Last week I had the privilege of presenting to some of our students on possible uses of new and digital literacies in an Elementary school. I presented an initial PPT describing the changing nature of literacy, which ultimately led into an instructional model I have been developing along with my colleague Greg McVerry.
The gist of the talk focuses on how the Common Core are obviously very important, but given their importance, teachers will now once again ignore authentic and effective uses of new and digital literacies in their classrooms. Additionally, the CCSS is woefully inadequate in representing the varied digital texts and tools our teachers and students could/should be working with in their classrooms.
The PPT wraps up with the Online Research and Media Skills (ORMS) model that Greg and I developed. The model focuses on three elements…and it is suggested that if you have work that is representative of these three elements, then you can say that you have authentically and effectively embedded technology into your lessons. The elements are:
- Online Collaborative Inquiry-A group of local or global learners who arrive at a common outcome via multiple pathways of knowledge.
- Online Content Construction- A process by which students construct and redesign knowledge by actively encoding and decoding meaning through the use of ever shifting multimodal tools.
- Online Reading Comprehension- The skills, strategies, practices, and dispositions students need to locate, evaluate, and synthesize information during problem based inquiry tasks.
Online Reading Comprehension: As a possible way to have students work to build their online reading comprehension skills, I would foresee two possible venues. The first would be using picture books in the classroom and discussing text, meaning, and possible design cues developed through placement of content on a page. I am working on materials to better describe this possible process and should have a more concrete example in the next week. The second possibility would be to print out webpages to have students read in class. I would suggest printing out a page of search engine results and having students actively read the webpage and teach them how to read the various pieces of information the results page presents. What does the title tell you? What does the URL and .com, .edu, .org tell you? What does the brief description tell you? What link would you click on if you wanted to…find a map of Oklahoma? What do you think you would see if you clicked on this link? How would we revise our keywords to get a better search result?
I would also suggest printing out a webpage and teaching students how to skim and scan the webpage to obtain information. Teach them what they need to read…and what can be ignored. Where should they look for the important parts of the page…and how to look for more information or links to other pages. These can all be done on printed out pages to hand out to students. Doing this while not on a computer saves us from the challenge of making sure all students are on the same “page.”Hopefully this gives a better example of possible ways to bring the ORMS model into the Elementary classroom. Of course, the biggest concern is to make sure that our use of these texts and tools is authentic and effective. The other important factor is the student learning objectives for the class and whether or not your activity really is improved through the use of these technological texts and tools. You don’t want to use a cool new tool in your classroom…just because you can…