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Exploring

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New literacy close reading

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Safety

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A collection of articles, videos, and other resources on internet safety, cyberbullying, digital responsibility, and media and digital literacy.

Digital Responsibility

Common Core in Action: Teaching Online Ethics by Heather Wolpert-Gawron (2014): A look at a key element of digital citizenship-responsible use of intellectual property-and the eighth-grade Common Core standard for gathering, using, and attributing relevant information.

Five-Minute Film Festival: Copyright and Fair Use for Educators by Amy Borovoy (2013): In K-12 education, it's a challenge to navigate the copyright and fair use waters. What can educators use? How can they use it? We have some fun, engaging videos to help teachers and students understand this confusing subject.

The Basics of Open Technology by Ira Socol (2015): From abundant tools and smart budgeting to accessibility and trust, the Albemarle County Public Schools district maintains a tech program that leverages digital literacy for all students.

Five-Minute Film Festival: Are We Addicted to Technology? by Amy Erin Borovoy (2014): Can't put your device down? Obsessing over social media? You may want to dig in to this playlist of videos and resources to help educators, parents, and students reflect on their relationship with technology.

Media and Digital Literacy

Other Resources From Edutopia

Additional Resources on the Web

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A collection of articles, videos, and other resources on internet safety, cyberbullying, digital responsibility, and media and digital literacy. Common Core in Action: Teaching Online Ethics by Heather Wolpert-Gawron (2014): A look at a key element of digital citizenship-responsible use of intellectual property-and the eighth-grade Common Core standard for gathering, using, and attributing relevant information.

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How to.

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So how are we doing on the push to teach "digital literacy" across the K12 school spectrum? From my perspective as a school-based technology coach and history teacher, I'd say not as well as we might wish - in part because our traditional approach to curriculum and instruction wants to sort everything into its place.

Digital literacy is defined as "the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate, and create information using a range of digital technologies." Many educational and business professional cite is as a critical 21st century skill. Even so, many schools have struggled to adapt it into their curriculum.

This is often because most institutions already have rigorous, established curricula with little wiggle room - and this is especially true in schools subject to state and federal testing. Content becomes king. However, there are ways that schools can adapt these skills into existing structures - integrating them into their current pedagogical framework.

Evaluating online content is a research skill

Administrators often tell me they cannot meet new digital literacy requirements because they cannot add a "digital literacy" course or requirement. Here's the other way: the need for students to "critically navigate and evaluate" online content is better viewed as an extension of research skills. Just as we don't teach a class called "research," we do not need to teach "evaluating online content" as a separate course or unit of study. We should teach research skills in the context of existing subject matter.

For example, when my students do research in US History, they are not only allowed but encouraged to use online content. However, when using internet material (as opposed to a peer reviewed article or an academic book), they need to include further evaluation of the content.

One of my favorite tools to use in doing this is the CRAAP test developed by the University of California at Chico. This method requires students to evaluate a source based on its Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. In fact, this method could easily be applied to "traditional" sources as well. ( Here's a public source handout.)

With the rise of academics who write blogs and use social media (such as Twitter and Facebook), and given the wealth of self-published content generally, pertinent information is now moving away from traditional forms. A student in science can learn a great deal from Neil Degrass Tyson's Podcast; in fact, it's likely a more accessible medium for young students than his published articles. Additionally, students need to know what online content they can reproduce and how to credit it properly (digital ethics).

The problem students face in the new world is no longer access to information, but rather how to deal with the glut of content that confronts them when they google a research topic. If we want them to effectively navigate online material (as 21st century learners), then research now needs to include not only "traditional" methods and materials, but digital ones as well. We need to ensure that they know how to evaluate a website, a blog post, a tweet, a Facebook entry. These evaluative skills transfer cross curricularly and prepare students for the broader world of online communication.

Engaging online is a modern communication skill

Engaging in effective discourse and debate is a necessary skill that many of us learned in school via class discussions, group activities, classroom debates, in class presentations, etc. Being able to effectively communicate is a requirement to success in many facets of life (academia, business, personal life, etc).

In our emerging digital world, a new medium of exchange has developed: online engagement, especially via social media. Effectively engaging online requires a myriad of skills that we strive to foster in school - effective written communication, brevity and civility. These components are often highlighted in Digital Citizenship programs, but in tradition-bound K12 education, we often deride social media as trite or ineffective.

However, social media use has quickly grown in professional and academic realms. I recently had a conversation with a friend from my high school days, Brian Muse. Brian is a successful attorney with a practice focused on the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). The primary focus of our conversation was the role that social media plays in Brian's practice.

Even I (an avid proponent of the power of online engagement) was surprised at how much value Brian and his peers put on social media. In addition to maintaining an active Twitter account (with the full encouragement of his firm), he also writes a blog on relevant ADA law.

Brian told me that social media, especially Twitter, is an effective tool for legal professionals in several ways: networking, branding, and research. As an attorney in a dynamic field, it's his job to predict where the law is going; Twitter serves as an effective crowdsourcing medium for him to take the pulse of labor law. His online presence and engagement (through his blog and Twitter account) allows him to share his knowledge with others and has led to several referrals from attorneys or chambers of commerce.

Speaking both a professional and a parent, Brian told me: "Any child that graduates high school with these skills will have such a leg up in this business world."

Just as we anticipate that the traditional communication skills we teach children as part of our established curriculum will translate to a broader skill set, so will their ability to engage with people safely and effectively online. Likewise, just as we do not need to establish a separate curriculum or class for "digital literacy," we can incorporate updated 21st century communication skills across our established curricular models.

Students need to create. Projects become digital.

If you are familiar with the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, then you know that creation is at the highest order of learning. Teachers recognize this; it's why we give students various projects and assignments: a science experiment, a research essay, a model UN debate, etc. With new technologies, students have the ability to create dynamic, multi-media projects quickly and easily. By combining these tools with a sophisticated topic, we can engage students in new and creative ways.

For example, my history students make documentaries for class. This project requires that they perform sophisticated research (using both traditional and digital resources), incorporate a variety of media (images, video, sound, etc), they must write, and then they present/peer review in class. This modernized research project addresses all of the elements of digital literacy in my classroom yet doesn't require additional in or out of class time to implement. It is an effective way to engage my students in effective, 21st century learning.

One reason that teachers are often hesitant to adopt new technologies or give students digitally enhanced assignments is because they themselves are unfamiliar with the available tools - and suppose that giving a "Movie Project" requires that they teach about movie making software. I try to encourage my faculty to "let go." Tell the students what the final project should look like (such as a video) and then tell them to pick the venue that works best for them to create a finished project.

New technology is easy to use/navigate and with YouTube and online blogs, students can easily teach themselves how to use them. Now this doesn't mean that faculty should not learn these new tools. In fact, I often challenge my faculty to use MovieMaker for their laptops or iMovie on their iPads to create a video of anything they want (their children, a pet, a favorite sports team).

Not only do they discover how easy it is to use the software, they see how quickly they can overcome any hurdles they encounter in the process. In fact, I often tout creative problem solving as important skill for students to develop - projects like this help them to develop those skills.

Digital Literacy: An everyday dimension of learning

Digital Literacy is a crucial skill that we as educators must foster and encourage in our classrooms (and administrators must support in the broader curriculum). I hope that these examples have helped to demonstrate how 21st century skills do not require additional class time or new course development. They often do require some tweaking of our established curricula.

I strongly encourage administrators to provide robust professional development and learning time for their staff and faculty. Your teachers can integrate digital literacy into everyday learning, provided you share the resources and support they need to shift a traditional curriculum to a more innovative one. If you do, our students will be better digital citizens and curators of online content; a necessary skill for success in the 21st century and a valuable contribution to civil society.

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How to Infuse Digital Literacy Throughout the Curriculum

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So how are we doing on the push to teach "digital literacy" across the K12 school spectrum? From my perspective as a school-based technology coach and history teacher, I'd say not as well as we might wish - in part because our traditional approach to curriculum and instruction wants to sort everything into its place.

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Visual literacy

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Common Core State Standards (CCSS)

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.6-8.7: "Integrate visual information (e.g., in charts, graphs, photographs, videos or maps) with other information in print and digital texts."

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.7: "Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words."

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.6: "Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text."

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.SL.1: "Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively."

National Council of Teachers of English Standards (NCTE)

Standard 1: Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts.

The Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning Corporation (McRel)

Standard 9: Uses viewing skills and strategies to interpret visual media.

On their own -- without explicit, intentional and systematic instruction -- students will not develop VL skills because the language for talking about images is so foreign. Ever heard kids debate the object salience and shot angles of a Ryan Gosling meme? To add to the instructional complexity, visuals come in an assortment of formats:

How to Teach Visual Literacy: Visual Thinking Routines

The VL strategies described in the sections that follow are simple to execute, but powerfully effective in helping students interpret images.

The think-aloud strategy -- typically used to model how adept readers make meaning from a text (demonstrated in the following short video) -- can be adapted for "reading" a visual artifact. After you model how to do it, have learners try this approach with a partner. Encourage elaborate responses. If you need a crash course in visual grammar before implementing this strategy in class, build your background knowledge with Discovering How Images Communicate.

Model Think-Aloud strategy from Derek Fernandez on Vimeo.
Visual Thinking Strategies
Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a specific approach to whole-class viewing and talking about art that primarily uses these questions:

What's going on in this picture?

What do you see that makes you say that?

What more can we find?

VTS encourages students to think beyond the literal by discussing multiple meanings, metaphors and symbols. Used with all ages -- elementary students (see video below) up to Harvard medical students -- implementation is simple. The New York Times' weekly VTS lessons are a good place to start.
Asking the 4WS
Inspired by Debbie Abilock's Noodletools exercises, I developed the 4WS activity to help students make observations, connections and inferences about an artist's agenda, and develop ideas about a work's significance:

In Five Card Flickr, you are dealt five random photos. To promote VL, have students follow these steps:

1. Jot down one word that they associate with each image.

2. Identify a song that comes to mind for one or more of the images.

3. Describe what all the images have in common.

4. Compare answers with classmates.

During a subsequent discussion, ask students to show what elements of the photo prompted their responses.
Image Analysis Worksheets
To promote analysis of key features specific to different formats, pick an appropriate tool from The National Archives:

Step-by-Step: Working with Images That Matter

The following lesson is partially based on Ann Watts Pailliotet's notion of deep viewing, a process that occurs in three phases:

Literal observation

Interpretation

Evaluation/application

Remember the 1957 photo of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan? Eckford was one of the first African-American students to attend the newly desegregated Little Rock High School. In the photo, you see her entering the school grounds while a throng of white students jeer, most prominently Hazel Bryan, teeth barred, enraged. The photo was disseminated worldwide within a couple of days, uncorking new support for civil rights.

Here are the lesson procedures:
Literal Observation Phase
Give students a hard copy of the Eckford and Bryan photo. To help them internalize the image, tell the learners to study it for one minute before turning it over and doodling a version of it from memory. Next have students write what they literally observe (What is pictured? What type of language is used? How is space used?) into a shared Google Doc.
Interpretation Phase
Copy all the student-generated descriptions from the Google Doc, paste them into Tagxedo, and then project the resulting collaborative word cloud for the class to view. Invite students to interpret the word cloud while periodically re-examining the photo. ( What are the most important words? Which words do you have questions about? Describe your feelings about the photo. What other images are you reminded of, past or present? What messages are implicit and explicit? How did you analyze the photo? What do you understand now that you didn't before?) Then have students help you summarize the conversation.
Evaluation and Application Phase
Direct students to legibly write about the image's relevance on notecards. ( Does the implied purpose of the photo convey ideas that are important? How? Is the image biased? How so?) Take the postcards and pin them around the Eckford and Bryan photo to create an instant bulletin board.

To extend the lesson, show the following six-minute video that narrates how Hazel Bryan, as a twenty-year-old, apologized in person to Elizabeth Eckford. The video features a contemporary photo of both women, mature now, arm in arm, smiling in front of the once infamous Little Rock High School. ( Does the video alter your reactions to the original image? How? Will you approach other socially charged photos differently? Why?)

Final Frame

When reading was taught the traditional way, with printed texts, students accepted the authority of the author and received his or her message as a window on reality. In the 21st century, students need to respectfully question the author's authority, articulate what is represented and how, and infer what has been excluded and why.

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Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies | Edutopia

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Do you wish your students could better understand and critique the images that saturate their waking life? That's the purpose of visual literacy (VL), to explicitly teach a collection of competencies that will help students think through, think about and think with pictures. Standards Support Visual Literacy Instruction

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Research

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From reading to new literacies.

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What are new literacies?

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Something seems wrong

A few days ago, I tweeted something that wasn't particularly funny, but I got this response: ¹

I don't know anyone named Cory Folse, and I don't know who this @jokesallnight person is, either. So I ignored the tweet, kind of glad I had made someone happy, but kind of confused.

But then a couple of days ago, I was still thinking about this weird tweet, so I decided to see who this Cory Folse person was. I clicked on his user name, which showed me a list of his most recent tweets, with the most recent ones on the top:

Ah. Now I see that Cory isn't trying to be my friend at all. He's a spammer, someone (or perhaps a computer program) who is trying to get people to check out the @jokesallnight user. He sends random tweets to random people all the time, trying to compliment people to soften them up and make them more likely not to see through his lousy advertising. (Whatever you do, please don't reward this behavior by looking up @jokesallnight and following that account on Twitter. I reported Cory for spam and blocked him.)

So let's think about the clues that Cory wasn't really my friend. Something seemed wrong in a lot of ways: I didn't know his name, his response didn't make sense in context, and he never uploaded an image to represent his user name. I've used Twitter enough to know that those three things combined often mean that a response-tweet is spam. You could say that I'm "literate" in the ways of Twitter, so I recognize when people act in "illiterate" ways.

I'm sure you know people who seem surprisingly illiterate when working with digital technology. I get forwards all the time that claim Apple or Applebee's will give me $2,000 if I continue the forwarding chain, and others that tell me about all the stupid luxuries Democrats or travel agents have insisted on when flying. Those who are email literate recognize the signs that these things probably aren't true (and a quick search on snopes.com usually clears up any lingering doubts about what's a scam and what isn't). There's even a whole website, literallyunbelievable.org, chronicling people who read the fake news on theonion.com and think it's real.

What's wrong with these email-forwarders and fake-news-believers? I suggest that they're not literate in the ways of new media. They saw something that would be fishy to many readers who are better acquainted with the usual moves made in those contexts, but no alarms went off in their minds.

This article is an exploration of new media literacies, with the end goals of reminding you not to be a sucker who falls for illiterate silliness and encouraging you to rely on your new media literacies when composing with digital technology. To get there, I want us to think about why we use the word literacy to discuss these online issues, how literacy has been expanded in other contexts, and what new media has to do with it all.

The Traditional Model of Literacy

We usually think of a particular skill when we hear the word literacy -knowing how to read. When students can barely read, teachers complain, "They're barely literate!" When politicians say, "Kids today are illiterate!" they mean that the kids can't read-or perhaps more subtly, that they can't read very well. That is, they don't understand the complexities and nuances that practiced readers see in a big splattering of words on a page or screen.

The politician's claim reminds us of another aspect of literacy that's usually tied to the reading angle: the ability to write. When politicians rile up crowds by calling kids illiterate, they often mean, "Kids today don't understand complex reading, and they can't produce complex writing, either." So implied in the skill of literacy is also the ability to write. This makes sense; if I can't make sense of a piece of writing's purpose, organization, figures of speech, and rhetorical moves, I probably can't create a piece of writing that uses those aspects of writing in sophisticated ways.

And as you can hear from my examples of the teacher and the politician, literacy is often a word that shows up when people want to describe something that people don't have. I'm unlikely to be praised for my literacy when I accurately summarize a tough essay in class, and I'm unlikely to read a particularly nice magazine article and say to the author, "Oh, you were so particularly literate in that piece!" Literacy is usually used more as a base-line for competence, something that we ought to have but that stands out most noticeably when it's not there, like the space where a demolished building used to be, or when we see a person not wearing any pants.

New Models of Literacy

Why go into so much detail about the traditional model of literacy-the skill of knowing how to effectively read and write? Because when literacy is applied to new contexts-as it is all the time-it often retains the baggage of its traditional usage. Even in these new contexts, literacy is often used to describe a lack that we wish were filled, just as when we describe people who can't read. Literacy is also often tied to effective reading and effective writing (though sometimes reading and writing are expanded to different forms of understanding and acting).

For example, I described myself as "literate" at the beginning of this piece because I saw through the Twitter spammer's tricks. That's because I was separating myself from the "illiterate" people who fall for his spam, and because I wanted to emphasize that communicating well on Twitter is tied both to reading and writing tweets effectively.

A quick Google search for literacy shows me various other ways that people use the word:

Financial literacy: the ability to understand complex financial information, and the ability to act wisely on that financial know-how

Information literacy: the ability to find the right information for a given task, and the ability to use that information in the best way (for an essay, work assignment, protest rally, or whatever)

Media literacy: the ability to read or view the various tricks used by the media to subtly emphasize one point of view, and the ability to compose messages that use media trickery effectively for a given rhetorical situation

In all three of those examples of literacies, I imagine the term developed as people began to realize how illiterate their friends and colleagues seemed to be. (Perhaps most terminology begins this way: as a way for individuals to draw attention to their own strengths in comparison to a rabble of "those other people." I definitely feel kind of cool when I catch a Twitter spammer.) In that framework, financial literacy works as a helpful term because so many people seem to lack basic skills related to budgeting, managing credit cards, and paying off debt. To people who have financial literacy, those who lack it seem to be missing a set of skills so fundamental that to not have them is akin to a reading person's feelings toward someone who can't read. Along the same tack, information literacy works as a term because so many people seem to lack the basic skills necessary to finding the information they need, especially in our increasingly information-centered world. And media literacy is a helpful term because so many people are duped by the political and social messages embedded in the news, movies, and music we consume.

So what happens when we apply these same ideas to new media reading and writing contexts?

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When literacy is applied to new contexts-as it is all the time-it often retains the baggage of its traditional usage. Even in these new contexts, literacy is often utilized to describe a lack that we wish were filled and as something that involves both effective reading and effective writing (though sometimes reading and writing are expanded to different forms of understanding and acting).

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This post first appeared on Educating Modern Learners
Changing Definitions of Literacy

Literacy, defined most simply, is the ability to read and write. But increasingly, we recognize that such a basic definition does not convey the power - economic, political, social, cultural - that comes with literacy (or the lack of power that accompanies illiteracy).

UNESCO, for example, defines literacy as " the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society."

But even this definition, now a decade old, fails to articulate how literacy might change in an "information age."

"New literacies" that arise from new technologies include things like text-messaging, blogging, social networking, podcasting, and videomaking. These digital technologies alter and extend our communication abilities, often blending text, sound, and imagery. Although connected to older, "offline" practices, these technologies change what it means to both "read" and "write" texts. (They change the meaning of "text," as well.)

These rise of "new literacies" necessary to wield these new technologies effectively place new demands on all of us - not just on students. We are all expected to move much more quickly to identify problems, for example; to know where to find information to help us address those problems - often on our own; to evaluate and synthesize information from a number of sources in order to try to solve those problems; to communicate with others about problems and potential solutions; and to monitor the solutions we've found and stay up-to-date with new issues as they arise.

We are increasingly expected do these tasks via the Internet, of course, to address elements of our professional and our personal lives. We do this as students, teachers, workers, and citizens alike.

Of course, it's still useful to think about how many these new literacies do dovetail with that UNESCO definition too: to identify and interpret materials. But it's important to consider how these practices, particularly when they're online, shape comprehension and interpretation in new ways. How do these new practices shape community participation in the construction of knowledge?

For educators, this must involve a more sophisticated response than the Internet is "good" or "bad." Moreover, it isn't just a matter of thinking about potentially different cognitive experiences of reading digital versus print materials (although there is a growing body of research to that end). It's about thinking about how students "move through" materials as they read and research and how digital materials make that a fundamentally different process.

Learners & New Literacies

University of Connecticut's Donald Leu ( PDF) has made several observations about these new literacies:

Online research and comprehension is a self-directed process of text construction and knowledge construction.

Five practices appear to define online research and comprehension processing: (1) identifying a problem and then (2) locating, (3) evaluating, (4) synthesizing, and (5) communicating information.

Online research and comprehension is not isomorphic with offline reading comprehension; additional skills and strategies appear to be required.

Online contexts may be especially supportive for some struggling readers.

Adolescents are not always very skilled with online research and comprehension.

Collaborative online reading and writing practices appear to increase comprehension and learning.

Number 5 on this list in particular highlights how dangerous the myth of the " digital native" can be - this idea that students born in an information age are somehow naturally or automatically predisposed to understand new information technologies. It is true (according to research from the Pew Research Center) that many teens now lead "tech-saturated lives": 95% use the Internet. 78% have cell phones. 80% have a desktop or laptop. 81% use social networking sites. But that doesn't mean that they are necessarily highly skilled when it comes to these new literacies. And as Leu points out too, having "traditional" literacy skills isn't an indicator of having these new proficiencies either.

New Literacies and the Classroom

How will the role of educators change with the rise of new literacies? This is particularly important as students (again, all of us) have to navigate more complex and more rich media - online and not just in print.

With a world of digital materials at students' fingertips, traditional instructional materials like textbooks are no longer canonical. But that doesn't mean that the role of the educator is necessarily diminished. To the contrary, educators could be even more important as they guide students through the contexts of learning materials, not simply the content. Again, as Leu points out, collaborative practices seem to help boost learning.

This has profoundly important implications for educators' professional development, something that cannot be addressed by treating new technologies as new instructional tools. Educators must develop these new literacies themselves - for themselves - before they can support students in developing them for themselves. Educators must learn to engage with new technologies and the literacy practices surrounding them (by blogging, for example, or by gaming).

New literacies will bring about new challenges for schools, because in no small part, new technologies (and the cultural practices around them) are changing incredibly quickly. All this in turn raises important questions about how - indeed, whether - new literacies "fit" into current school practices, and how schools will respond.

Reflecting on Your Own Literacies...
What are some of the new literacies that you believe you have developed as a result of new technologies? What are some of the new literacies you recognize you lack? How can schools support all members of their community -- teachers, administrators, students, parents -- in developing these new literacies? Image credits: Tim Geers

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This post first appeared on Educating Modern Learners Literacy, defined most simply, is the ability to read and write. But increasingly, we recognize that such a basic definition does not convey the power - economic, political, social, cultural - that comes with literacy (or the lack of power that accompanies illiteracy).

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The New Literacies: text, images, music, video | Glogster EDU - Interactive multimedia posters

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See the Glog! The New Literacies: text, images, music, video | Glogster EDU - Interactive multimedia posters

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Students are immersed in 21st century "new literacy" technologies, but are schools preparing them for the future?

Are you familiar with the Pacific Northwest tree octopus? Most likely not. Good thing there is a website on the Internet to tell you all about it! According to the tree octopus site, this solitary cephalopod resides in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on North America's west coast. It is amphibious but lives in trees, spending only its early life in water. It has eight arms, complete with sensitive suckers, and a soft body, just like a regular octopus. It is intelligent and inquisitive. And it does not exist.

Surprised? Again, most likely not. But 25 seventh-grade, high-performing online readers, when directed to the site in a recent study by the New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut, all thought the Pacific Northwest tree octopus was real.

"Knowing truth from fiction on the Internet is a huge problem," says Kenneth Eastwood, superintendent of Middletown City (N.Y.) School District. "Students might be good researchers, but they tend not to scrutinize the information."

Apparently high-performing online readers are not so high performing after all. And those 25 students were the same top students who, when first surveyed from a larger pool of 800 students in urban Connecticut school districts, said, "You can't trust everything you see online." But you can always trust a tree octopus. (Or maybe that's a mountain walrus. Check the site.)

It might seem that evaluating information online-just one form of "new literacy"-and reading a book-more of a foundational literacy-are pretty much the same thing. After all, you can't trust everything you read, either. But there are differences. And those differences, when brought into the classroom and incorporated into curricula, are enriching the educational experiences of many K12 students. Unfortunately, many administrators, although they are beginning to recognize the need to revise their districts' media skills instruction, lack the resources, and more importantly the vision, to bring the new literacies into the classroom.

21st Century Skills

Foundational or traditional literacy is about print on a page, or decoding and making sense of words, images and other content that a reader can string together and then begin to comprehend. They are the words and pictures students read and pore over that are contained in textbooks, in novels, on standardized tests, and even in comic books.

The new literacies encompass much more. Their utility lies in online reading comprehension and learning skills, or 21st century skills, required by the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs), including content found on wikis, blogs, video sites, audio sites, and in e-mail. They require the ability not just to "read" but also to navigate the World Wide Web, locate information, evaluate it critically, synthesize it and communicate it-all skills that are becoming vital to success in this century's economy and workforce.

What complicates the situation is that there is a growing gap between what today's students do in school and what they do at home. According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, "The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap between Internet-Savvy Students and Their Schools," students are spending 27 hours a week online at home, compared to an average of 15 minutes per week at school. "It's hard to develop online skills in traditional classrooms when so little instructional time is online," says Susan Patrick, president of the North American Council for Online Learning. "Online learning is not this separate silo that we might need to use as a tool." Administrators should have such learning weaved into classrooms, she adds.

Today's students, the "digital natives" as they are sometimes called, are practically inseparable from their computers, video games and the Internet. Moreover, a recent study by the National School Boards Association found that 96 percent of students who have online access use the technologies for social networking such as blogging, sharing music, instant messaging, and posting their own movies. Not exactly the first thing you think of when you imagine a classroom.

And although digital natives may be tech savvy, they don't use a lot of information, or at least they don't know how to think critically about the information they use. They need guidance on how to find the best information most efficiently and determine fact from fiction.

"Technology and knowledge in general are growing at an exponential rate," says Mary Colombo, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at Hopkinton (Mass.) Public Schools. "Where do you find it? How do you gather it? How should you use it?"

New Literacies Research Lab

At the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut, tucked amid the rolling hills of northern Connecticut, researchers are conducting studies on the state of new literacies in schools and encouraging district leaders to realize the importance of such technologies, particularly in middle school. The six-year-old research lab, with $8 million in private and federal funds for research, professional development, assessment and curriculum development, is the most widely recognized center worldwide for doing such research. And the 14-member team develops research-based evidence to prepare students in these new skills.

The lab's co-directors, Donald Leu, Douglas Hartman and Julie Coiro, maintain that it's high time for school districts to focus on this new form of literacy. "It's a huge challenge because we've never been in a position where every month or every year there are new reading and writing skills that you have to acquire because there are new technologies," Leu says. "We've had the same technology for 500 years. We have basically been reading books. Who knew about wikis or blogs" just five years ago?

But few, if any, of the new literacies have found their way into the American classroom. "Indeed, many seem to be resisted overtly by deliberate educational policies or covertly by educators who sometimes are not nearly as literate with the Internet as the students they teach," according to Leu and others at UConn, who wrote a research paper, "What Is New about the New Literacies of Online Reading Comprehension?"

Economically challenged districts have little incentive to include online reading skills in the instructional program because they face pressure to raise reading test scores on assessments that have nothing to do with online comprehension. As a result, many students are not taught these online skills, especially those students who require the most support-and who have the least access to the Internet at home.

"And think about the wealthy districts," Leu says. "The kids have the Internet at home. When they come to school, the teachers, the superintendents and the administrators feel less pressure for AYP, and so they're integrating the Internet more into the classroom. They're getting the skills. And the kids who are the lowest- performing students on state reading assessments are being denied them just because of the pressure of these tests."

Among the UConn lab's various studies, one with the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory/Learning Point Associates created an online reading comprehension assessment. It asked seventh-graders from a Connecticut district first to download a document from a blog post, requiring them to search the web, and to post a new blog message to communicate what they found. The results showed no statistically significant correlation between scores on state reading assessments and students' performance on online reading assessments. It suggests that there's "something different going on here," Leu says. "That's highly unusual in the reading world-all reading comprehension assessments correlate with one another."

New Instructional Models

Under the lab's experimental study with Clemson University in South Carolina, Teaching Internet Reading Comprehension to Adolescents, the research team is now developing a three-phase instructional model for teachers, called Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT). This year the team will randomly choose seventh-grade classroom teachers in Connecticut and South Carolina to receive instruction in the new literacies using the model.

Another study underway in California is ascertaining the contexts in which students learn new literacies best. "It's a qualitative study where one of the doctoral students is watching new literacies being introduced to the classroom, and the kids are the informants to the researcher," Leu says. The doctoral student learns the context in which the students' new skills are acquired, such as from a teacher or another student, or from something the student decided to do on the Internet or from something that was assigned. "That information is really going to be important to understand what contexts facilitate the acquisition of new literacies," Leu says. "Is it when the teacher tells you directly, or is it when students explore something and figure something out? And those contexts are important as we think about integrating these things into school classrooms."

Testing Mandates

Ironically, the federal No Child Left Behind law includes an Enhancing Education Through Technology section mandating that every student become technologically literate by the end of eighth grade. But there are few, if any, federal funds going to schools under this mandate, and the law doesn't clearly define the mandate, Leu and Hartman say. Every state has technology standards, but they go untested, which makes real change difficult to achieve.

Joseph Cirasuolo, chief operating officer of the American Association of School Administrators, agrees that these new skills are about the present, not just the future. "Until we change assessment laws or NCLB starts to test for these skills, I think we'll have a major time problem" where the school day and year is limited, he says. "This will be a bigger problem in school districts that serve children who don't test as well."

"Technology literacy is endangered by well-intentioned educators trying to create checklists and tests," says Dennis Harper of Generation YES, which provides programs for youths to improve their education through technology, such as TechYES, which is a technology literacy certification program for sixth- through ninth-graders. "And they artificially put an end to the process. Technology should open new doors to students, not limit them." Leu adds, "This is really critical - it's not only that there are new reading skills and strategies involved, but our public policies, because they're not in tune with what's going on, are actually preventing the kids we care about the most from acquiring these skills."

Learning from Other Nations

As news reports proclaim that the world is getting "flatter" as a result of a rise in economic and workforce competition from foreign countries, there are signs that the U.S. educational system is not taking the new literacies seriously enough, Leu and Hartman say. The National Assessment of Educational Progress-the nation's report card-has no plans to test such skills at least for another 10 years. And the United States is not participating in the 2009 PISA reading assessment, which is a worldwide assessment for 15-year-olds conducted every decade by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The 2009 assessment will include online reading literacy skills for the first time. "Assessment needs to be part of it," says Colombo. "We must know how what we're doing is helping students and what new skills they're leaving with when they're out of school."

By contrast, other nations around the globe, particularly developed nations, are taking the new skills quite seriously. Finland, for example, has a national training model for teachers to integrate the Internet and other ICTs into the classroom. The government gives five weeks of paid release time for professional development to all teachers, Leu says. "They know their kids are going to have to compete with other kids," Leu adds. "And they also have a priority for an information technology economy. They're very focused on that."

Ireland is following a similar path. "It's a boom economy right now," Leu says. "It's being called a 'Celtic Tiger.' More software is manufactured in Ireland than in the United States today, and it's because they have a trained workforce. They've invested in integrating technology into their schools so that kids know how to work in an information age, and major companies have been setting up their headquarters in Ireland because they have a trained workforce. Ireland is importing workers now because their economy is so strong. It used to be that they sent their sons and daughters away when they didn't have enough jobs."

The United Kingdom has just developed a national ICT literacies assessment that's being piloted in schools, and in Japan the government subsidizes Internet access in 98 percent of all households because it knows that kids spend more time reading outside of school than they do inside, Leu and Hartman say. In Mexico, there is a national policy to make Internet access available to all schools in all classrooms and all homes in the next 15 years. And all of Singapore's high schools are using online learning, Patrick adds.

State Initiatives

Fortunately, there are pockets of hope in the United States, as various states and districts have taken steps to alter the educational technology landscape. The International Society for Technology in Education encourages administrators across the nation to use the new literacies in classrooms. And the Partnership for the 21st Century Skills, a national advocacy organization focused on infusing 21st century skills into education, recently started joint partnerships with Maine, South Dakota and Massachusetts to bring 21st century teaching and learning skills to students. Other states are also getting involved, including Michigan, North Carolina and West Virginia. Gov. Michael Easley of North Carolina and Gov. Joseph Manchin III of West Virginia realize that students must move beyond mastering instant messaging and MP3s and cope with the bigger demands of the new literacies.

For example, North Carolina has been losing jobs in the textile and clothing industries over the past few years, so Easley's development strategy is designed to introduce more high-skilled jobs. The North Carolina Center for 21st Century Skills is working with business leaders, educators and policy-makers to ensure that all high school students will graduate with new literacy skills that are relevant to jobs today. Among its plans, the center has a program to create smaller learning communities that make class work relevant to contemporary workplaces. It also created Learn and Earn, a one-year high school extension program that allows students to earn two years of college credit or an associate's degree.

West Virginia has also lost jobs in the coal and mining industries, so Manchin implemented the West Virginia 21st Century Skills Initiative, a 30-member board of key leaders, including teacher union and higher education representatives, which is working to restructure the state's education system to integrate 21st century learning and implement online professional development tools.

Wisconsin has a book full of ICT standards, but the difficulty is weaving them into core subject standards that were implemented before the ICT standards were born, according to Barry M. Golden, educational consultant at the Wisconsin Department of Education. "I believe we are ahead of the game with the standards but are far from having them fully implemented, in great part because we don't have the resources at the state level, nor do the districts have the resources at the local level to deliver the training necessary for full implementation," Golden says. "I think it's imperative that the nation look at the challenges facing us in most content areas, 21st century skills, problem and project-based learning, and technology integration in general and conclude that the K12 enterprise must go on a massive retooling effort."

Reaching Out to Districts

In districts where the UConn lab is working, administrators are starting to think about the digital disconnect-the gap between how often students use the Internet at home compared to how often they use the Internet in school. But Leu reiterates that administrators are at different levels of awareness.

Tim Lauer, the principal of Meriwether Lewis Elementary School in Portland, Ore., not only is aware of the technological gulf between what students do in school and at home, but he also points out that the way students conceptualize information is so radically different now from when he was a student four decades ago. "Students are more connected now than ever. They don't even look in books. It's actually really funny as far as where they go to get information. They don't even know what yellow pages are," he says.

School change must start from the top, Leu and Hartman stress. Early on, the research team prepared dozens of Connecticut high-level administrators to work with new literacies over a three-year period, under a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant with the Connecticut Department of Educational Leadership. "We had a series of workshops around the state and we had groups of 40 or 50 people in them to show them what new literacies were, trying to get them to understand these things," Leu says. "If you don't have leadership it's not going to happen. If you're going to change schools, you have to have a vision for it."

While the research lab can offer no primer or "how-to" list that administrators can follow, Leu says, it's key for administrators and teachers to spend time every day online. "If they don't live online, how are they going to communicate to kids how to do these things that they themselves don't do?" Leu asks.

Beyond leadership, Leu says that revamped curricula and preservice teacher education will support teaching new literacies to students. "We've got to coach current teachers to become newly literate, understand how to use the Internet, so they can pass along a lot of those skills, and then we have to implement effective instructional models," he says.

At the Middletown district-where administrators are working to enhance its curriculum with new technologies through a federal Enhancing Education through Technology grant-Eastwood agrees that to address the most important issues one must first properly train the teachers in instructional technology. "New teachers do not do very well with technology integration skills in the classroom," he says.

Hartman's grant with preservice teacher education, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and called the Adolescent Literacy Preservice Initiative, is designed to develop and implement an innovative program of teacher preparation for candidates in secondary math and science education that focuses on foundational print literacy as well as the new literacies. "All of this is gradually receiving greater attention, but the change is huge," Leu says.

Hartman plans to work with a school in the Manchester (Conn.) School District this year, focusing on how teachers already use online reading and writing every day, and then have administrators think about how such technologies can be integrated more fully across grade levels. As teachers develop the skills and language for building a professional school culture, then educators can think about "logical and natural ways to fold" online reading into what the students could and should be learning about using the Internet and other communication technologies, Hartman says.

Patrick believes that school leaders also need to be clearer about their mission, which should be to prepare students for the Information Age and to ensure teachers have online teaching credentials. "I'm going to push our teacher education schools to include these skills" and get certificates, she says. Boise State University is one such example, she explains. It is working with Connections Academy, a free K11 public school distance-learning program, to encourage standard classroom teachers to receive online training skills.

Districts Ahead of the Curve

The lab researchers have worked with more than 500 K12 education leaders in states such as Connecticut, New York and South Carolina who are "starting to get it" and understand "the enormity of the challenge," Leu says.

Portland, Oregon

At Meriwether Lewis Elementary, Lauer oversees classes in digital arts for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders. Held in a computer lab outfitted with 30 Apple MacBook computers, students delve into every subject from filmmaking to music composition to digital photography, but some of the most interesting lessons merge Internet-based programs like Google Earth with 3D modeling and city building programs like SimCity Societies and Google SketchUp. "Students capture real earth images from Google Earth and then expand on them with the other software," explains Lauer. "Each kid gets his or her own property lot to build on."

Lauer says students use web-based search engines like Google to "research zoning and construction issues" and through the software learn the importance of planning and sticking to a budget. Students also share their ideas with classmates and respond to each other's work through a "construction diary" blog.

Scarsdale, New York

This fall, Scarsdale (N.Y.) Public Schools will begin offering a yearlong course through its Teachers Institute on the new literacies so district teachers can collectively examine the pedagogical nature of the technologies and incorporate them into classroom teaching models. The course is inviting national experts in the field to investigate the research that's being done and make recommendations on how participating educators can use the technologies to improve student learning.

"One of our goals is for students to read better online," says district technology director Gerald Crisci. "Becoming more critical, knowing the importance of the source, knowing how to navigate... are all examples of what we're trying to do."

But Scarsdale computer teacher Jodie Giroux stresses that the phrase "new literacies" is almost a misnomer, because what should be achieved is "balanced literacy," or a comprehensive literacy that incorporates traditional print media, electronic media and everything in-between that makes connections among various forms of content. "This is nothing 'new,'" says Giroux. "It's much more like taking what we already know and applying these new technologies to it. It's a good commonsense approach to teaching literacy, in every sense of the word."

The Scarsdale district also has an intensive Capstone Project for fifth-graders in which they choose and research a topic of their own and make a presentation at the end of the year. Giroux says that "inquiry research" is central to the project's ideals. Students are taught the value of framing good questions, how to make connections, and how to research both in print and online. Teaching students how to read web pages and how to find sources on the Internet is paramount, she adds.

Additionally, Paul Folkemer, assistant superintendent of instruction, not only "gets" the importance of new literacies and web 2.0, but he runs and maintains a current events blog for all the district's students. He often reads news articles from various online sources, chooses one he believes will be interesting for young people, rewrites the story himself, posts it to the blog, and poses questions that he thinks will be debated or considered.

"Critical reading is one of the new literacy skills, and the current events blog is an effective strategy for teaching critical reading because students connect the content to their lives and then accurately respond to what they have read," says Folkemer. "The blog gives students an opportunity to read, think and respond in writing to events and issues that are important for them to understand as citizens of democracy."

Folkemer says that whenever he adds a new story to the blog, an e-mail is sent to more than 80 teachers in the district who incorporate the blog articles and questions students raise into their own lessons.

Baltimore, Maryland

Online and technology literacy is part of the success of Connections Academy, a virtual public school based in Baltimore, according to Patricia Hoge, senior director of curriculum and instruction. The academy offers a course, Educational Technology and Online Learning, every year in which students learn Internet safety skills, how to navigate search engines and how to distinguish bogus from authentic sites. Middle school students also learn about intellectual property rights and plagiarism. Assignments are directly related to class work. "We certainly have them well-positioned to move out into the world and use technology skills on a daily basis," Hoge says, "and not just sit in a computer lab once a week."

Monroe, Connecticut

Monroe (Conn.) Public Schools is part of a group of districts turning to organizations such as the Partnership for 21st Century Skills to explore the educational potential of new literacies. The district held a retreat this past summer for school administrators at which they reflected on what 21st century skills are and what it means to have those skills. Assistant Superintendent Richard Canfield, who is also concerned about teaching life skills and lessons in personal finance, says, "Improving these literacies is an enormous task. It is important in every single subject."

Engagement and Motivation

Despite the fact that many students struggle with traditional reading, they're still engaged when they're online. And engagement means they are more excited in school and less likely to drop out. "We think we get spillover into traditional reading," Leu says. "We think we'll get engagement and motivation even with these kids because we'll be integrating reading where they get to control where they're going. We give them a problem to solve and they get to decide where to go."

Leu feels that the much-needed technology shift in American schools might just boil down to patience. "But other nations are doing this stuff," Leu reiterates. "Meanwhile we're still struggling here with the best technology in the world, the most access in the schools, and one might argue the least use."

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It might seem that evaluating information online (just one form of "new literacy") and reading a book (more of a foundational literacy) are pretty much the same thing. But there are differences that, when brought into the classroom and incorporated into curricula, are enriching the educational experiences of many K-12 students.

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Identifying literacies.