What Should I Read?
These are great books for getting started on or expanding an exploration of digital tools and teaching English. The cover images and descriptions below are taken directly from each book's Amazon listing. And, yes, there is definitely a bias toward teaching writing here. I've indicated any thoughts of my own with an * .
Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction
by Rodney H. Jones & Christopher A. Hafner
Assuming no knowledge of linguistics, Understanding Digital Literacies provides an accessible and timely introduction to new media literacies. Each chapter in the volume covers a different topic, presenting an overview of the major concepts, issues, problems and debates surrounding the topic. Features include:
Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms:
A Fresh Look at the Read/Write Web
by Will Richardson For educators of all disciplines, this third edition of a bestseller provides K–12 examples of how Web tools such as blogs, wikis, Facebook, and Twitter allow students to learn more, create more, and communicate better. *A great how-to primer. Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment
by Maja Wilson
The conventional wisdom in English education is that rubrics are the best and easiest tools for assessment. But sometimes it's better to be unconventional. In Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson offers a new perspective on rubrics and argues for a better, more responsive way to think about assessing writers' progress. A New Culture of Learning:
Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change
by Douglas Thompson & John Seely Brown The twenty-first century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning, Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic.... Replete with stories, this is a book that looks at the challenges that our education and learning environments face in a fresh way. *Just read it. Really. Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other Digital Tools
by Richard Beach, Chris Anson, Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch, and Thom Swiss
See how to use various digital tools including blogs, wikis, digital mapping, online chat, digital storytelling, podcasts, e-portfolios, and others to teach writing in the classroom. Packed with examples of teaching activities and student writing, this one-of-its-kind book demonstrates how to use search engines and digital mapping to develop information, online discussion tools and blogs to formulate ideas, Wikis to write collaboratively, digital storytelling and poetry to create multimodal texts, podcasts and vlogs to create audio and video texts, online commenting tools to provide peer feedback, and much more. Included are links to new tools and activities on the authors constantly updated Web site. The Socially Networked Classroom:
Teaching in the New Media Age
by William Kist This book demonstrates how pioneering teachers have successfully integrated screen-based literacies into instruction and how you can harness students’ social networking skills for learning. |
The Digital Writing Workshop
by Troy Hicks
Troy Hicks holds sight on good writing workshop instruction. Where others have talked about new technologies and how they change writing, Hicks shows you how to use new technologies to enhance the teaching of writing you already do. Chapters are organized around the familiar principles of the writing workshop: student choice, active revision, studying author s craft, publication beyond the classroom, and assessment of both product and process. In each chapter you'll learn how to expand and improve your teaching by smartly incorporating new technologies like wikis, blogs, and other forms of multimedia. Throughout, you ll find reference to resources readily available to you and your class online. He also includes a practical set of lessons for how to use wikis to explore a key concept in digital writing: copyright. Multimodal Composition:
Resources for Teachers
edited by Cynthia Selfe Multimodal Composition is designed to help teachers of English composition expand the modalities on which they and their students draw, to go beyond the limits of texts that rely primarily on words, and to enjoy exploring the affordances-the special capacities - of video, image and sound. This book offers faculty practical help on creating multimodal assignments and working within digital composing environments. *Plus, TONS of mentor texts, i.e, student-created video, audio, etc., on an accompanying CD. Reading the Media:
Media Literacy and High School English
by Renee Hobbs This pioneering book, by one of the founders of the media literacy field, provides the first empirical evidence of the impact of media literacy on the academic achievement of adolescents. It chronicles the practice of high school teachers who prepared their students to critically analyze all aspects of contemporary media culture. To do so, they developed an innovative curriculum that incorporates popular media, television, journalism, film, and new media into the required English curriculum. This book examines the processes they used to design and implement the new curriculum as well as the specific, measurable impact that the program had on students. *The book is not as academic as it sounds. It's exciting and inspiring to read about the curricula the teachers created. Teaching the iGeneration:
5 Easy Ways to Introduce Essential Skills with Web 2.0 Tools
by Will Ferriter and Adam Garry ...The purpose of Teaching the iGeneration is to help teachers find the natural overlap between the work that they already believe in and the kinds of digital tools that are defining tomorrow s learning. Each chapter introduces an enduring skill: information fluency, persuasion, communication, collaboration, and problem solving as well as a digital solution that can be used to enhance, rather than replace, traditional skill-based instructional practices. These solutions include blogs, wikis, content aggregators, asynchronous discussion forums, web conferencing software, video editing applications, and social bookmarking and annotation tools. *A different approach to 2.0 tools, and important in that it emphasizes the pedagogy and not just the tech. Lots of reproducibles. Rethinking English in Schools:
Toward a New and Constructive Stage
by Viv Ellis, Brian Street, Carol Fox Why should young people study a subject called English? This question lies at the heart of this fascinating monograph, which brings together the diverse perspectives of many leading thinkers about English and literacy education. This meticulously researched and well-written collection takes as its starting point the importance of the history of the subject in the formation of its constitution and its boundaries. First and foremost, it proposes that questions of aims and values have informed these choices. Equally, it suggests that returning to these educational questions helps us to understand curriculum and pedagogy in complex ways that a simple focus on content and methods neglects. Curriculum and pedagogy bring learners, teachers, institutions and the wider society into the debate. *Just read it. Really. |
