Literacy and ICT in the Primary School

A Creative Approach to English

Andrew Rudd, Alison Tyldesley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136773716
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

By clearly outlining how ICT can enhance and improve children's learning, this book unlocks the full potential of ICT within the classroom. Stimulating, useful and free of jargon, the book provides many practical examples to show teachers where, when and how ICT can be used effectively within literacy teaching. It provides advice on:

• teaching creatively
• using ICT in the Foundation Stage
• making the most of your resources
• planning and assessment.

Rooted in the practical realities of the classroom, this book will support both trainee and qualified teachers in providing rich and creative literacy experiences through the use of technology.

CHAPTER

1

Introduction: new literacies and new technologies

A new world of information

The world of communication, literacy and education is changing. In the book-centred culture of a century ago, to ‘read’ the classics was often considered to be the best education. Good handwriting and the ability to compose formal letters were essential life skills. Throughout the twentieth century a series of major technological changes – telephone, radio, television, computers – has radically redrawn the map of communication. Children growing up in modern Europe socialise and communicate electronically: they are in constant electronic contact with each other through voice, text, pictures and even video. Their primary day-to-day experience of ‘reading’ comes to them through screens – television, computer, games device or film. The internet allows them to treat a world of information with the casual lightness and inattention of a daydream. Ilana Snyder describes this as a new ‘communication order’:

Now, for the first time in history, the written, oral and audiovisual modalities of communication are integrated into the same electronic system – multimodal hypertext systems made accessible via the Internet and the World Wide Web. Being literate in the context of these technologies is to do with understanding how the different modalities are combined in complex ways to create meaning.

(Snyder 2003: 264)

As educators, we have no choice about inhabiting this technological environment – it is very much with us and is highly unlikely to go away. The only choice we have is whether or not to engage in our teaching with these new literacies: and, if so, how to lead children into a mature and independent literacy of their own.

Consider these facts:

We live in a society defined by the production and flow of information on an unprecedented scale. As I write this, Google claims to be able to search 8,058,044,651 web pages – an alarmingly enormous and precise figure. Searching for the exact phrase ‘information literacy’ brings over a million references. How do we cope with this deluge of information? Growing up in the twenty-first century obviously requires children and students to be able to handle and communicate information – to access the information they need in a literate way. In this context ICT and literacy together have become more and more important in the curriculum – especially where the learner comes into contact with new and evolving literacies.

New skills

Literacy is no longer limited to reading printed books and other paper texts, but a number of key skills are needed more than ever. Many of these are the traditional skills of reading, scanning, skimming which remain essential in any text-based media. Some new media reading skills appear to be novel and specific, and the teacher of literacy needs to take them into account. Here are several skills which are common to ICT and English. Each one raises important questions which will be explored in more detail in later chapters of this book.

The ability to find information

The reader needs to understand something about the structure of a text in order to navigate a way through it. Books have indexes, tables of contents, page numbers. They are organised in hierarchical and familiar ways which are taught in the literacy hour as a matter of course. What strategies are available to navigate electronic texts and the internet? Where are the signposts and clues? The skills of scanning and skimming are useful in gathering information from books – how are they applicable in the high speed world of electronic communication? Do we as teachers have the knowledge and skills to use search engines effectively to return manageable and relevant lists of data? How can we teach these skills to children? How can we interpret content, skills and progression in this information literacy?

The ability to develop critical thinking and evaluate

Texts produced on paper usually offer familiar, socially accepted clues to their reliability and authority. Just by picking up and holding a text we can usually identify it as a book, or a letter, or a note. What signposts are there to help in our critical reading of electronic texts? How can we develop skills to evaluate, compare and criticise electronic texts as readily as we can those written on paper? New media change and develop at a bewildering rate. How can the teacher keep up to date – neither resisting change or becoming over-enthusiastic – without losing what is valuable about the culture of the past?

The ability to re-present information in different ways for different audiences

A literate adult is usually someone who can write as well as read. New media literacy, however, is often represented as purely a matter of ‘reading’. Texts are broadcast, presented or delivered, and the user – child or adult – is usually seen in the single role of reader or consumer. How can we teach children to handle electronic texts as authors – web designers, multimedia creators, and so on?

The ability to use new media as a creative space

Schools are full of creative work on paper which children have originated – stories, poetry, and information texts written by children are commonplace in classroom displays. In the worlds of graphic design, music and film, the computer is commonly a creative ‘workshop’ – a space which encourages and enables creativity. What are the creative opportunities provided by new electronic literacies for children? How can we harness these in the process of literacy teaching?

Personalised learning

A popular ideal of many educators is what the government currently describes as ‘personalised learning’ in which the education system is designed to help every child to reach their full potential. There is nothing very new in this – it is what schools have always aimed to achieve. But the current ideas of personalised learning depend on ICT as a key ingredient. ICT allows a high degree of differentiated learning to take place – support for children with special needs, extension for the gifted and talented, and a whole range of day by day tools for all children to learn and create. Remote teaching by video-conferencing or electronic packages can allow easier access to shortage subjects and a wider range of skills. To quote from the ‘personalised learning’ document, the first principle includes e-literacy as a fundamental skill:

for children and young people, (personalised learning) means clear learning pathways through the education system and the motivation to become independent, e-literate, fulfilled, lifelong learners.

(DFES 2005, ‘A national conversation about personalised learning’)

Studies and research

1 Digital Rhetorics

In Australia, a large-scale two-year project entitled ‘Digital Rhetorics’ looked at the implications of this new world of communication technologies on the practice of literacy education. The authors have developed a useful view of what this ‘new literacy’ might entail. In their view, being literate has to be much more than being able to decode or encode texts; it requires a new awareness of context and the ability to create, shape and transform meanings. Education, in this view, does not just address the ‘operational’ literacy of making sense of print, but also needs ‘cultural’ and ‘critical’ dimensions. A child may be able to work the computer, control the tools of the word processor, and make a fair job of drafting out a piece of work, but all this may be limited to the ‘operational’ dimension. The ‘cultural’ dimension will involve the style, audience and purposes of the work, and often forms part of what we teach in school. A mature literacy, however, is able to operate in the ‘critical’ dimension. In the world of the internet this is the most important part:

the ability not only to use such resources and to participate effectively and creatively in their associated cultures, but also to critique them, to read and use them against the grain, to appropriate and even re-design them.

(Snyder 2003: 270)

The Digital Rhetorics study found that most educational uses of new technology – unlike the approach to paper texts – still focused almost entirely on the operational level of literacy.

2 Multimodal literacy

The process of learning and teaching has always used many modes of communication – writing, reading, speech, body language – and participants in learning have always developed ‘literacies’ to understand and create communication in these different modes. Teachers, for example, learn the body language of their pupils – and vice versa. The arrival of new technologies has added a host of new modes of discourse to the classroom, and each of these has its own ‘literacy’ – conventions, practices, operations and ethos. Teachers often find themselves at a disadvantage when pupils seem to be more ‘literate’ in these modes than they are. One of the main tasks of the literacy teacher at this time is to master these new literacies, and use them effectively in teaching and learning, so that the children they teach may be empowered and enriched by the possibilities of a multimodal learning environment.

According to Jewitt and Kress (2003) in their book Multimodal Literacy there has also been a perceptible shift from the traditional logic of the page to the much more visual logic of the screen. Writing has become subordinated to image. This has huge implications for teaching – from textbook design to the children’s extended writing. How can we, in this cultural context, encourage children to get beyond the soundbite and factoid, and learn to create logical, connected and coherent text? And, perhaps an even greater challenge, how can we enable children to create and write within the many modes available to them – creating multimedia, websites and so on?

3 New literacies

New technologies can be used to do traditional things in a different, possibly more motivating, way. This can have a useful place in the classroom. A marker board may be better than a chalk board, and an interactive whiteboard may be an even more exciting way of doing the same thing. There is now quite a lot of research into how much of this is actually new literacies – or merely instances of ‘old wine in new bottles’. Lankshear and Knobel (2003) observe that there is a ‘deep grammar’ of schooling which is very difficult to change. As soon as a new literacy enters the school environment, it rapidly becomes part of an old literacy, losing its distinctiveness and relevance to the world outside. This may happen because the school culture is teacher-directed – implying that innovation only comes from the teacher – and ‘curricular’ – everything taught is ‘founded on texts as information sources’. So in this rather pessimistic view, school is not a good place for teaching or even engaging with new literacies. An awareness of these problems is essential if the attempt is to be made, and this book works with the assumption that it is possible to make effective and meaningful use of new technologies in the teaching of different modes of literacy.

4 Attention

Another concept which is extremely relevant to the teacher of literacy is that of attention. There is certainly no shortage of information – we are almost disappearing under the weight of it – what we are short of is ‘attention’ (Lankshear and Knobel 2003: 109). It is commonplace to talk about the ‘short attention spans’ of children. According to these authors:

people’s efforts to attract, sustain, and build attention under new media conditions … have spawned a range of new social practices and new forms of literacy associated with them.

Somebody publishes a website, advertises it. It receives a lot of visitors, and appears at the top of search lists on Google. The author has captured the attention of an audience, but also created a ‘structure of attention’. But attention is not merely a matter of drawing a crowd. Information which is not attended to is just ‘data’ – meaningless volumes of words and numbers. The more attention it is given, the more meaningful and useful the information becomes. The role of the teacher of literacy, in this model, is one of encouraging attention, of increasing attention. These authors quote Lanham’s powerful idea:

that we use different terms for information depending on how much attention … has been given to it. No attention leaves us with ‘raw data’. Some attention yields ‘massaged data’. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction: new literacies and new technologies
• 2 ICT in the foundation stage
• 3 Whole class teaching using ICT
• 4 Guided and independent work with ICT
• 5 Making full use of your school's ICT resources
• 6 The effective use of the internet and electronic mail
• 7 Planning and assessment in ICT
• 8 Creative possibilities with ICT
• Index