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Technology in the Library Supporting Literacy

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Technology in the Library Supporting Literacy

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Did you know our school library offers many digital resources and technology that can support beginning of the school year curriculum. If you would like any more information on a resource come visit Mrs. Huntley in the library!

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Sora Link:

https://soraapp.com/library/nhssdcnh

The Sora app is a digital reading platform. Our school has a subscription to the New Hampshire Schools Shared Library. Sora offers assistive technologies that readers can benefit from such as that offers both ebooks where you can make annotations and highlight text and audiobooks which can benefit students with visual impairments or those working on comprehension skills. Read the article above for more information about audiobooks and their benefits.

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As is required of all women in their 30s, I am in a book club. At the first meeting of this group, one poor unsuspecting woman mentioned that she had listened to that month's selection instead of reading it. That, the rest of the group decided together, is definitely cheating. Never mind that no one could exactly articulate how or why it was cheating; it just felt like it was, and others would agree. She never substituted the audiobook for the print version again (or, if she did, she never again admittedit).

This question - whether or not listening to an audiobook is "cheating" - is one University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Willingham gets fairly often, especially ever since he published a book, in 2015, on the science of reading. (That one was about teaching children to read; he's got another book out next spring about adults and reading.) He is very tired of this question, and so, recently, he wrote a blog post addressing it. (His opening line: "I've been asked this question a lot and I hate it.") If, he argues, you take the question from the perspective of cognitive psychology - that is, the mental processes involved - there is no real difference between listening to a book and reading it. So, according to that understanding of the question: No, audiobooks are notcheating.

His reasoning reveals some fascinating insights about the way the brain makes sense of language, whether written or spoken. But first, consider what that assertion - that listening is cheating - is saying: It suggests that the listener got some reward without putting in the work. Because that does seem to be the typical argument, Willingham said. "It's not that you're missing out on something, or it's not that this experience could be better for you," he told Science of Us. "It's that you're cheating. And so they think you're getting the rewarding part of it ... and it's the difficult part that you've somehow gotten out of." So that implies, Willingham argues, that to your brain, listening is less "work" than reading. And that is true, sort of - but it stops being true somewhere around the fifthgrade.

There are two basic processes happening when you're reading: There is decoding, or translating the strings of letters into words that mean something. And then there is language processing, or comprehension - that is, figuring out the syntax, the story, et cetera. (It's obviously much more complicated than that; this is what's known as the "simple view" of reading, but it's sufficient for thinking about the question at hand.) Researchers have studied the question of comprehension for decades, and "what you find is very high correlations of reading comprehension and listening comprehension," Willingham said. As science writer Olga Khazan noted in 2011, a " 1985 study found listening comprehension correlated strongly with reading comprehension - suggesting that those who read books well would listen to them well. In a 1977 study, college students who listened to a short story were able to summarize it with equal accuracy as those who read it." Listeners and readers retain about equal understanding of the passages they've consumed, in otherwords.

Decoding, by contrast, is specific to reading, Willingham said; this is indeed one more step your mind has to take when reading a print book as compared to listening to the audiobook version. But by about late elementary school, decoding becomes so second-nature thatit isn't any additional "work" for your brain. It happensautomatically.

According to the simple model of reading, then, you really can't consider listening to a book to be easier than reading it. But there are other differences here, of course, one being that it's really easy for your mind to begin to wander when you're listening to an audiobook. But is that more or less likely to happen as skimming the less interesting parts when you're reading? There's not exactly an easy way to test that question empirically, but there are some comparable things about the way people circle back to catch the stuff they missed, whether they're reading or listening. "About 10 to 20 percent of the eye movements you make are actually regressions, where your eyes are moving backwards," Willingham explained. Many of those regressions happen when you thought you had the word, but - whoops, no, you didn't quite get it; others happen when you might be trying to work outsyntax.

And something similar happens with the brain's auditory system, specifically a phenomenon called echoic memory. "I'm sure you've had the experience where someone says something, and you're not really listening, and then you can tell from their intonation that they've stopped talking and that they've asked you a question," Willingham said. "And you're like, 'Oh, shit, I totally was not listening to this person.' And then you say, 'I'm sorry, what?' And then in that moment where you say, 'I'm sorry, what?' - you're able to recover what it was they asked you." You did not listen. And yet you still heard, and there is a wisp of a memory of that, which is still banging around inside your mind. "And you are, in the time it takes you to say, 'I'm sorry, what?' - you are consulting that little memory store, and you get the last second or two of what they said," he continued. So that, he argues, is comparable to the visual system's eye regressions: In both mental processes, your mind ticks back to what it just consumed, in order to double check themeaning.

The ; version of all of this is that as far as the mental processes are concerned, there really isn't much difference between reading and listening to a book. One is not more work than the other. And yet there is, maybe, something to the way your elementary-school teacher might've phrased the question - you're only cheating yourself. Returning for a moment to the simple model of reading: The decoding process does become automatic once you've passed a certain level of reading proficiency, but you can become even better at this well into adulthood - and the only way to get better is by reading. The improvements are small ("infinitesimal," as Willingham put it) but they are there, and up for the grabs for a reader. Comprehension, too, is something that improves the more you read. And there are also, of course, times when you need to remind yourself of something farther back in the text, something that is no longer held in that one- to two-second echoic memory. (WhichGreyjoy is Victarion, again?) You could pause the audiobook and hit that 15-second rewind button until you find it. But you probablywon't.

There's also this question to contend with: Are you consuming the text the way the author intended it? (And how much does that matter?) The reader of Willingham's own audiobook did a wonderful job, for example, but there were jokes stepped on, punch lines that didn't quite land the way Willingham exactly intended. (This, incidentally, is why listening to one of those recent books in the funny female memoir genre - like Amy Poehler's Yes Please - is often a much better experience than reading them.) "The idea that you are experiencing the novel in a way the author did not intend, that you're missing out in some way - I'm much more open to that than 'You listened to it, you bigcheater,'" Willingham said.

The literary value of audiobooks versus print books - that's up for wider interpretation. But there's another way to consider the question of cheating, one that, incidentally, annoys Willingham the most. On my commute this week, for example, I began listening to H Is for Hawk, and so some might argue that, once I'm done, I can't claim to have really "read" it. "There are people who think of reading as a sort of achievement, a mark of honor that you've done something worthy of respect," Willingham said. "There's this sense that when you have read a book, you've done something that is worthy of pride, and it is worthy of other people patting you on theback."

This, to his mind, is nonsense, a holdover from elementary-school days. "You know, there are classrooms that are set up with that very much in mind," he said. "There's a reader wall and you get a star next to your name every time you finish a book, and the number of books is counted. And I think some of that feeling in adults may be ... a hangover from prior school experiences." It's a rather sad way to view reading as an adult, he contends, and he has a point. After all, grown-ups can't exchange a list of books they've read for a free personal panpizza.

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To Your Brain, Audiobooks Are Not 'Cheating'

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A cognitive psychologist on a question that annoys him.

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The library offers many different coding robotic resources that will support ELA topics such as...

Beebots: Code the bots to support letter recognition, sequence and retell stories.

https://blog.teaching.com.au/5-literacy-bee-bot-lesson-ideas-for-the-classroom/

Vex123: Drive the robots to letters to spell out a word, reenact plot points in a story and use the tablet options to read and sort simple sentences to program the bot.

https://kb.vex.com/hc/en-us/articles/6713513130516-Using-VEX-123-to-Support-Teaching-Literacy-and-Mathematical-Thinking

Makey Makey - Students can practice "invention literacy" where they have to read, write, and re-invent.

https://makeymakey.com/blogs/blog/invention-literacy-and-makey-makey

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Coding can help middle school students gain a deeper understanding of ELA concepts and build problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

"Coding is today's language of creativity. All our children deserve a chance to become creators instead of consumers of computer science." -Maria Klawe

With technology changing so rapidly, how do we teach students how to use, and thrive in a future with, technology that doesn't yet exist? This question was a major factor driving my venture into coding in my eighth-grade English language arts classroom. I wanted to show students that technology and the arts are not separate entities but in fact able to coexist.

Many states have begun adding a digital literacy component to curriculum. In fact, every state now has a law promoting computer science in K-12 education. I have no degrees in computer science, coding, or technology. I am a language arts and literature teacher, with a love for teaching critical thinking and problem-solving skills. I knew that students would need those skills, and I found coding and robotics to be the bridge between two worlds.

How to Begin integrating coding into ela

For me, integrating coding into ELA initially started as a desire to teach the hero's journey in a new and creative way. I wanted to avoid having students simply completing worksheets. I initially stumbled across Code.org, which has free resources for teachers, including this course, which combines Minecraft and the hero's journey. This approach helped several of my students who would ordinarily tune out a lecture-style lesson to really engage with the content. It also sparked more discussion than I would typically be able to get from an eighth-grade class, by having them compare how well the program lined up with Joseph Campbell's theory.

Resources like these connect clearly with what you are teaching and allow students to think about character details, patterns, or literary elements in a way that they hadn't before. Coding teaches students to put things in order, to create and follow patterns, to evaluate results and make corrections to solve a problem. All of these skills are things that all teachers want to develop in the classroom.

Here is some advice for teachers who are looking to begin.

Start small: You do not need to teach students how to build a robot (though that sounds very cool). Start with something small, free, or even programmed for student use. One of the first programs I began using was Scratch, by MIT. Ask students to code a character's actions in a chapter from the novel you are reading, match a character's path through the story, or design a game that follows a traditional plot structure.

Embrace failure: Be open and honest with your students, particularly if (or when) something fails. One of the first concerns many teachers have is that they are not familiar enough with the technology to make sure that it works perfectly 100 percent of the time. However, shying away from the imperfections of the technology results in missing a key learning opportunity: allowing students to see an adult troubleshoot in real time and to participate in the problem-solving process.

Prioritize content in grading: Grade thinking and standards over the accuracy of the use of technology. When scoring student work, ask students to reflect on their learning. Score student ability to show mastery of ELA content instead of trying to score the coding or program. When assessing student work, ask them to explain how their products show their understanding of a concept. For my classroom, I ask students to complete a reflection on these types of tasks. One of the critical questions I ask students is "Does this product show that you understand [key concept]? How do you know?" The answer to this question is almost always a very good indicator of whether they understood the ELA concept, regardless of how the technology worked for them.

Connecting Technology to ELA Content

When connecting technology skills to ELA content, teachers should focus on a particular standard and look at the core process involved. Here are some examples of how that could work:

Let's say students are learning to "analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision" (Common Core ELA standard, RL8.3). The teacher could have them code an Ozobot (or use the free online coding program) to "react" as the character does to key events in the story or to particular lines of dialogue. For example, if the character reacts in sorrow, maybe the bot could light up blue or move slowly to show their struggle. Not only does this provide a memorable and visual way for students to interact with the text, but it asks them to represent things on a level they may not have previously considered.

Students can also code connections. Have a list of events, terms, or characters, and ask students to code a bot or program to connect the items, explaining the significance of the connections. For example, if you are working on vocabulary terms, ask students to code a bot to make a path between terms, and have the students explain similarities with each coded connection.

Coding can also replace some of the more traditional summative assessments that often are used in the ELA classroom. Instead of having students create a hand-drawn book cover to show significant themes in a novel, Code.org's module can help students create an interactive book cover, with characters that show depth or movement. Tools like Makey Makey can be used in combination with Scratch to create interactive posters. Instead of the typical research poster, or biography, ask students to code audio for the poster for a more dynamic and engaging option, as well as a more exciting gallery walk at the end.

In the end, the key skills you are teaching are not how to perfectly code a robot or write a program that has no flaws. To be completely honest, I am not sure that is a realistic expectation for anyone, much less a student. Instead, by incorporating coding into the language arts classroom, educators are teaching students about the metacognitive processes involved in trying to solve problems and find solutions, as well as to embrace failure as a learning opportunity. These skills will serve students well into the future-no matter what technological advances it holds.

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Integrating Coding and Robotics Into ELA Classrooms

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Coding can help middle school students gain a deeper understanding of ELA concepts and build problem-solving and critical thinking skills.

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Did you know Google can help with guided reading groups?

Google Sites - Create a class website using where you can post reading materials and resources for guided reading groups. Students can also create their own site to support learning!

Google Slides - Create interactive worksheets to support student comprehension.

Google Draw - Create maps, collaborate on projects, take notes and much more.

If you would like profession development in how to use Google digital tools to support your guided reading groups send Mrs. Huntley an email to set up a time to meet.

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Going Digital with Guided Reading - Literacy with Aylin Claahsen

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Going 1:1 in the Classroom I remember being so excited when the school I was working at a few years ago decided to go 1:1. I love technology and was looking forward to implementing it into my intervention groups. My students had both iPads and Macbooks, depending on the grade level.

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I would like to collaborate with classroom teachers this year and to implement guided literacy sessions that complement and enrich your classroom instruction. These groups can be tailored to provide targeted support, comprehension skills, and promote a love for reading among our students. If you would like to collaborate this year please click on the Google Form above for more information and to connect with me (Mrs. Huntley).

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Google Forms - create and analyze surveys, for free.