a word" (Flanigan, Templeton, and Hayes), had some solid suggestions for teaching vocabulary effectively, some of which were echoed in the other readings.  The authors' primary initiative is helping students to develop their morphological awareness, that is their understanding of how words work and about how words are built.  Because so much of English is based on Greek and Latin, most of our words have meaning embedded within their components, the roots and affixes (suffixes and prefixes).  Decoding the meanings of these components, "unlocking the system of meaning," is close to impossible if you don't know there is any system to unlock.

     Teachers should therefore strive for "generative instruction," which is the name given to the authors' idea that students will generate knowledge by learning how to read the code.  Using graphic organizers and word trees, students explore the differences in meaning between words with similar features.  For instance the words graphic, polygraph, and telegraph all contain the root -graph-, which means something written out or represented visually; once you know the code, you can make an educated guess about any new word that contains the root.  Now you can discuss the suffix -ic, which creates an adjective; the prefix poly-, with many familiar examples available for discovery related to the coded meaning "many"; and the prefix tele- with many other examples related to the meaning "to send."  Those additional examples branch out to still more, and with any luck and probably a lot more practice, the students are expanding their vocabularies.

     One challenge for me personally is figuring out how to work more vocabulary study into the math classes I teach. It's time to mix up the curriculum - let's bring literacy instruction into math class and sneak some data analysis into reading class!



Articles discussed:
 Baumann, J. F., Ware, D., and Edwards, E. C.  (2007).  "Bumping into spicy, tasty words that catch your tongue": a formative experiment on vocabulary instruction.  The Reading Teacher, 61(2).  PDF.

Flanigan, K. and Greenwood, S. C.  Effective content vocabulary instruction in the middle: matching students, purposes, words, and strategies.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 51(3).  Nov. 2007.  PDF.

Flanigan, K., Templeton, S., and Hayes, L.  (2012).  What's in a word? Using content vocabulary to generate growth in general academic vocabulary knowledge.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 56(2). Oct. 2012.

Pikulski, J. J. and Chard, D. J.  (2005).  Fluency: bridge between decoding and reading comprehension.   The Reading Teacher, 58(6).  Mar. 2005.  PDF.

Ruddell, M. R. and Shearer, B. A.  (2002).  "Extraordinary," "tremendous," "exhilarating," "magnificent": middle school at-risk students become avid world learners with the Vocabulary Self-Collection Strategy (VSS).  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 45(5).  Feb. 2002.