Open House Discussion: How Are New Literacies Taught at Your School?

New Media Depends on Old Literacy

One of the interesting experiences I had recently was taking a social media workshop. I entered the room anticipating a strong presentation with great content, classy visuals and probably sound as well. This was, after all, about media! I was taken completely unawares by the presenter’s frenetic pace, flashing pictures scrolling across the screen, and the dumping of content in bucketfuls, slide after video after slide. As I travel around to many schools, it is obvious that new literacies are heavily dependent on a very old literacy—reading and comprehending at high speed! Why did I imagine that was somehow less important now in the 21st century?
Independent School Management (ISM), Wilmington, Delaware
Simon Jeynes, consultant and director of business development

Essays Are Worth a Thousand Words

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and new literacies supported by technology allow teachers to leverage them. For example, digital photos and some well-crafted captions in Comic Life gave voice to students who could otherwise have been paralyzed by their introduction to essay writing. Our Grade 6 students took photos during a First Nations field trip. Using Comic Life, they chose the photos and wrote the captions necessary to state and defend their thesis on the First Nations’ people and their relationship to nature. While essays won’t always be this fun, it is hard to imagine a more engaging way than digital storytelling with Comic Life to launch students in this skill.
Kingsway College School, Etobicoke, Ontario
Andrea Fanjoy, assistant head, academics

Returning to the Real Basics with Eco-literacy

Olney Friends School embraces the teaching of eco-literacy, not because it’s timely (though it is), but because it has defined our school program since 1837. We are an independent co-educational Quaker boarding and day high school (grades 9 to 12) with a globally diverse student population on 350 acres in rural southeastern Ohio in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

We practise what the Center for Ecoliteracy calls “schooling that returns to the real basics: engaging with the natural world; understanding how nature sustains life; nurturing healthy communities; exploring the consequences of how we feed and provision ourselves; caring about the places where we live and the people and creatures in them.”
Olney Friends School, Barnesville, Ohio
Kirsten Bohl, director of communications

Spreading Media Awareness

Media literacy is one of the most important topics in which we can educate our students in this media-saturated world. At Mulgrave School, we bring this into our mentoring curriculum in our middle school program and continue to focus on it through the senior grades. Going beyond Internet safety and evaluating sources, we strive to encourage students to understand the influence the media have on our everyday life, from where we get our news and information to how trends and brands gain popularity. As we continue to encourage students to make the best use of new technologies, we also ensure that they understand what they are able to access and where it comes from. A valuable website that I personally use to support my students is www.media-awareness.ca.
Mulgrave School, West Vancouver, B.C.
Lian Anson, film studies teacher

Critical-Thinking Online

New literacies in my classroom are being addressed by creating an online resource through Jog the Web where my students can watch videos, listen to podcasts and read a text. Jog the Web is a site where you can create your own interactive web-based activities. Students are then asked to synthesize the information during class discussions and demonstrate their learning by using critical-thinking skills to complete, compare and contrast diagrams using the software program Inspiration 8 IE, which is great for creating graphic organizers.
Lower Canada College, Montreal, Quebec
Alison Wearing, Grade 5 English and social sciences teacher

Authentic Learning Through Multimedia Collaboration

Montcrest School ensures that its curriculum drives all integration of new literacies. Using stop-motion moviemaking and our soccer field, junior school students simulated the travel of food through the digestive system. This movie was posted on VoiceThread, an online multimedia collaboration tool, where students recorded their play-by-play voiceover. The next step will be to invite a Montcrest alumnus who is studying medicine to join this VoiceThread to ask questions and make the learning authentic. This is just one example of how new literacies are being integrated at Montcrest.
Montcrest School, Toronto, Ontario
Rob Thomson, director of information technology

Enhancing Reading with Audiobooks

While the concept of “new literacies” evolves, it’s given us (in the library) the opportunity to continue developing collections beyond traditional formats. This year, we added MP3 players to our collection. While in the past we’ve offered audiobooks to our students with special learning needs, feedback indicated that they could be used and appreciated by students throughout the school and in all grades. We’ve been delighted to find that this is the case. Word is out, and we’re getting an increasing number of requests for audiobooks, most often something required for class, but sometimes something simply for pleasure reading (or “listening”!). Educators now recognize that not all students read (or interpret) print in a meaningful way, and listening to a quality recording of a specific text (ideally, while following along in print or on screen) seems to truly enhance their reading experience. Having incorporated e-readers into our collection as well, we’re excited about how these new technologies allow us to respond to the variety of new literacies in which our students must become proficient, so that they continue to be effective learners beyond our walls.
Trinity College School, Port Hope, Ontario
Shelagh Straughan, librarian

Embracing Technology All Around in Class

New literacies are embraced by students and teachers alike at our school. My lessons incorporate a wide variety of digitally developed technology including Promethean interactive boards, digital cameras and regular use of classroom computers. Students learn language through viewing, reading, interpreting, creating, designing and redesigning multimodal texts, and by using resources that include printed text, electronic text, audio forms of communication (radio, music, electronic audio), and videos (both DVDs and online videos).

Students honed their computer skills by developing digital stories, which called upon students to use a variety of Microsoft Office, scanning and photo processing programs. Students have embraced technology and realized its potential in shrinking the boundaries of space with our ePals program, where students connected and shared experiences with students in Poland. We were able to collaborate on a classroom wiki project, where an entire online geography resource was created. Every day my students blog, use word processors, read online texts and truly embrace the use of new literacies. I try to create learning opportunities that enhance students’ prior knowledge of technology and new literacies in order to help students better understand the use and place of these literacies in our world.
Braemar House School, Brantford, Ontario
Jacquie Stripe, Grade 7 teacher

Four New Literacies

At Royal St. George’s College, we have identified four new literacies as integral to preparing our boys to thrive in the 21st century. We aim to develop students who can creatively adopt the following roles:

1. Researcher: identifies, gathers, evaluates and uses information, technology and resources to complete tasks
2. Designer: looks for and acts on new ideas for learning
3. Developer: monitors, assesses and revises plans to complete tasks
4. Presenter: communicates learning effectively through media, word or the arts

Through inquiry-based projects, we focus on introducing, practising and mastering these 21st-century skills. We use technology when it helps students to communicate and reflect upon their understanding—what’s interesting is figuring out how technology enables new ways of learning.
Royal St. George’s College, Toronto, Ontario
Anna Magor, curriculum coach, and Charles Fowler, director of information technology

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