Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Hot Topics in Literacy Education for 2015

The International Reading Association released its annual list that forecasts "hot" topics in literacy education. Hot is not the same as important, but indicates an area of high interest or even debate among reading experts.  Conducted by Jack Cassidy and Stephanie Grote-Garcia, the 2015 survey polled 25 leading literacy scholars and researchers to find what's hot and what's not.

2015 IRA LITERACY SURVEY

HOT AND SHOULD BE HOT:
  • Common Core State Standards
  • Close Reading/Deep Reading
  • Digital Literacies/New Literacies
  • College and Career Readiness
  • Informational/Nonfiction Texts
  • Text Complexity
  • Argumentative Writing
SHOULD BE VERY HOT:
  • Preschool Literacy Experiences
  • Adolescent Literacy
  • Comprehension
  • English Learners/ English as a Second Language
COLD BUT SHOULD BE HOT:
  • Literacy Coaches
  • Creative Writing
  • Professional Development
  • Motivation/Engagement
  • Struggling Readers (Grade 4 and older)
SHOULD NOT BE HOT:
  • Phonics/ phonemic Awareness
  • Fluency
  • High-Stakes Testing
(Cassidy & Grote-Garcia, 2014)

Friday, August 8, 2014

Learning to Read, One Tap at a Time

                                                                                                                         by dolanh cc-nc-sa2.0   

Three-fourths of U.S. families with young children now have mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets). These accessible digital tools are equipped with touchscreens that respond instantly to a fingertip swipe and are just the right size for young children to handle, carry, and operate. However, the icon-based interface of touchscreens organizes space and image very differently than books. It's time to expand Marie Clay's familiar book-based Concepts About Print: the understandings that help readers move front to back, left to right, and top to bottom through a book or to focus on the black and white lines of print rather than the images when reading.

A child with a tablet balanced on her lap is learning that the touchscreen is organized by a grid of colorful squarish icons that represent software applications, and importantly with little or no print.


Each icon opens an app at the touch of a finger and reading involves more taps…on arrows, “x”, checkmark, trashcan, pencil, plus signs and so on. These icons are not arranged in the orderly rows of print on a page but are scattered along the top, bottom, or corners of the screen. 

I argue that touchscreen technologies operate with an expanded set of conventions for interactive modes including finger swipes, icon recognition, and voice controls; in other words Concepts Beyond Print. (For more details, see a forthcoming chapter in the book Reclaiming Early Literacy edited by Kathryn Whitmore and Rick Meyer.) 

Today’s young children are learning printless ways of reading—one finger swipe at a time. With each tap, our emergent readers are learning interactive and flexible orientations to digital reading: recognizing icons as activators or portals, expecting a finger action to produce a screen change, and persisting when nothing happens, knowing that an area of the screen might contain an invisible icon that may appear when pressed. And accordingly, our teaching must change to recognize all that children already know.