One Hour of Coding

Coding can be such a powerful for students. It creates problem-solving skills that be used across every subject and helps students learn increasingly valuable college and career skills. The past few years, I had the opportunity to lead a "Coding Club" for my school's after-care program. Because I know absolutely zilch about coding itself, I started with a group of highly-motivated third graders who I thought would get a kick out of playing on the computer for a few hours with some of their favorite cartoon characters.

Code.Org has also been endorsed by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who, as we all know, are industry titans. The site also shows different exciting careers, that unexpectedly use coding to help students think about their future careers.

Emotionally Crafted Experiences

Emotionally Crafted Experiences: Layering Literacies in Minecraft by S.S. Abrams

As of 2016, Minecraft was arguably one of the most popular online video games with nearly 23 million subscribers around the world. This may have been replaced by the new game called Fortnite, but the same principals can probably still be applied. In my own third-grade classroom, I can't make through the day without at least five students talking about their virtual world.

What does this all have to do with me, a devoted classroom teacher? Well, half of our job is all about making connections. We want to connect a student's academic world to their world outside of the classroom. In ELA terms, that could mean incorporating literacy with whatever the latest video game craze is. 

According to Abrams, there is a rhythm for creating 'layers of literacy' and 'meaning making.' It creates this beautiful colladeiscope of thoughts and ideas. What this boils down to is a twist on Fan Fiction, a topic we have covered extensively in class. This activity can turn my classroom's favorite video game into a literary writing lesson.

Teaching With Interactive Picture E-Books

Teaching With Interactive Picture E-Books by H.R. Schugar

Who doesn't love a good picture book? They are fun, engaging reads that can cover a whole gambit of standards and objectives in your ELA classroom. When you take a fan favorite and make it digital with fun voices and graphics, it's going to get that much better. Before you jump right on in and use Picture E-Books with your students, please consider these important points:

1. You need to familiarize yourself and your students with the device or app that they will be using. 
1. Show students how to turn on the device and applications.
2. Show students how to orient themselves on the screen.
3. Demonstrate for students how to open the e-book and turn the pages. 
1. This would make for a great lesson on print awareness, even if it is digital
4. Set expectations for your students as they use the e-book and let them know what they should be doing before, during, and after reading.
2. Teach students how to transfer their knowledge about reading in print to reading in e-books.
3. Beware of gimmicky apps or ones with lots of distractions and advertisements. 

Graphic Novels for the Digital Classroom

Graphic Novels for the Digital Classroom by Lindsey Fuller

Despite the slight taboo in the classroom, graphic novels are almost the perfect piece of text to add to your classroom library. They create quite a punch! Think about your reluctant readers for a second, which I know we all already do. The text is broken up into small manageable pieces, they have incredibly engaging visuals, and are often on topics that kids at all reading levels devour. Not to mention Graphic Novels have this undeniable 'cool' factor. It's almost to the point where kids can even forget about their dislike and struggles with reading.

Cut to the iPad, a technological advancement that nearly every kid wants to get their hands on. What happens when you join these two kids super powers? You create a digital classroom where students are not only reading, but are beyond excited about. There are countless ways to add this to your classroom with the many computer programs out there. Pinellas County School, for example, uses MyOn to give students fun, engaging books.

By adding 'digital graphic novels' to the classroom, you are giving your struggling students, one more support to practice and improve their reading craft. I know that's something that every teacher can get behind.

Writing in the Wild

Writing in the Wild: Motivation in Fan-Based Affinity Spaces by Jen Scott Curwood

Contemporary affinity spaces have 9 defining features:

1. A common endeavor is primary.
2. Participation is self-directed, multi-faceted, and dynamic.
3. Portals are often multi-modal.
4. Provide a passionate, public audience for content.
5. Socialization plays an important role in affinity spaces.
6. Leadership roles vary within and among portals.
7. Many portals place a high value on cataloguing content and documenting practices.
8. Knowledge is distributed across the entire affinity space.
9. Affinity spaces 

To action in your classroom, here are four steps that you can start right away

•  Design a survey and ask students about their experiences with fan culture and online communities. Inquire about their reading and writing practices in out-of-school contexts and then create literacy learning activities to connect with these experiences. 
• Expand the boundaries of your classroom by incorporating an online space, such as Ning or Scholar. In this space, you can model the peer- review process for your students, both during an in-class workshop and an online demonstration. They can then share their writing and offer constructive feedback to others. 
• Encourage students to engage in collaborative and multimodal responses. For example, students can create a podcast in which they take on the perspective of a specific character and react to key events or they create a blog that explores composers or themes. Alternatively, students can use a video game engine to create machinima based on classroom texts. 
• Online affinity spaces depend on technology, but teachers can create affinity spaces within the physical environment, too. For instance, teachers can draw on workshop-based approaches to student writing and share this work with a wide audience by creating a gallery, holding a poetry slam, or crafting a literary.

Is That How I Really Sound?

Artistic Technology Integration

Artistic Technology Integration

Guiding Principles for Artistic Technology Integration

1. You don't have to be a technology wizard.
2. Identify the tools you need.
3. Leverage the capabilities of digital tools.
4. Use a gradual release of responsibility approach.
5. Consider the socially situated nature of learning.
6. Don't let the obstacles and challenges slow you down.

Digital Storytelling Revisited

Digital Storytelling Revisited: An Educator's Use of Innovative Literacy Practice by C. Shelby-Caffey

Seven Elements of Effective Digital Stories:

1. Point of View: intentionally told from the POV of its creator.
2. Dramatic Question: an attention getter that piques a viewer's interest.
3. Emotional Content: storyline that draws the reader in and stirs an emotional connection.
4. Economy: carefully crafting a script that relays the intended message.
5. Pacing: maintaining a rhythm that keeps an audience interested
6. Voice: using your voice to tell a story
7. Soundtrack: the use of music to produce an emotional connection to the story

Writing for the Big Screen

Writing for the Big Screen: Literacy Experiences in a Moviemaking Project by Carol Bedard and Charles Fuhrken

Image-dominated texts are becoming more and more prevalent. Just look out our social-media. How easy is it to flip through all the text written on our feeds until we see an image that we like. I can't be the only one. In addition, there has been an emergence of multi-modal perspectives. These are texts or features that include an combination of talk, gesture, image, sound, and movement.

With this article, a 6-week long curriculum was created for an over-the-summer project. Over 100 students participated with the goal of learning moviemaking strategies along side their reading and writing curriculum. The goal was that by incorporating film, the students' views as readers and writers would shift to make them more aware of what they were doing.

This strategy was based on scaffolds and sequences. Each moviemaking activity was sequences with a literacy activity. In turn, it was used as a scaffold into the next step. In this way, students were able to feel accomplished with each piece of the moviemaking puzzle.

In the end, students were offered and learned new strategies and processes in their roles as readers and writers because they were thinking from a film makers point of view.

Blog It Like It's HOT

HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking: Lisa Zawilinski

What is a blog? A blog is an editable web page with posts in chronological order.

Why bother with a blog?  The internet is this generations defining technology for literacy. Each aspect of the internet requires a different set of skills and strategies to be successful. It is the school's job to teach students these skills for college and career readiness.
-- Blogs also teach about online communication. For bloggers to be understood, they need to write their ideas effectively and clearly. 
-- Blogs in the classroom can help to bridge the cap between out-of-school and in-school literacies. 

Four Types of Blogging...

1. Classroom News: Used to share news and events with students or parents. This is a great way to spark communication between everyone involved.
2. Mirror: Gives students a space to reflect and share what they are thinking. 
3. Showcase: Teachers may use this kind of blog to highlight student or class work. 
4. Literature Response: Instead of writing in a journal, students can give their responses to reading (or any subject) with a blog.