Combining Traditional Literacies in the 21st Century

Combining Traditional Literacies in the 21^st Century

This article inspired me to take our writing lessons to a new level this quarter.  In ELL writing, we spend a lot of time using graphic organizers to plan our stories. We orally rehearse them, but students need a lot of support to include all the details they share orally into their written pieces. They also need a lot of support and modeling to revise their stories. Recording their oral rehearsal with a partner may be the added support they need to improve in these areas.

The Livescribe Smartpens used in this study seem like an amazing tool – I’d love to have the opportunity to try these sometime.  Since that is not an option right now, I plan to use either Educreations or Seesaw to take a photo of students’ completed graphic organizers and have them record their oral rehearsal.  I’ll need to practice more before I decide which will work best. I’m leaning toward using Seesaw because it’s an app I introduced to students and I want them to be more able to use it independently. Another advantage of using Seesaw is that they have their digital animal research stories stored in their Seesaw learning journals. This gives them an opportunity to go back and listen to them and any other work we choose to store in this app.  One concern I had about my digital story project was – if students don’t have opportunities to listen to/share their digital stories and get feedback on them, what is the purpose of creating the digital story? 

I’ll be starting this project with personal narrative writing when we get back to school next week. I’ll keep you “posted” on my progress and lessons learned.

I practiced creating my own digital graphic organizer on Popplet Lite. I believe any of my students (K-5) would be able to use this organizer because it allows drawing, photo, and text options for planning.  I found it a little hard to draw because the planning boxes are so small.  It is very easy to erase your drawings – I spent most of my drawing time erasing.  The option to add photos works great.  Throughout the year, we create Language Experience stories as a class. I photograph the steps in the story so students can use them to plan their stories. Earlier this year, my first graders built snowmen in class then wrote about their experience in a personal narrative. We recorded digital versions of these stories. I wish I would have know about Popplet Lite when we were doing this because it is a perfect way to let students use the photos from the experience to plan their stories.  I made an example of one students’ picture story to show how it could work.  When we did this in our class, I printed the students’ pictures so they could use them for planning – an expensive, no-tech option.  I’ll definitely have students use Popplet Lite for the next Language Experience story.