educadhd

[educadhd]

Considering my own digital literacy...

In these past few months that I've spent making these lesson plans and create to learn projects, I've had a lot time to think about my personal relationship with digital media and evaluate my own literacy. And thanks to the bees in my head, I have Many Thoughts.

I am, admittedly, chronically online in many ways, and I'm comfortable working with a wide variety of digital tools and platforms. I'm an artist, so I'm comfortable with digital art software. I'm a musician, so I'm comfortable with audio production and post-production software. I'm a writer, so I can basically use any text related digital anything with my eyes closed. These things have made sense to me and been a part of my life for over a decade now, so I feel like I've reached a stage in my relationship with technology and the internet where I'm turning my focus to seeking out the best tools and resources and examining tech with a critical eye rather than just using whatever is easiest to find.

So when approaching a lot of these projects, I took a rather picky approach to the resources I selected to use to make them. Since I've recently been more cognizant and concerned about the financial accessibility of various tech, I tried to use as much free, open source software as possible. Technically speaking, I do have free access to Adobe's collection of creative software, but this is not something my students can count on having, so it's been important to me to curate as many truly free, easily accessible, and non-subscription-based resources as I can. Quite frankly, if I see another great software I love turn into a subscription, I will scream.

That being said, I've found it incredibly valuable to be familiar with a lot of different creative software because it gives me a lot of options when I want to do something, so I think that giving students the opportunity to build their own toolboxes of software and other resources that they can choose from at their discretion is a really important thing to prioritize in the classroom. I believe strongly in providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and response so that students can develop healthy autonomy in their learning and their relationship with media, and projects that encourage students to branch out and be creative in new ways can be a great way of facilitating that.

Ultimately though, more than any specific mode or project, the thing that really sticks out to me as valuable is the ideals of literacy and accessibility. Hardware and software are constantly shifting, and what I think is fun and useful now may very well be obsolete in a couple years, given the obnoxiously short life cycle of a lot of tech these days (but that's another rant altogether). What doesn't change are the transferable strategies associated with lifelong learning and literacy and the need for accessible resources. So to me what matters most is shaping my classroom around those principles, cos I figure if I do that, the specifics of what and how to use various tools and resources will become clear as I move forward.

[educadhd]

Legend Genre Writing Lesson Plans - Grammar and Usage

I'm a big fan of folklore, and I love the idea of using legends as a genre of narrative writing. These lesson plans detail how legends as a genre are also great vehicles for teaching conventions of grammar and usage and how writers use these conventions as a part of their deliberate craft.

[educadhd]

Create to Learn - Screencast

Screencasting is a fun and different style of video essay, probably more suited to informational writing genres than narratives. This particular example illustrates how screencasting could be a medium for critical analysis of a subject (in this case, the rhetoric of my ghoul boys, Shane and Ryan 👻).

Software used: OBS Studio (recording), Lightworks (post production), Google Slides (slideshow)

Hardware used: DELL Inspiron 15 (laptop), TONOR TC-777 (USB microphone)

[educadhd]

Create to Learn - Book Movie Poster

Making hypothetical movie posters for books is always a blast, and it's a great way to showcase understanding of theme and mood. This is my stab at a poster for the ultimate dream live action movie adaptation of instantmiso's webnovel, Siren's Lament, that lives rent free in my brain. (it's so good y'all please go read it I'm begging you)

Software used: Canva

Hardware used: DELL Inspiron 15 (laptop)

[educadhd]

Create to Learn - Podcast

Podcasts are a very fun genre. This one is a (rather long) example of podcasting as a genre of informational writing.

Software used: Audacity

Hardware used: TONOR TC-777 (USB microphone), DELL Inspiron 15 (laptop)

[educadhd]

Create to Learn - StoryMap

A rather different sort of narrative writing assignment. I went for a poetic route, but the possibilities with this one are endless. Could be particularly useful for engaging students with setting.

Software used: StoryMapJS

Hardware used: DELL Inspiron 15 (laptop)

[educadhd]

Create to Learn - Playlist

A study playlist designed with neurodivergent brains in mind. It combines the power of video game music and lo-fi to create the ultimate musical chewing gum for an ADHDer. Something like this could also make a great assignment for literary analysis through music or even analyzing music as a text itself.

Software used: Spotify, Amazon Music, IbisPaint X (cover art)

Hardware used: Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (tablet), Samsung Galaxy A52 (smartphone)

[educadhd]

Create to Learn - Video Story

An example of a possible creative video product for personal narrative writing.

Software used: IbisPaint X (art) , Canva (video), Audacity (audio)

Hardware used: Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (tablet), TONOR TC-777 (USB microphone), DELL Inspiron 15 (laptop)

[educadhd]

The Secret of the Blue Glass Reading Lesson Plan - Text Sets and Blended Learning

I've talked a little previously about blended learning and my hesitations with it, but I do recognize that it has merit, so here's a hypothetical lesson plan detailing how one might combine the learning centers strategy with concepts pulled from the station rotation model of blended learning.

[educadhd]

Podcast Genre Writing Lesson Plan - Copyright

Podcasts are a fun and engaging medium to use in an informational writing unit, but as with any digital creative medium, they require some familiarity with copyright to work with authentically. This lesson is my take on how copyright could be taught in an engaging way.

[educadhd]

RPG Genre Writing Lesson Plan - Tables

Another piece of my TTRPG narrative writing unit brain child. This lesson focuses on the specific genre convention of random encounter tables.

[educadhd]

RPG Genre Writing Lesson Plan - Genre Content

One of my brain children is teaching narrative writing through the genre of tabletop role-playing games. This would be intended for 12th graders, as it's a fairly complex genre, but still, I think it would be a very fun way of working with narrative writing.

[educadhd]

Tech Profile of a Classroom - Kat

A brief survey of the kind of tech used in a secondary classroom. Potentially the start of a series depending on my ✨ mood ✨

[educadhd]

Survey of Technology Integration in English Language Arts

Here is a handy spreadsheet I made surveying and evaluating some of the various software and web-based resources used in secondary English Language Arts classrooms. I will likely update it periodically when I find new things. Any suggestions for software, hardware, or other tech to look into are more than welcome!

[educadhd]

My Digital Teaching Philosophy

We live in an era where technology is ubiquitous, often to a fault, and navigating when and how to use the technology that we have as teachers is a difficult task. Fundamentally, I see technology as a tool, and a powerful one at that. Like any tool, it can be used to great benefit in the classroom, but at the same time, it’s important to remember that tools have specific purposes, and it is unhelpful to us and to our students to try and make everything a nail just because we have access to a really cool hammer. 

That being said, my digital teaching philosophy centers around two main principles: literacy and accessibility. To put it simply, any use of technology in the classroom ought to either strengthen students’ literacy or increase the accessibility of a task. If a technology does not do either of these things, its place in the classroom should be reevaluated. 

Literacy

When I discuss literacy here and in other areas of this blog, I’m referring to the concept of literacy as explained by the NCTE, which states that literacy is "a collection of communicative and sociocultural practices shared among communities." (source) Basically, the idea is that being able to read words is only one form of literacy, and it is important for us and our students to develop a network of literacies, including digital literacy, media literacy, and critical literacy in order to be full participants in the global society we live in. In short, for students to be truly literate in this digital age, they need to be able to "consume, curate, and create actively across contexts" and engage critically with the ethical and cultural concerns of these contexts. 

With this in mind, the assignments and tasks we have students engage with in our classrooms ought to be centered around this goal of being literate across contexts. In English and Language Arts education, we have a special responsibility to help students develop literacy because effective communication is the domain of the English subject. Thus, creating classrooms that encourage literacy development is critical for English teachers in secondary education. This can look differently depending on the classroom and teacher, but in my classroom, this means:

Incorporating multimedia artifacts in reading and writing units

Teaching students how to evaluate and select the digital tools and mediums that best fit a given task and/or audience

Encouraging students to branch out and be creative in different modes than they’re used to

Teaching online research skill sets that allow students to find and recognize credible sources

Having real conversations with students about the nature of online spaces and how to protect themselves and others in an increasingly exploitative online environments

Prioritizing relevance and authenticity in medium, topic, and genre in all assignments

Because helping students to develop literacy is at the center of my use of technology in the classroom, whenever I am considering using a new form of software or hardware, I ask myself the following questions regarding its usefulness in helping students develop literacy:

Will learning to use this technology in and of itself set students up for future success?

Does this use of technology authentically simulate how adult professionals use it in normal contexts?

Will this use of technology help students learn to discern truth and error both on and offline?

Does this use of technology help students better understand how people and corporations may try to manipulate and present information to influence them? 

Accessibility

As a disabled person, accessibility is a huge concern for me and thus is very much centered in my teaching philosophies. I see technology as an incredible tool for increasing accessibility in classrooms for neurodivergent or otherwise disabled students. With accessibility concerns at the forefront of technology use, the viability and usefulness of different hardware and software is made much more evident. While many digital literacy theorists emphasize the importance of "transformative" technology use in the classroom, many of these theoretical discussions fail to recognize that disability affects what is and is not transformative for a student. Use of a word processor like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, for example, may seem from an abled perspective to be functionally a mere replacement for traditional pen and paper and not a transformative use of technology, but for a student with dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, or even just a language barrier, access to a word processor could mean the difference between being able or unable to complete the task assigned. Because of the way disabilities affect student learning and the simple fact that we have students with known and unknown disabilities in every class period, it is critical to ensure that our use of technology in the classroom is, first and foremost, accessible to every student.

Accessibility requires, by necessity, an individualized approach to education, but this sort of individualization is difficult to achieve when there is only one teacher to, in some cases, 40 students per class period. The way I see it, there are two primary methods by which to resolve this issue. One method is to increase curriculum individualization through a blended learning approach, which has been seen to work well in several cases. However, I personally feel that the drawbacks to this approach outweigh the benefits, so I prefer to use the Universal Design for Learning approach, which focuses on providing students with multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression that they can access and choose according to their needs. In my classroom, this means:

Optimizing student autonomy

Incorporating student interests where possible

Providing mastery-oriented feedback on assignments

Providing students with coping skills and strategies

Offering various ways of customizing how information is displayed

Offering alternatives for visual and auditory information

Using multiple modes of media to illustrate concepts and communicate

Varying methods for student response

Ensuring access to assistive technology and other tools

Helping students to develop strategies to strengthen executive functioning

To ensure that the digital tools in my classroom are accessible for all of my students, whenever I am considering implementing a new hardware or software in my classroom, I consider the following questions to evaluate its accessibility:

If this is an online resource, is it at least WCAG 2.0 Level A compliant?

If this is an ebook or other digital publication, does it have a NIMAS compliant or otherwise accessible source file that can be converted to a specialized format (e.g. Braille, audio, large print, etc.)?

Does this tool fully support screen readers and keyboard access?

Will having this tool available remove barriers for disabled students?

Will having this tool available remove barriers for English language learners? 

Will this tool provide an additional means of engaging with, representing, or responding to lesson content?

How might a student with a disability in sensory processing respond to the use of this tool?

Will this tool increase student autonomy?

This is just one way to go about creating a pedagogical approach that is conscious of digital literacy. What works for me may not work for everyone, and that's okay. What matters most is that we as teachers are committed to giving our students the best education that we can, and this means constantly revising and updating our theory and practice to incorporate the ever-shifting needs of our students.