Literacy for older students and technology

        In our class the other night we discussed the fight for using technology in schools to help our students develop 21st century skills and literacy. I know my school has good intentions on doing this. It is why we got the 1:1 grant, but we also lost it. Part of it was due to people in charge not reading the fine print, but I think a lot of it had to do with teachers not using them. I was using them, but now I realize I could have used them more effectively. I have been patiently waiting for us to get our carts of laptops since school started. I hope that I can implement the strategies I have learned and see positive results. So far I have taken my students to the library to do computer work, but our library computers are so slow and it frustrates the students and me. However, it looks like the laptops are in sight. One of the other teachers in my department and myself are going to set up the laptops (even though it’s the job of the IT and admin) because we are tired of waiting. I am getting excited to finally start trying out some of the tools I have learned about.

           I do have some concerns though when it comes to the reading levels of my students. I have some students who are very poor readers. When I have done some small projects in the library, they tend to just copy and paste stuff from a website and not really understand the information they are reporting. I wonder, how can I get the students to work at a higher level of thinking when they can’t read and just do not know basic facts of the world. An example of this is some students do not know the sun is the center of the solar system, or that the moon has gravity. They don’t know words like origin, repel, equilibrium, resistance, atoms, function. These are just a few off the top of my head. But besides atoms, these are not science vocabulary words. I know my students are smart, but they have been left behind or their culture does not emphasize the importance of education. For our freshmen, we basically teach 7/8th grade science just to catch them up. Our sophomores take biology and it is very basic. I would like to have my students designing their own labs based on their own questions, but many just do not know what to ask.

           I have been trying to research how to use technology to improve their literacy skills and science reading comprehension. It seems difficult to find information on this because it is still an emerging field. There is a lot of focus for the elementary levels, but not high school. The magic answer I keep hearing is give them something that is engaging and they will want to read and comprehend what they are reading. Okay so I have tried to do that, and for me it is out of my comfort zone teaching them reading because I am not trained in that. But I feel it is important so I am trying. I gave them a reading about a newly discovered planet believed to be made of diamond. I found it through my Personal Learning Network (PLN) I have developed. I tried to get my students to practice figuring out words with context clues. They thought the idea of the diamond planet was cool and had many questions about it. I had them read the article, I picked out words they probably didn’t know for the context words and had them write a 3 sentence summary of the reading. I got all sorts of answers for the summary. One said (well 2, they copied off each other) it was about a snake. Some said it was about a star. Even though we discussed it and I showed a news video clip about it. Some still could not tell me what the article was about. Now I know it’s still early in the year and so I hope this process improves. But if I want them to develop projects that involve them creating and connecting ideas, I worry they will get frustrated and lose motivation for it because they cannot understand text.

            So what do you do when you are supposed to teach high school science to kids who read at a 3rd-5th grade reading level and do not know “stuff” about the world? No one has an answer for us at the school. Of course this issue is not just at my school, literacy for older students is a problem in many schools and an interesting observation has been made that students are reading well in early grades, there is evidence of this in our district, but performance starts to drop off in higher grades (Conn, 2006). It is also more of a problem with students who grow up in poverty (2006), which also fits the profile of my students.

           There are frameworks for developing literacy. In a recent article by Sanden and Darragh (2011), Wiki’s can help students improve their literacy by giving them a chance to be heard and see what other students are saying about topics of interest. They also can use a mix of types of communications that are not limited to text including pictures and video. With teacher’s guidance, wikis can “enrich students’ options of literacy consumption and production” (2011). I want to use wiki’s, but I am still trying to figure out the best methods. I have found that Google docs is useful since students can work on the powerpoint at the same time. I have had my students do collaborative powerpoints. They were not too bad, spelling was a major issue and citing sources was another, but I am trying to do just one thing at a time with them. Did they understand the concepts I wanted them to learn? Well they have a quiz today on this; we’ll see how they do.

             Being a science minded person, I like to see the numbers. In a recent New York Times article, the stagnant test scores of schools who have integrated technology was the main focus. Even though schools have spent millions of dollars on getting laptops and technology upgrades in schools, test scores have not gone up. The evidence is not there (Ritchel, M., 2011). I suppose for myself and the effectiveness of these strategies will have to come from my experiences with my students. I will have to keep track of their abilities and challenge them to keep up with reading. In combination with our literacy classes for our freshmen, I hope to see improvement in science literacy.

            If I can find something that works and have the numbers to prove it, then I hope others will start to try out these new ideas in their classroom. I think part of the fight to use technology is to show that it really does work for student learning. We have to stay focused on the skills the students need for the future. Not just digital literacy, but literacy in general. Being able to read is so important and we have to get students to see that. I have had students tell me that they don’t think reading is important (they ended up failing all their classes). Technology can be used to engage learners, but we need to figure out what practices really do help students with low reading levels, especially with older students. I hope to see numbers in the near future that reflect this, but for now I will focus on my own students.

          There are so many ways to describe the needs of education, but what should be the main focus? The video below describes the essentials for 21st century skills…and literacy is one of them. In order to be successful in life, you have to be able to read. I can throw google in their faces and send them off to “internet-land” and do powerpoints and wikis and blogs, but if they can’t understand the text they read, then what? I am going to be finding out soon.

21st Century Skills: How do we get there?

Conn, Cynthia.(2007, February). Jim Cummins, Kristin Brown, and Dennis Sayers, Literacy, technology, and diversity: teaching success in changing times. Educational Technology Research & Development, Vol. 55 Issue 1, p79-82



Ritchell, M. (2011, September 3). In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/technology/technology-in-schools-faces-questions-on-value.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1



Sanden, S., & Darragh, J. (2011). Wiki use in the 21st-century literacy classroom: A framework for evaluation. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education,11 (1). Retrieved from http://www.citejournal.org/vol11/iss1/languagearts/article1.cfm