Our students are increasingly engaging with literacy online and there is great debate as to whether this enhances, diminishes or has no effect on the development of reading skills. Some argue that children and teenagers should read what interests them and that many reluctant readers would not engage in reading in their own time if it were not for the internet. This is a valid point but is reading online enough?

As a child, unlike my bookworm sister, I had no interest in reading but my mother persisted in great vain and I will forever be thankful for her efforts. Reading books opens up unfamiliar worlds and allows us to experience the lives and ideas of others. We in turn can engage in visualisation and further formulate our ideals and understandings, as we become immersed in the words on the page.

Engaging our students with reading online is imperative. Not only is this often the medium that they are choosing themselves, it is also provides a real-world context and offers an excellent source for engaging students in critical literacy. However, we must also continually encourage our students to read literature for pleasure and personal development.

The article ‘Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?’ is an excellent read. It presents a variety of arguments backed up with thorough research and causes us to think about where our students are heading in terms of their personal reading choices and how we need to approach this as educators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?ex=1374897600&en=81a364206914f90a&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Young children are naturally responsive to sound and rhythm. Therefore, Early Childhood Education utilises music extensively and successfully, as it allows students to experiment with grammatical rules and rhythm patterns in songs and other written texts.

However, this response to music and the power of music in teaching Literacy is not limited to the early years. Many teachers attest to this and utilise music if possible.

I commenced my teaching in Early Childhood and my students and I sang and danced our way through a never ending assortment of resources. As soon as I entered middle and upper primary this changed as the resources diminished considerably. Whether this is a result of the assumption that beyond Early Childhood music is no longer an effective tool in teaching literacy, or that students beyond this age do not respond to music in the same way, or that there is not enough time/space in the curriculum, I am not sure. What I am sure of, though, is if it works for young children then, dependent on the approach taken, it will work with all students of all age groups. Furthermore, whilst there may not be as many resources available in the form of CDs and accompanying texts, technology provides the perfect tool for combining Literacy learning and music. Through technology music can be used to engage listening, speaking, writing and reading skills and can provide that meaningful avenue we are always seeking in the learning experiences we provide.

Take a look at these links to get you thinking about how you can use podcasting and movie making to enrich your literacy lessons.

Flocabulary is a brilliant resource from the US that teaches literacy to primary and secondary through rap. Although the resource itself is not free, the website allows you to explore the concepts and demonstrates the possibilities of using this popular music genre.

Flocabulary is a brilliant resource from the US that teaches literacy to primary and secondary through rap. Although the resource itself is not free, the website allows you to explore the concepts and demonstrates the possibilities of using this popular music genre.

http://www.flocabulary.com/

The following address links you to the MTV website where you can view videos about the many Harry Potter bands. Imagine how powerful it would be for our students to write and perform songs about their favourite books!

http://www.mtv.com/videos/news/155156/harry-and-the-potters-unload-with-the-weapon.jhtml#id=1561807

The Flight of the Concords is not only, according to the many fans that watch it, an awesome show, it also demonstrates how easily music can be used to communicate in everyday life. Poetry might be interesting to all students if they could present it in such a form!

http://www.conchords.co.nz/

For centuries we have been facilitating our students to critically engage with multiliteracies and, for a long time, the availability of material has been relatively confined. As we enter a new chapter in education, where students are engaging with omnipresent texts and media, we face a new challenge; we now need to facilitate our students in being able to effectively and efficiently engage with the information they have available to them. When our students are searching, we need to teach them how to quickly navigate and locate useful websites.

So it makes sense that teachers are now engaging students in critical literacy and evaluation of the texts that are available to them on the internet

However, as teachers, we all know that the creation of new tasks, criteria sheets and rubrics is often time consuming and difficult, as we need to be clear about the outcomes.

The following links provide information on how to engage our students in the evaluation of blogs and provide an exemplar of a rubric that could be used.

If you are reading this and can share any similar resources or information that would be useful for teachers, it would be great if you could let us and all our readers know.

http://21cif.com/rkitp/assessment/v1n5/valenza1.5_blogeval.html
http://21cif.com/rkitp/assessment/v1n5/blog_evaluation_assessment_v1n5.html

” The collaborative environment allows students to not only learn from one another, but also to have “grand conversations,” rich discussions about literature that extend beyond the confines of the classroom…”

Rather than me telling you all about it – head on over and check out how Baltimore County are moving into the 21st century to “help students collaboratively build knowledge for an authentic audience using real world scenarios.” Check it out here!

You’ll’ find more classroom case studies here.

In the case of Deadly Unna, you may not be willing to commit to recording four hours worth of novel all by yourself, but with 20 or 30 students in your class, reading 10 – 20 minutes each (at the start of a lesson say), the task just got a whole lot less daunting. Their recordings can then be burned to DVD and made available through the library for future students to access. You could do the same for any year level or you could have older year levels, create recordings for other year levels. 

For those of you who have attended our podcasting workshops, I am sure you can see how you could use Garageband to do your recordings (a program that comes standard with all Macs) and your students could even create their own illustrations to accompany the recording. 

This task would also be a great way to assess reading and speaking skills and the recording could form part of the students portfolio that would help track the students progress over the course of the year.

Be sure to comment on this post if you try this in your class and let us know how it goes!

1. Record presentations and explanations of key terms and concepts covered in English, adding diagrams, images and video footage where necessary. For example, create a series of recordings that provide examples and explicit instruction about different text types.
2. Record steps or instructions in undertaking a writing task, using diagrams, examples or video footage where necessary. For example, give students a step-step guide to essay writing, with different chapter with tips and tricks for brainstorming; researching; writing an introduction, body and conclusion; editing and referencing sources.
3. Record news stories that promote literacy: whether they be competitions, book and film reviews, guest speakers or upcoming book releases.
4. Record interviews with writers and illustrators, for a radio show type segment.
5. Record student progress in english, with samples of work before and after a the learning sequence. For example, record students at the start of the year, and throughout the year, to document their progress with reading fluency and/or speaking.
6. Record students goals in english and reflections throughout the year in terms of how they have been working to achieve their goals.
7. Record student discussions, dramatizations and debates, to formally assess speaking and listening skills. For example: students can form literature circles and discuss a particular book; they might dramatize a monologue; or debate an issue from perspective of a character in the novel being studied.
8. Record activities that are appropriate for different levels, like writing prompts, spelling words or other tasks that are appropriate to their level of language development. For example, record spelling tests for a range of levels or record paragraphs with varying degrees of complexity, that students can punctuate.
9. Record students reading their work out-loud during the editing process (the podcasts can be discarded, or used as evidence of the proofreading process).
10. Record students narrating their stories, poetry and other writing, which they can share in a radio show type segment.

Feeling confident that the class novel we were studying that semester, Deadly Unna, was sure to engage the students, I encouraged the student to borrow an audio recording of the novel from our library (which he put on his iPod). Sure enough, he finished the novel and he was was very enthusiastic about participating in class discussions about the novel. 

I have since come across a number of websites that offer free audiobooks that students can download onto their iPods and MP3 players. Use the links below to search for titles that are available. Generally speaking, items published before 1923 are widely available, including classic novels by Jane Austin and Charles Dickens, plays by Shakespeare and even poetry.

LibriVox

Project Gutenburg

Literal Systems.org

Free Classic Audio Books

Audiobooks.net

Audiobooksforfree.com

Lit2Go

Learn Out Loud