These questionsâand others like themâconfront todayâs educators, especially because relevant, contemporary teaching includes the experiences of students and the technologies they directly or indirectly encounter. There can be a mismatch between the devices and/or programs students use inside and outside school. Some students also may only have Internet access in school and others may have better connectivity at home. Thus, when challenged by the above questions about integration, we need to look at how we can use devices and software without blindly embracing new programs, resisting the lure and illusion of technologyâs innovation. After all, technology is seductive. The word promises something new, exciting, different. But when it comes to education, we cannot immediately assume ever-evolving hardware and software will guarantee improved teaching or student performance. One should not arbitrarily use contemporary tools for, as the Alliance for Excellent Educationâs Terri Duggan Schwartzbeck and Mary Ann Wolf argued, â[s]imply slapping a netbook on top of a textbook⌠will not necessarily lead to significant outcomesâ (2012, p. 8). In other words, itâs not the technology per se that helps students; itâs the purposeful integration of online and offline mediating activities that both teachers and students do with and through the various technologies that foster meaningful learning.
Technology and the Classroom
It is a false assumption that digital technologies are used in all classrooms. In 2014, I visited schools that had limited and outdated devices or software. I have seen defunct desktop computers covered in layers of dust and LCD projectors in storage closets because of broken or missing bulbs that render them unusable. I have heard teachers intend to use the computer lab only to find the room assigned for standardized test use, and I have seen teachers struggle with unanticipated Internet loss (Olmanson & Abrams, 2013). While Internet access seems mostly reliable in our everyday lives, we all face unanticipated and disempowering âoutagesâ; such outages in the classroom can lead to derailed lessons if educators do not have contingency plans in place.
Yet even when connectivity is not an issue and technologies are part of classroom instruction, there are concerns about the ways in which they are used in the classroom. Research suggests that technologies are tools primarily for computational purposes (e.g., calculators) and/or access to social networking sites. For example, the US National Center for Education Statistics report, Teachersâ Use of Educational Technology in U.S. Public Schools: 2009, included data from 1,949 schools (and data of 3,983 teachersâ use of technology) and indicated that digital devices were most often conduits for Internet-based communication. Only 20â30 percent of students used technology for design or creative purposes, such as the production of written texts or graphics (Gray, Thomas, Lewis, & Tice, 2010). Similarly, in the UK, a BBC report indicated that, âchildren are being forced to learn how to use applications, rather than to make them. They are becoming slaves to the user interface and are totally bored by itâ (Burns, 2012, para. 15). These statements suggest that there is a need to address how technology is included in the classroom, with a specific focus on higher-order thinking skills.
The trend to âdigifyâ education has also spawned a blended learning movement that focuses on the integration of technology in the classroom, with multiple approaches that run the gamut of face-to-face opportunities complemented by digital technologies to completely online scenarios. These approaches help define ways to deliver content to students, and primarily focus on online arenas. For instance, Meghan Jacquot, author of the vignette in Chapter 5, works at a charter school that is based on a âflexâ principle, a model that hinges upon âan online platform that delivers most of the curriculaâ (Horn & Staker, 2011, p. 4). Meghan explains:
When I teach high school English at San Francisco Flex Academy, I like to think of myself as a guide. I facilitate English through a blended learning model. Students receive online instruction as independent learners in a cubicle setting in the Flex Centers. They are physically at school, but they have an online curriculum offered through [the software provider] K12ÂŽ Inc. As a teacher, I organize their classes and we meet in a physical classroom. It is not 100 percent online and it is not 100 percent brick and mortar, so we call it blended learning.
In this case, blended learning includes online instruction, but the approach centers on content delivery rather than pedagogy; this means that teachers need to pay even greater attention to practice. Flexible and responsible educators, like Meghan, use the time to meet with students in small cohorts and offer individualized instruction while other students in the class continue to work in the online space. However, as Meghan noted, because the flex model (and others like it that involve students receiving instruction from a virtual teacher) requires students to be responsible, independent learners, this approach may prove challenging for those who have difficulty managing their learning experiences. To address these problems, Meghan reported that schools, like San Francisco Flex Academy, offer students extra supports, âsystems in place to mitigate the learning curve, with a learning coach and peer mentorship program designed to work with new students.â In other words, effective blended learning requires schools to reconsider and/or reconceptualize curricula and classroom culture to support differentiated instruction and independent learning.
Other forms of blended learning include âflippingâ the classroom, whereby students encounter new information and skills at home through assigned materials (typically videos or narrated PowerPoint presentations) and then apply their newfound knowledge to homework-style questions in class. In these scenarios, students are expected to independently learn new material, and then the teacher evaluates their understanding as they complete the questions in class. By centering class time on engaging learners in âthe most cognitively demanding work inside classroomsâ (Reich, 2012, para. 4), this approach is supposed to provide the teacher more time to target studentsâ needs in the classroom. Results of successful flipped instruction can be striking, as evident in the Public Broadcasting Serviceâs segment, How âFlipped Classroomsâ are Turning the Traditional School Day Upside Down. Featuring Detroitâs Clintondale High School, which has fully adopted flipped instruction, the segment shows Principal Greg Green explaining the impact the flipped method has had on overall student achievement. According to Green, flipped instruction has been credited with students âdoubling the national average as far as ACT gains.â Though he notes âsome mixed resultsâ on state testing, Green says âwe have also seen an increase in graduation rates to almost 90 percent, and college acceptance rates at 80 percentâ (Brown, 2013).
Flipped learning does not need to involve technology, yet digital resources like videos and podcasts, as well as interactive programs, such as games and hyperlinked information, can enhance flipped approaches by offering students a variety of ways to self-select and engage with the material at their own pace. Of course, these activities require students to have access to technologyâsomething that may not be possible or equitable, depending on the devices and connectivity required to complete the assignments. In such cases, schools may opt to mirror San Francisco Flex Academyâs approach to helping students who donât own a computer, lending students appropriate technology (in this case laptops and Internet hubs) so they may go online at home. Or, like Clintondale, schools may select mobile-enabled programs so that learners can effectively access information through their phones, as well as offer students more time in the schoolsâ computer labs.
But we must not be flip about flipped learning. As with any assignment, educators must also be careful not to haphazardly use apps or online programs; busy work, even when dressed up with the bells and whistles of the virtual world, often equates to the misuse of time and technology, and supports âlearningâ that is bereft of originality or application. As consultant and online educator Andrew Miller warns, âIf the flipped classroom is truly to become innovative, then it must be paired with transparent and/or embedded reason to know the contentâ; this includes something more substantial than the âbecause it is on the testâ rationale (2012, para. 4). Still, the flipped model, when used effectively, can help to support independent learning skills at home and individualized instruction in school.
Despite the possibilities of blended learningâfrom the use of technology to the reorganization of instructionâit remains an umbrella term for technology-based instruction, and such a large category can potentially inhibit the identification of more nuanced approaches that create unique educational experiences. Moreover, given that many blended methods involve commercial-companies-as-instructional-providers, there is an unbalanced attention to content delivery over pedagogy. It is imperative for teachers and administrators not to accept programs at face value, but to ask, âHow can I change âxâ feature or only use âyâ program to support and/or meet a specific goal?â To merely integrate a program as-is, without consideration of its adaptability and the necessary pedagogical shifts, puts teaching and learning activities in jeopardy of becoming mechanistic.
Incorporating digital technologies in the classroom may seem to be the natural course of action, but often schools are quick to value digital approaches without having the educational research and pedagogy to support their assumptions. For example, though schools may have begun purchasing tablets for their students in an effort to offer ostensibly innovative education, only recently have studies begun to emerge on tablet technologies, and these studies suggest a range of implications. On the one hand, studentsâ use of tablets can aid the development of critical literacy skills (Prinsloo & Rowsell, 2012; Walsh & Simpson, 2013), enhance meaning making when used in concert with traditional print text (Walsh & Simpson, 2013), become a springboard for rich discussion, and âflattenâ teacherâ student and studentâstudent hierarchies (Rowsell, Saudelli, Scott, & Bishop, 2013). On the other hand, research suggests that tablets can likewise be a source of distraction for some struggling readers (Sheppard, 2011), and that they can replicate âdrill and skillâ techniques, rather than support higher-level syntheses and ideation; for example, in their assessment of visual arts and mobile applications, Jen Katz-Buonincontro and Aroutis Foster found that the âability to generate new ideas about art in the mobile applications was not present in most of the applications [and] few of the applications fostered the userâs ability to produce a digital painting (or sculpture in a few instances)â (2013, p. 15). Given that tablets and related apps are part of a burgeoning area of study, schools should resist the urge to âromanticize technologies like iPads as a panacea, an answer to the challenge of 21st-century literacy educationâ (Rowsell, Saudelli, Scott, & Bishop, 2013, p. 351) and, instead, focus on the pedagogy that can revitalize education. In other words, itâs not just about the technology, or the content area knowledge, or the pedagogy; itâs the combination of all three that supports effective technology integration (Mishra & Kohler, 2006).
The layered literacies framework described in this book goes one step further by offering models for flexible and innovative pedagogy related to technology integration. Building on research into adolescentsâ literate practices, it suggests how classroom instruction can include the layering of texts and experiences that inform studentsâ out-of-school learning, and it addresses a number of ways in which digital and non-digital texts can work in concert to help students find learning meaningful and relevant.
What This Book Offers
In My Pedagogical Creed, John Dewey underscored the importance of education responding to the inevitability and ubiquity of change, and he envisioned education as anything but static: âeducation must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thingâ (1897, p. 13). In a similar vein, Dewey called attention to the dynamic nature of thinking and creativity, noting that a studentâs âlearnings and achievements are fluid and moving. They change from day to day and from hour to hourâ (1902, p. 20). Education, thus, needs to embrace the imagination, variation, and evolution that accompany learning. Simply put, as Jean Piaget contended, âThe principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have doneâmen who are creators, inventors and discoverersâ (Duckworth, 1964, p. 175). The factory model of education that has driven classrooms to date not only contradicts Deweyâs and Piagetâs assertions, but also has proven to be anachronistic and ineffective for our present and future lives (Collins & Halverson, 2009). From tools to norms, our lives are different and the digital revolution continues to change us at an unparalleled rate, as is evident in the fact that we have developed a âfully networked lifeâ in which hyperlinks and search engines offer us (un)anticipated and rather immediate information (Turkle, 2011, p. xii). The challenge for educators, then, rests on the pedagogy of integration. That is, how do we harness the affordances of technology and studentsâ experiences with technology to help them develop the necessary skills to be independent and collaborative thinkers and creators? How do we help students become agentive learners who are willing to try âcoloring outside the linesâ and revel in the excitement of thinking differently?
This book responds to these questions, providing a framework that returns to Deweyâs and Piagetâs imperatives. By layering studentsâ literacies and honoring dynamic learning, we can continually rethink pedagogy and practice in light of social, economic, political, cultural, and/or technological changes. Building upon research into studentsâ literate practices in and out of school, this discussion values the textured, cohesive use of digital and non-digital texts in the middle and secondary classroom. The layered literacies framework, therefore, is flexible and customizable; after all, education cannot have a âone-size-fits-allâ model if we are to effectively engage adolescents in differentiated and individualized learning opportunities.
To that end, this book combines foundational educational concepts with contemporary learning theories to help explore how the confluence of online and offline learningâboth in and out of schoolâcan help educators reconceptualize learning objectives, formative assessments, and educational practices. As such, literacy is not married to its traditional, paper-and-pen definitions; it includes a variety of visual, spatial, and linguistic and non-linguistic modes that are part of the meaning making process, a...