Using Apps for Learning Across the Curriculum

A Literacy-Based Framework and Guide

Richard Beach, David O'Brien

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317668497
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Languages & Linguistics
• Sous-sujet: Literacy

How can apps be used to foster learning with literacy across the curriculum? This book offers both a theoretical framework for considering app affordances and practical ways to use apps to build students' disciplinary literacies and to foster a wide range of literacy practices.

Using Apps for Learning Across the Curriculum

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• presents a wide range of different apps and also assesses their value

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• features methods for and apps related to planning instruction and assessing student learning

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• identifies favorite apps whose affordances are most likely to foster certain disciplinary literacies

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• includes resources and apps for professional development

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• provides examples of student learning in the classroom

A website (www.usingipads.pbworks.com) with resources for teaching and further reading for each chapter, a link to a blog for continuing conversations about topics in the book (appsforlearningliteracies.com), and more enhance the usefulness of the book.

PART I A Literacy-Based Framework for Using Apps

1 Introduction Defining Purposes for Learning With Literacies Through Use of Apps

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769127-4

In their English language arts classrooms at West Junior High School, in Hopkins, Minnesota, Sara Speicher and Julie Walthour (2013) use the Subtext http://tinyurl.com/9ykogpm app to organize and support their students’ responses to their reading. They use this app to have their students:

• access books from their local public library using OverDrive or Baker & Taylor or upload PDFs or ePub documents;
• share books or texts with peers and access the class’s “group shelf”;
• edit book covers by adding their own photos to those covers;
• share their responses to books or texts through highlighting, tagging, and annotating passages from texts;
• export their written responses to Google Docs;
• access discussion question, quizzes, polls, links, or videos added by teachers.

They can also acquire articles, curriculum materials, assessment tools for tracking student work, and text-to-speech tools in the Premium Subtext version.

The use of the Subtext app represents an example of one of thousands of apps available to support literacy learning in different subjects, the focus of this book.

In this chapter, we describe a number of frameworks for thinking about how use of apps can support learning with different literacy practices related to accessing information, reading, writing, speaking/listening, creating images/audio/videos, and reflecting on learning, practices relevant to learning in all subjects.

Determining How and Why to Use Apps in the Classroom

A critical factor in teachers’ use of apps is often discussed as tech integration—how well one selects an app that affords the best use of a particular tool to meet an instructional goal while engaging students. One recent study of the use of tablets with fifth-graders showed that some teachers use tablets in limited ways like calendar-keeping, grade-checking, and educational games, while other teachers employ tablets for note-taking, class polls, and videos, differences that reflected teachers’ different attitudes about the value of use of technology in instruction (Schwartz, 2013).

In using a particular app with a teacher’s guidance, students learn how and why they are using an app so when they are outside the classroom, they know which app is best for a particular project. For example, when a student employs the iOS http://tinyurl.com/a6z4tsu or Android http://tinyurl.com/mrltgkl Explain Everything screencasting app to visually enact how they solved a math problem, when they are outside the classroom, and need to create a visual display of their learning, they might turn to use of this screencasting app to achieve that purpose. So teachers need a clear purpose for using each app in order to convey those purposes to students.

Defining Purposes in Terms of App Affordances

In this book, we propose that, as teachers or preservice teachers, you should plan and select apps based on what we’re defining as app affordances. Unfortunately, apps are often selected for a particular use based on how they are labeled rather than on the possibilities they hold in well-designed instruction. All of those lists such as “50 Popular iPad Apps For Struggling Readers and Writers” describe these apps but fail to consider the degree to which they actually support certain kinds of literacy learning. When we peruse these lists, we find apps with some helpful tools, some apps that afford some engagement with lots of teacher guidance, and some apps based on totally faulty assumptions of reading instruction. Few of them have the affordances for fostering engaging, learning, and instruction based on what the app designer put into them.

App Affordances as Action Possibilities for Your Activity

The primary problem is that the affordances of apps are not simply “in” the app based on the assumption that use of X app will result in Y learning. The affordances of apps depend on how you design an activity in ways that exploit uses of an app for purposes unique to your activity.

In coining the use of the concept of affordance, James Gibson (1986) argued that how an object presents itself in a certain context and point in time influences what it affords. Affordances are action possibilities available in the environment, independent of one’s ability to perceive them. If you are tired from a long walk on the beach, a piece of driftwood affords rest—a place to sit; once rested, as the sun goes down and you start to feel chilled, a piece of wood might afford warmth when used as fuel for a fire. The driftwood affords a lot more than rest or warmth, depending on how it presents itself, in relation to what you need, and the extent to which you relate to it in a way that actualizes the affordance.

Instructional designers of apps, and, to a certain extent, teachers thinking like instructional designers, assume that the design of instruction, if carefully planned, can help them predict student learning and engagement outcomes. Of course, to an extent that is true, especially if the designers are armed with both ample instructional experience and in-depth knowledge of the domain the apps are supposed to tap into. Design, from the perspective of app designers, focuses more on the features incorporated into the app—the app-as-object, with a goal that a carefully designed app will predict some consistent outcomes when used for its intended purpose. Sometimes this happens, sometimes not.

We therefore discuss app affordances in this book in terms of both design and use—the features designed into the app and the design-in-use. For example, a well-designed app that affords annotating and note-taking related to a text supports the use of writing as a literacy practice. However, the specific instructional lessons and tasks you set up afford writing as a way to support learning because you are inviting students to use specific practices, afforded by the app in classroom activities.

The design-in-use affordances, which are not implicit in the app design, might not become apparent until you use the app for a specific purpose, as part of an instructional activity. App designers, although they might anticipate affordances of an app, cannot know for sure about what will actually happen with an app in use; and some apps are used in ways that designers never intended or imagined.

Just as the traditional classroom chalkboard affords teachers and students the opportunity to share their writing on the chalkboard for their class, so apps and mobile devices afford a range of opportunities for possible practices by the way the app, and the various tools it contains, presents itself to the student or the way the student enacts a particular use as needed. A popular note-taking app like Evernote iOS http://tinyurl.com/cxo6req and Android http://tinyurl.com/dyspv8p allows students to not only clip texts from websites, but also to record their notes related to these clips and to then share the notes with peers. However, students might not enact the most useful, purposeful affordances unless they are engaged in a collaborative activity that involves the use of note-taking to share with their peers.

Selecting and Using Apps Based on Your Learning Objectives

Thus instructional activity is essential for defining app affordances. As illustrated below, rather than selecting an app because you want students to use that app for an activity (Option A), we suggest that you begin with the activity designed to achieve your particular learning objectives and find those apps that afford the best engagement and learning within the activity (Option B).

Option A: App affordances → Activity

Option B: Activity → App affordances

Focusing on instructional activities and what students will learn from participating in activities as the basis for selecting apps means not using apps as technology tools for their own sake, but rather using apps to enhance learning (Dickens & Churches, 2011).

The same apps may be used for multiple purposes, depending on purposes driving an activity. For example, while note-taking apps such as Evernote might be used to record and share notes, how your students use note-taking apps will vary according to the goals for classroom activities. Teachers should specify the anticipated affordances of uses of apps related to a particular instructional need. With the design-in-use aspect, you need to carefully observe and record affordances that you did not anticipate but that might emerge once students use the apps.

In planning instruction, you have a major role in selecting apps and determining the kinds of affordances associated with the use of apps. For example, a math instructor wants students to share their problem-solving process through creating a written record and an audio, think-aloud narrative for solving a math problem. These will be shared with peers and the instructor (Fusch, 2011). Based on this instructor’s need, someone assisting this instructor suggests the use of the iOS app, Underscore Notify http://tinyurl.com/olzn4t5 that students can use to create handwritten notes with a stylus and record their think-aloud narrative for solving the problem for sharing with peers and the instructor. This Underscore Notify app therefore provided the affordance of synthesizing/sharing information through writing to learn in math courses.

All of this suggests the need to define affordances in terms of how apps are being used to foster literacy learning in the classroom. Apps can certainly be used to foster traditional “drill and practice” forms of learning.

At the same time, apps have the potential to foster more engaging kinds of learning. In describing the uses of apps, Mark Prensky (2012) posits that apps have the following affordances in fostering learning:

Apps can be designed for very specific purposes. My son learned his alphabets in two languages by tracing letters.

Apps will soon exist across the entire school curriculum, that can be downloaded piece by piece as needed, and discarded when they have served their purpose.

Apps increasingly come with intuitive, touch and voice controlled interfaces.

Apps recruit all the other features of the devices they are on, such as the camera, the videocam, voice recording, phone, Wi-Fi connection, Twitter and Skype, for example.

Apps can incorporate capabilities from the cloud: text to voice, voice to text, voice recognition, storage, computing capacity, etc.

Apps can do everything computers or books can, incorporating all of those tools’ capabilities, and far more. (p. 2)

Prensky’s descriptions of these different uses of apps have a lot to do with the technical features of the devices themselves, such as the touch interface, use of recording/camera features, cloud-storage, and portability. At the same time, as he notes, apps are “designed for very specific purposes,” so that they can be used to mediate specific kinds of literacy learning, the focus of this book.

Defining App Affordances in Terms of Literacy Practices

In this book, we define app affordances associated with design of classroom activities in terms of certain literacy practices. We use the word practices rather than skills or strategies. Skills often represent a fixed corpus of what you know how to do, regardless of a particular context or situation, and strategies are often presented as the generic complements to skills, that is, particular plans for becoming more skilled. Practices puts more of a focus on literacy enactmen...