Literacy in the Digital Age of Education

Olivia

Yeah, and it’s interesting as teachers thinking about the you know both the educators we had as students whether that was at whatever age you know first grade or college and whatnot and then all the way to even some of the teachers we’ve worked alongside and how each of those definitely has a big impact on our experience. And I’m curious, I noticed that you became an ISTE or ISTE Certified Teacher back in 2019 and I’m curious if you could elaborate in your experience, an insight that you’ve gained from this certification, maybe for some of our audience members out there who are interested in kind of what the benefits are and what cause you to reach out to get that certification.

Troy

Certainly yes, many people in your audience are probably aware of what ISTE is. If they’re not it’s the International Society for Technology in Education and that group has long been the leader in the edtech world as we’ve thought about how to integrate technology critically and creatively into our classrooms and so they started the certification program. It wasn’t too much earlier than 2019. I was one of the first groups to go through it but I was a bit untraditional in tit, sense that number one I was a higher ed faculty member and not a K-12 colleague and then also I went through it in what I would call an alternative pathway. It was very self-paced because I was doing that while we were trying to also get our master’s degree here at Central Michigan University for learning design and technology accredited through ISTE. But I did go through the same process and the process is that you have to share fourteen artifacts of your teaching all of which had to meet at least two of the ISTE standards and some of them had to meet three of the standards in order to show how those artifacts indicated what you did in a robust manner to integrate technology into your coursework and your other types of teaching experiences. And so through that I’ve learned yet another set of lenses and ways to think about how to bring educational technology to life and the pre-service methods classes that I teach, the graduate courses that I teach, the workshops and webinars that I lead and always to center student learning in that process. So, one thing about all of the ISTE standards is that they really do put learning at the core of the practice and it’s not just about the newest and fanciest technology so that entire certification process was very useful and still helps me to this day.

Olivia

Yeah, and I love that you mentioned like that idea of keeping learning at the center because you’re right, that is honestly it and I’m sure our audience and audience members are going to agree. There is an overwhelming amount of technology and it’s all very shiny, especially, you know, at the beginning of the school year even just especially with some of the surgeence of each technology company having their own AI, chatbots and all of these other additional elements. It’s all shiny and so I think keeping that mindset of keeping the learning at the center and thinking about as you mentioned the different lenses that you have to think about learning and utilizing them like that’s really what you know what teachers are trying to gain is that ability to kind of look through the noise and find out what’s actually going to serve their students the most that sounds quite useful.

Troy

Yes, and it remains useful because the community meets on a regular basis online in Zoom too. So that’s an added benefit. You stay connected with other ISTE Certified Educators throughout the entire school year.

Olivia

Yeah, and I’m sure you know given that in your role as a chairperson in that education department having that community and having you know you’re  sort of consistently connected to a space where people are learning at the best new practices but many people after they graduate school or wherever it is. They’re now in the field and so no longer as closely connected to the up-and-coming research and I think that kind of leads me into some of my thoughts about the education industry at large and your role within it. So, I know you oversee a pretty diverse educational community and I’m just curious how you might see the foundational principles of learning design and technology integration that you’ve learned in getting your ISTE certification and in some of your other roles. How do those align with the University’s mission and what strategies are you able to employ to ensure that these principles are implemented in your courses or within the groups that you oversee?

Troy

Yes, I really appreciate this question and I think that any teacher educator who’s involved in educational technology or otherwise if they were being humble and honest would probably admit that we’re not doing as well as what we should overall in terms of integrating K-12 technology and by no means am I trying to undermine the tragedies that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency remote teaching but there’s that joke that we might have let a good crisis go to waste in the sense that suddenly we put all this technology into students’ and teachers’ hands and yet we were not as perhaps diligent as we should have been about thinking creatively, critically, carefully and thinking in whatever way we want to describe it, we could have probably been a little bit more strategic in helping them plan for more effective uses of technology. So, for instance here at CMU, we have always said that technology is integrated throughout the elementary education program and recently with changes to our secondary program, we eliminated the educational technology class and again, supposedly, we are integrating that into our entire pre-service program. And yet when my colleagues and I have conversations, we know that this is not always happening, and we know from surveys from our students after they graduate that they feel this is not always happening as well. So even though we’re saying that we’re doing some of this, I think that we need to be much more intentional, so there’s professional learning that needs to happen for faculty, from faculty. We need to listen to students. We need to talk to our K-12 colleagues. We need to understand better what technologies are already available in schools and to use them in more creative ways and then to also think about where we can start to push the boundaries and encourage newer technologies to come into schools and for our pre-service teachers to be able to use those as well.

Olivia

Yeah, and you’re making me think of you know back in elementary school when I took a computer class and we just took a class just on using computers and I think when I was teaching middle school so our students had their Chromebooks for at that point. In my first year they’d only had them for about half a year and so they were just learning the computer by doing and so it was integrated you know in fifth grade year spending a bit more time getting kids set up on whatever website they’re on versus eighth grade. They can kind of just log in, but it’s just woven in and I think that is reality of technology is that it starts to become a bit more woven into the process because it’s so integrated. We’re all just becoming a little bit more technology native, but to your point if that’s not done with enough intention is are we just missing out on the actual, um, you know, skills of employing tech and ed tech products and kind of with a critical thinking of “which one do I use in this moment?” because I think that’s a big challenge is just, you know, once I’m in the middle of deep in a product is this actually the one that I want to use or is there something better out there.

Troy

Yes, and so one thing that we’re trying to do this year, we began this initiative last year and seemed to start to be picking up some traction working with some of our educational technology doctoral students to develop asynchronous modules with some short video clips, some tutorials, some suggested activities that they can use with different educational technologies and integrating those technologies into their courses as appropriate per the assignments and assessments that they’re designing, say, in their elementary methods class or their social studies methods class or their English language arts methods class or things like that. So we are trying to take a little more intentional approach this year and hopefully we see some results from that initiative.

Olivia

Yeah, definitely and that’s great to think about just the ways in which you’re leaning on the rest of your community to actually achieve those goals and definitely speaks to the community that exists at CMU. And I’d love to switch gears a little bit. I think that we’re still thinking about how to use technology to really help our teachers get to the core of what they’re trying to teach and I think there’s a lot of discussion in recent months about what really is the purpose of school and an education when there is technology out there, and how do we prepare our students for the future, and so I’ve noticed your commitment to literacy seems to be unwavering, especially given your background in ELA and then the writing workshops and when we spoke before we had a really interesting conversation about literacy and just really what that means and I was curious if you could delve a little bit into that concept of literacy in the context of today’s technology-driven education is being literate really just about reading and writing or does it encompass more in this age?

Troy

I think it certainly encompasses more than reading and writing in the broadest sense of those words. So, this question made me think of the idea from Paulo Freire of “reading the word in the world,” being able to understand language of course, but being able to understand how language is enacted in different ways and then also understanding physical and other relational types of the world and, you know, images and infographics and video clips and commercials and just reading spaces and places and things like that too. So, literacy is broad. We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that students need to be able to understand words and decode and comprehend text and also need to be able to put words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into stories and essays and reports and things like that. And yet, at the same time, I’m also reminded of the National Council of Teachers of English’s Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age where they have these three terms that literacy is “interconnected,” “dynamic,” and “malleable,” and when we think about what that means especially as we begin to think about the influence of artificial intelligence, it’s going to really require everyone – and especially English language arts teachers but everyone in their own disciplinary manner – to help students understand what that means to read and write. What does that mean to read and write and understand the world as a mathematician? What does it mean to read and write and understand the world as an historian? And how do we help other teachers see themselves in that way both through the lens of the technology and then also through the lens of disciplinary literacy. So, I sometimes think about this as digital and disciplinary literacies and how that complicates, in good ways, how that complicates what we understand literacy to be so yes, it is ever broader and ever more complicated and yet ever more necessary.

Olivia

Yeah, that feels like a lot of topics. So, it’s the more you know necessary, it is the more overwhelming and perhaps difficult, it might be to accomplish. But that’s why it’s important, that’s why it’s important that we are creating the resources for those educators and just the students eventually they actually have these skills and I think you know similar question, but you know in today’s digitally driven world how important is this digital and media literacy for educators and maybe if you could help us understand a little bit. We’ve heard these terms thrown around a lot but you know what strategies and resources do you recommend for teachers to develop these kinds of skills of digital media literacy and how can they then pass those on to their students.

Troy

Yeah, these skills are crucial as well and I don’t want to split hairs here and try to define what “digital literacy” is and what “media literacy” is and what “digital media literacy” is. In fact, I have wonderful scholarly conversations with colleagues about this as we try to you know disaggregate these terms and give them unique definitions. But, in general, these are skills that again need to be taught at all grade levels and all disciplines and in those unique ways. And so you know speaking with teachers about this, “well, how do I integrate this in just a little bit every day,” just a little connection here or there is useful. You don’t have to just try to jam a unit on media literacy or digital literacy into your already crowded curriculum. You can introduce these skills as part of what it is that you’re doing on a daily basis. And so for some places to turn for strategies and resources we’ve already mentioned ISTE and NCTE also the International Literacy Association has resources for digital literacy related to ELA and I’m sure other content areas’ special organizations have that as well. There’s also NAMLE, the National Association of Media Literacy Education, there’s the Media Education Lab where I’m an affiliate faculty member. There are wonderful lesson plans and resources at websites like Common Sense Media or Media Smarts out of Canada or the critical media literacy project and then also through Jeff Share’s work with the critical media literacy framework and the questions that he asked with his colleague there. I think just even using those questions as you’re looking at text in a language arts classroom — even if you’re not trying to do a critical media analysis kind of thinking about who is this audience and what is being said and what is not being said and what is being implied  — those types of questions are wonderful ones to ask again just in small ways on a daily basis. It doesn’t have to be a whole entirely separate unit on digital skills and media literacy skills. It can be part and parcel of what we do every day.

Olivia

Yeah, I love that because it’s not about changing, as you mentioned, it’s not changing your entire curriculum but it’s almost a new found urgency and importance not that these topics were not important before but you know weaving them in with the reality of why these skills are important and I think it ultimately comes down to really considering the why and the results we need for our students and the importance of having digital and media literacy when there is going to be, you know, more and more challenging, you know, articles to figure out who actually wrote this and what is the bias or the intention behind the article and, you know, just the ability for generative AI to produce so much content thinking about helping our readers become stronger critical thinkers in that sense.

Troy

Yeah, and even a quick example to that point is like in Mozilla, you know the group that works with Firefox and so many other initiatives, like one of their newsletters came out last week and I really appreciated this. They’re like how you can spot a fake AI image.

Well, look for people that have too many fingers or a misshapen face and, like, yeah, that’s helpful and then their final suggestion was go to a Google reverse image search or Tin Eye and I’m like, “that’s what needs to be first right?” Like, that’s the, yes, you do want kids to kind of be thinking about that looking for text that’s garbled or you know a character that has 6 fingers or something like that. But you want to teach them at digital literacy skill. There are tools out there that we can turn to that can help us with this. And yes, it’s good to have that kind of immediate filter on but we also need to teach them how to use tools and so I think again, it’s all part of what we would do as a lesson like, you know, “trust your gut” and “oh yeah, that looks kind of fake,” but then go and use one of these tools to back it up. So again, I think there’s so many ways that we can integrate that into our daily teaching practices. It does not have to just be some random lesson on one, you know, Friday at the end of the year. It can be something that we do as we’re looking at resources across the whole year.

Olivia

Yeah, and I think to your point it also this is that’s where it’s gonna be more sticky if it’s just a lesson on you know, isolated lessons with certain types of skills. Don’t end up sticking with students because they’re not applied to the content that they’re doing and so when you weave it in that way it’s much more. I think it just helps show the applicability of the skill but also helps connect it to the things that kids are really going to be doing. And I think I just appreciate your focus and your commitment to literacy, and I was curious if you had there was an article I saw in The Atlantic a couple months ago. I feel like it was passed around quite a lot about kids not falling in love with reading anymore and I definitely can say that as, you know, a science teacher, I was often pulled as a guided reading instructor as well and so definitely working with some of the students that were below grade level when it comes to reading and so I definitely noticed there was a trend with those kinds of students that they often also were not and we’re not the kinds of kids who are picking up books on their own accord quite as often and so I’m curious you know in today’s digital age with these concerns about declining interest in reading among students, how do you think educators could effectively harness some technology tools and platforms to help their students navigate this expanding lab landscape of educational technology and really employing it for the best use.

Troy

Yeah I do not want to make light of this situation because I have seen this with my own children, now all of whom have graduated from high school some of whom I would say are readers and some who just are not. And, for a language arts teacher at heart that’s really hard to see sometimes with your own kids not necessarily loving to read and yet I also know that there are so many systemic challenges to reading that many authors have explored over the years, so like Donalyn Miller, Penny Kittle, Kelly Gallagher who wrote the book Readacide some number of years ago, there are a lot of people out there that have already thought about this but one teacher that I turn to all the time is a friend a colleague a co-author Andy Schoenborn who for almost twenty years taught AP Lit and recently moved into an alternative high school and he said, “You know what, Troy, it’s still the same right? You just have to put books in kids’ hands. There’s power in print.” And so he has a classroom library. He’s constantly doing book talks. He’s encouraging kids to read when they say “I hate reading, I’m never going to read anything in your class.” He’s like “okay, no problem. You know here’s a few things that you might be interested in, but you know if you don’t want to, don’t worry about it.” And inevitably, you know, by day two or three, they’re looking at the back covers and eventually they’re digging into the books and then he finds the right book for the right kid. And as much as I love digital text and I appreciate digital text, I think that sometimes just putting a book in a kid’s hand is the most powerful thing. Then what I’ve seen in Andy’s classroom and he and I have written about is how he invites kids to use digital tools at the point they are engaged in reading. So, for instance, he might have them take a picture of a particular page or paragraph in a text and turn it into a “book snap,” they can add emojis and draw on it and write their response on that photo and share it to social media. Sometimes we’ll use more, you know, specifically designed annotation tools things like Perusal or Kami. Even now I think like saving PDFs in Google Drive you can annotate on those so you can do all kinds of annotation and response that way. Students will, you know, share their book talks on Flipgrid or Padlet or things like that. But then the one thing that he does is he doesn’t ask them to write book reports. He’s always asking them to represent their reading in a different way. How can they create a TED Talk? How could they create a short video? How could they create a podcast? And so I think that, again, getting the right book and the right kid’s hands, that’s number one and then once that happens just giving them opportunities to share their love of that book, but not always through the traditional book report. So, I think there is a place for technology in our reading and there is a place to show them how to use the library app, right? Or how to go online and read The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or something like that. But it is also something where we really need to just remember to put books in kids’ hands and then encourage them to use the technology to express their love of those books in creative ways.

Olivia

Yeah, and I love that because I think that there is definitely you know sometimes that as the standards of reading ability change and the measurements for that sometimes the ability to connect to a book is not, as I’ve seen, is getting a little bit less and less highly regarded in terms of what does that mean about the ability to understand the book. But I think that does not change the importance of the personal connection for a student’s ability to grow and so I think any technology and curriculum that is aligned to helping a student connect to the text is supporting their critical thinking as well as their love of reading that’s going to be what actually motivates them to pick up the book the next day because if they connect if they read the book one day that’s great, but it is about that continued learning and continued commitment and motivation. So, I wanted to just round us off with some kind of advice you might be able to give out especially given your role in kind of educating our future educators what advice would you give to current and aspiring educational leaders both at Central Michigan University but also just across the education sector as they navigate this evolving landscape of technology and education and what should be their key priorities for the future?

Troy

Yes, for me when I think about working with any teacher whether it’s someone who is taking their first pre-service methods class or someone that I’m working with in a workshop and has you know ten to twenty years or more experience than I do, I always talk about those small moments of teaching and focusing on what we call those core teaching practices. What are those small moves that you are going to make at any given moment whether online asynchronous, online synchronous, or face-to-face. Whether you’re designing an assignment or whether you’re having an actual conversation with a student about an assignment, both the content that you’re trying to teach them as well as the disciplinary thinking. What are those moves that you want to make and how are you going to maximize students learning? What’s the question that you can ask? What’s the way that you can encourage them to think differently about a subject so they’re going to understand it better and be able to share that knowledge? So, then when you layer in the technology piece you always want to be making strategic choices. So, my most recent book with Jen Parker and Kate Grunow is called Make the Move with Edtech. We think about all these protocols and strategies and routines like “I see, I think, I wonder,” and all the things have tried and true, time-tested strategies. So how can we apply those and then use technology to draw that out over a few more minutes or an entire class period or how might we stretch that into a longer unit of study and encourage students to engage in inquiry? So, what is it that we want to try to do and how can we use technology in those essential ways? The flip side of course is that you can always introduce too many technologies and so I’m experiencing that with my first year writing class this fall. My students are like, “Okay Dr Hicks, it’s a little too much. We’re only in week four and you’ve already introduced like twelve different things.” I mean, I guess you’re right, I need to pause and slow down. So, I also like teachers to think about what are your “everyday tools,” what are your “every week” tools and then what are your “once in a while tools?” So, for instance, maybe Google Docs is like your everyday tool. That’s where you’re going to have your agenda that’s where students are going to compose their work and then every week maybe you have them post to a Padlet. But then every once in a while you might have them create a video and you’re going to have to invest more time at that particular project or stage when you’re teaching them how to create the videos. So, what are those tools that you’re going to use every day and how can you use them strategically so that you’re going to really invest in early and then students are going to be able to use them in multiple ways. Over time, I think that’s the core of what I would try to say to teachers, you know. Focus on what are the teaching practices that are at the heart of your pedagogy and then how are you going to choose tools that are going to support that?

Olivia

Yeah, I love that. I think it’s important to also set up those students for success. So, if it’s going to be you know your everyday tool investing a student in the product or investing I should say in the time to get those students on-boarded there so that it doesn’t become an obstacle to their learning and they can actually master it can actually support you know then when you have the more one-off tools. They’ve kind of gained some of those troubleshooting skills and things that are sort of what comes along with the technology, but aren’t necessarily the end goal. But you know that troubleshooting skills are going to help them and anything it’s a very cross-cutting skill but just having them, setting them up for success by knowing which tools are going to be used at which frequency and helping them kind of visualize that as well. I think that’s a really helpful mental way for teachers to kind of think about their use of technology as on a kind of big picture scale before they actually dive into to picking that specific one and I think with that you know as you’re mentioning that’s kind of that takes collaboration from the teachers and their students. It takes collaboration among the teacher team, you know, are we all a Google Doc team or whatever you have there but I’m wondering just in general with collaborating with the various stakeholders in general as we move into more technology solutions in education how do you think that universities, government agencies, technology companies’ educators, how can all of those groups work together to create a more promising future for education through technology. I know I’m putting a lot on your plate with this one.

Troy

And this is the golden question, right? This is what keeps me up at night and wakes me up in the morning. Yeah, so I think about this, I have thought about this through my whole educational journey and especially now as a chairperson of a department focusing on both teacher education and special education across the entire K-12 community and as someone who’s recording podcasts and writing books and speaking at conferences and things like that. So, I wish I had the single answer to this question and, yet again, I go back to that point of “what are the essential moments?” What are those core practices, what are teachers going to do at any given moment with any given student to help them better understand a process or better understand content? What is it that they’re going to be able to teach students how to do with the support of technology, not just by sending them to some you know website that’s going to do a drill and kill practice flashcards quiz session, but where students are going to actually have to synthesize and create and to express and to otherwise, you know, rethink what it is that they’re learning and then put it into their own words or their own visuals or their own voice recording or something like that. And there are so many moments. I mean every day today in all the classrooms in this state, in this country, and around the world there are millions of these moments that go by that are untapped that we have just not even taken the opportunity and

we can’t do it with every single moment with every single student; that’d be overwhelming for teachers to have to go back and to try to assess all of that and, yet, at the same time, if we could just think about how do we develop the procedures and processes in school but then think about the technologies that can support them in order to make those processes more useful more engaging more transparent more helpful for students as they self-evaluate and reflect on their learning and for teachers to comment on that learning and provide feedback and to talk with administrators and parents and caregivers about learning. Those are the types of technologies and opportunities that are most interesting to me and I hope would be most useful to educators and students in the future.

Olivia

Well, I do appreciate. I know I loaded you with a pretty hefty question there, so I appreciate hearing your thoughts on that one and it’s been really Troy wonderful having you on our podcast today and definitely I feel that your wealth of knowledge and just your passion around literacy and teacher education have really supported our exploration about some of these topics and I just want to say to our listeners. We hope your minds are brewing with some newfound wisdom and inspiration. We definitely invite you to share your reflections and personal anecdotes related to today’s subjects across your social media platforms. Time together has been a great time for learning and we can’t wait for you to join us next time for another interesting conversation on Educator insights. So, until then let your curiosity be your compass and we hope you are able to bring our students to some great places so that thanks, everyone.