Building Learning Communities 2014

What it means to read, how we access, select and hold onto texts, and the strategies we use for constructing and sharing our making meaning have been dramatically impacted and enabled by newer literacies and technologies. Some of these shifts have quickly and immediately moved into our classrooms, and others require more examination and questioning - asking us to continually reexamine our pedagogies (and practices as readers) of texts that can be produced and consumed in an instant.

During the session, we will discuss ways of rethinking and “connecting” our readers workshops, cultivating digital libraries, leveraging e-readers and mobile tools, annotating and sharing print and digital texts, and evaluating multimodal tools which are changing how we teach and work alongside student readers. Emphasis will not be on tools but on the literacy practices that they open.

I teach within a BYOD (bring your own device) classroom, and all examples and tools will all come directly from my work with students. Where we will root/situate our work in the emerging literature in the field (i.e., new literacies theories, multimodality), the emphasis will be on the practical. Examples will include but not be limited to use of digital tools for textual annotation, methods for building readers communities within GoodReads and other online spaces, scaffolds for student creation of multimodal book trailers linked to QR codes and auroas placed on book spines, using multimodal tools for feedback and reflection, rethinking readers notebooks with evernote, and use of voicethread and other apps to support interactive readers’ portfolios.