Digital Literacy in Today's Classroom with Dr. Shea Kerkhoff

Hey everyone! You've probably heard all the buzz about digital literacy. But you're wondering what is it and how can I bring it into my practice? Well in today's episode of Teacher Prep we'll be talking to Shea Kirkoff. She is a professor of teacher education at the University of Missouri and she'll be talking to us all about digital literacy. In fact, her research area is in digital literacy. According to Dr. Kirkoff our world is increasingly digitally and globally connected. Students need digital and global literacy to participate, collaborate and thrive in the 21st century. So today's interview we'll be talking to Shea about ways that we can build digital literacy into our teaching practice. Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of Teacher Prep. Today I am joined by with Dr. Shea Kirkoff who is a professor of teacher education and she's here today to talk to us about digital literacy. So Shea we're so glad to have you with us today. We got to hear a little bit about your background and what you're doing and teacher education. Can you share some about your teaching experiences and what else our listeners should know about you? Sure, hi everyone. I am an English teacher as a background. I taught high school English in North Carolina and Washington DC for seven years. My PhD is from North Carolina State University and it is in literacy and language education. I am a teacher educator of literacy as well as content area reading and English education methods and I'm the editor for an NCTE journal called English Education. Wonderful and for those of you that aren't familiar with NCTE which let me just see if I remember National Council of Teaching English. Close or no? Close. National Council of Teachers of English. Teachers of English. Okay thanks so much. I as a math teacher I'm always saying join NCTM which is kind of like the sister organization of NCTE which is focused on teachers of math. So yeah absolutely those are great resources and it's wonderful to have you here talking about your experiences both in the classroom as well as your research. For our listeners out there that have never heard of digital literacy can you just kind of unpack that for us? Tell us what is digital literacy and why is it so important for our teacher educators to know about it? Sure so digital literacy means being able to find and read and research online texts digital texts as well as create compose and share digital texts. So it includes the same literacies we need for print reading and writing in addition to the ability to critically evaluate what we are reading and to think about our audience when we are sharing because there's no filters either way. So in traditional print publishing there was an editorial process where the print would go through an editor a fact checker a publishing company before it would make it on the shelf. So if you were reading something from a library pick up any book it will have gone through a process. Now that doesn't mean it's 100% accurate or that we don't that knowledge doesn't change over time and that we end up learning something is different than we originally thought but there was a process. Sure and with online there's more there's a greater ability to self publish which is great but means that we now have to do that fact checking ourself and that critical evaluation that an editor would have done previously or in the print world ourselves. So in addition to decoding the words on a screen and putting the knowledge of the words together to form ideas for reading comprehension we also have the critical evaluation on the reader's responsibility when we're reading. On the other side if we were to publish something in the past it would go through the same editorial process but now we can self publish which means we can put anything we want out there to the world and students need to critically evaluate what message they want to put out in the world and I think it's important for us as teachers to help them think about evaluating the messages that they're putting out to the world before they put them out there. Right. Yeah I mean I guess some of that would be knowing your audience and the purpose of your writing just like you know going through the writing process and and thinking about all those pieces but you also mentioned that you know with a traditional word or print you would have this editorial process and that's not always true with the online space. I remember when I had my students in the science classroom write a report and several of the students would just go on to blogs or Wikipedia and I felt really frustrated as a teacher because I'm like wow that's just not really a valid source you know I've already given you all these resources and I wonder if maybe the resources I provided was just such a high level of comprehensible input for them as second language learners that they chose to select another source that had a greater readability but less reliability. So all of those things really come into play in terms of digital literacy. You talked a little bit about some of those digital literacy skills but are there other specific digital literary skills that perhaps are critical to for teachers to explicitly teach across the elementary to high school level. Yes for sure. So if we think of the digital literacy as a process then the first thing that teachers need to be thinking about is how they ask students to identify their research question like how are they going to narrow down the 1,000 hits they get or more hits that they get. I think part of what you were talking about that grab-and-go method that adolescents tend to use when they do online searching is just the being overwhelmed. So if teachers can first help them start the process by identifying the problem or the research question then students have a way to critically evaluate what source is going to help them answer their question. So number one identify a problem or research question. Number two the second digital literacy skill that teachers need to be explicit with is locating reliable sources both online and offline and so helping students realize that they can use both print and digital together. Right. And you mentioned Wikipedia there's actually been research that shows that Wikipedia is is about as reliable as the Britannica encyclopedias from my generation. Wow. I did not know that. That's great to know. Yeah. So there's been some studies where people put wrong information and the wrong information is changed back to the right information pretty quickly. So so their students need to know that it is self-publishing. However they can use that as a jumping off point. I tell my students you know look I have a PhD in research in digital literacy. That's my topic. I still go to Wikipedia as a jumping off place when I want to when I want to just get a background on a topic. I don't stop there though. Right. So just get to as you're sharing get some familiarity about the topic and then maybe look at some more evidence based sites like that would give you more source or information related to facts or information that you might want to cite in your report. Right. And so when we're talking about digital literacy the synthesis across multiple sources is really important. So whether you use Wikipedia or you use the New York Times either way you want to find other sources that corroborate that information. So that's why number two locate reliable sources both online and offline is plural more than one source. Right. The next number three read through a critical lens. So that's that critical evaluation that's needed throughout the process of reading and writing with digital literacy for construct knowledge by synthesizing information from multiple sources and then five communicate using the appropriate modes knowing your audience. So with digital literacy we have multiple modes that means text pictures sound video puts all of that together. And so we're not only communicating for our audience but also choosing our mode with purpose. Right. So someone could do a podcast or maybe they'll do a website or a blog post. Is that kind of different products of. Right. Okay. Great. Awesome. I love that you already have the five steps that they need to focus on. And does that look the same across the grade span. I mean are there different levels of progression with digital literacy. What are your recommendations there. There is definitely a progression and there are tools already online that teachers can use for early grades. There's a Google safe search that teachers can have students use in early grades. It already filters out information that is from fake news. Oh wow. Or information that isn't appropriate for children. Right. That's the safe part of the search. And it creates a multimodal search experience where it puts the images and the text together. So that when students are looking at the results they see an image and words. That's great. Is that is that I'm sorry to interrupt you. Is that an entire browser or how do teachers get access to Google safe search. It is a browser and it's safesearchkids.com. Okay. Phenomenal. Now moving up the continuum of age is well there used to be Google junior but I'm looking for it right now and it looks like it. Oh yeah it's still here. So Google junior has also been taken over by safe search for kids but it's for a little older grades I would say upper elementary. And then there's regular Google but once we get into you know juniors and seniors or college level is Google scholar. So Google scholar is a website that puts evidence based research to the top of your search engine. Right. That one I actually used for my dissertation. That was super valuable. I liked it better than my library. I do. I do too. And I think it's partly because we use Google every day so we just feel familiar in that space. Also because it just connects to everything that's out there rather than just what's been put out there in the traditional ways. So those are some scaffolding and some enrichment too. The Google scholar is actually really challenging level text for the locating sources. But I also think with communicating allowing students to use different modes is actually really helpful for students in younger grades and for English language learners to be able to communicate what they know through speaking and pictures in addition to text. Oh absolutely. I mean as I shared with you earlier my experience has mostly been in math and science. But with the standard for mathematical practice there's a big emphasis on students explaining their thinking which is part of problem solving so they can actually make sense of what they did and how those processes and procedures come into play when solving a problem. We used to use Flipgrid which I loved. And the kids had so much fun and they even get to put like a little emoji on their face or leave comments to their peers and it was all behind a firewall with our Google classroom. So never had to worry about you know it getting out into the internet. And I could even put like a screen a safety feature on it that you know none of the posts actually go onto the platform until I've had a chance to review them. You know because sometimes you have kids that are doing things inappropriate especially at the middle school. It's like where do they think of this stuff. So yeah I love Flipgrid. Are there other tools that you would recommend? So I love Flipgrid too and just talking about the emojis and stuff. Sometimes teachers are hesitant to use tools because they say well my kids spend too much time goofing around but I say to that that the three seconds it took them to find an emoji and put it on may have been the three seconds that got them engaged in the learning that they wouldn't have done anyway. So think about the end product and the entire process not just the maybe three seconds that they're off task or distracted by some of what makes it fun. Absolutely. I know I agree and I would say to them try doing a teacher professional development with 30 middle school teachers and tell me what happens. When they come in after teaching all day the last thing they want to do is sit and listen. So I always do some warm-up activity or just kind of like different pauses or things to kind of grab their attention and get them to kind of re-engage with what we're doing because it is a lot of heavy lifting and we have to remember that we're social creatures. I mean that's just part of our DNA. So yeah and so Flipgrid allows that social ability because students can talk to each other and see each other if they choose to put their face on there. And then also Padlet doesn't have the face but they can it's basically like a huge bulletin board and they can post little post-it notes on this huge bulletin board of their ideas. One of the affordances of technology that can transform a classroom is connecting kids to people outside of the four walls of their classroom. They can connect with experts. They can connect with students in other classrooms all over the world. They can even connect to your third period when it's second period right. So they get to connect and collaborate across time, across culture, across space. So Padlet, Flipgrid, we've done slow chats on Twitter using hashtags. Seesaw, there's a lot of great tools out there. Right yeah we my son's teacher uses Seesaw and I just it's really cute. You get it's almost like a Facebook style platform and I can leave comments for my son on his work and I can see what the teacher's doing and what activities they're working on which is super helpful for me as a parent because you know so busy trying to do day-to-day stuff and then you know like get to see what my kids are doing and how I can help them or you know talk about their day. Right because if your son is like mine at the dinner table and I said what did you do at school today? Nothing. What did you learn? I don't want to talk about it. So if I have those pieces of information from the teachers then I have a seed of something that can blossom into a full conversation with my child. Absolutely yeah super valuable tools I love it. So it's so great that we talk about this and as well as the progression because as you know even if you are a secondary teacher you might have students that need more scaffolding. So knowing that there's a host of tools out there you can support them no matter where your kids are at. Yeah and another way I scaffold over time or just for differentiating my classroom for different students needs is through curation. So as the teacher if I'm having my students doing online research and reading then they can have the entire internet or I can create either on Weebly which is the website I use or on a google doc a few websites for the students to use. So one way I can curate that is by saying you have to choose three out of these five giving them some choice or some autonomy in that or saying you have to use these two and find the third. There's different ways that teachers can use curation but curation really helps when you need to scaffold. So for younger grades and for and if you just don't have a lot of time so the more the teacher curates the less time it will take for the students to conduct the digital literacy project. If students have a lot of experience and a lot of time then you know student autonomy student choice having them going through all five of those stages of digital literacy can be more open-ended. Yeah I see a lot of teachers using a genius hour and design thinking now in their classroom and I wanted to ask you too about planning because you know I think that's a big piece with the Common Core is that teachers have to actually look at the standards think about the specific skills in the standard that they're addressing and how they're going to teach that or you know create activities and assessments that will support their students in terms of mastering those skills. So what what recommendations do you have if you know you want to do some digital literacy activities with your students maybe they're working on a on the writing process or what have you in terms of planning you talked a little bit about that in terms of curation or do you have any other recommendations? Well as far as planning I think that it's helpful to think about chunking for the students and having formative assessments along the way. So one of the challenges I'll call it that I see when I'm working with pre-service teachers is they have they want their students to do an online project and they have 12 standards and then here's how they're going to do the project and then they're going to assess it at the end right and instead I suggest taking one standard at a time and making sure that you are formative doing formative assessment in order to count it as a standard for that project so you don't have to do every standard for every project right you can focus on two or three at a time and making sure that you have formative assessments for those two or three and then at the end you're really looking on grading those two or three and then giving feedback perhaps more holistically but that just really helps with being able to model for the students to be able to see what their needs are related to those two or three standards rather than trying to look at everything holistically the whole time. Right yeah no it's interesting I almost chuckled with myself because I also have that same problem they it's like okay maybe we're just looking at the standards holistically and saying oh yeah I'm doing this and I'm doing that and and then before you know it it's like okay it's just huge you know two pages of just standards and then everything else just becomes so watered down in the process because you know they're trying to do too much at once you know it's like going to the gym and you want to just like I'm going to do this I'm going to do that I'm going to do this and then you're just really not doing anything well like so that you can actually get a good workout on whatever like body part you want to work on but I love the backwards design approach because you really are focusing on that assessment piece that you talked about and if you begin with assessment then you'll know what do you need to explicitly teach your model or scaffold and what other support can you build in whether it's a sentence stem or a graphic organizer so that the students can have success at that specific standard yes good thinking yeah I'm glad that you brought that up because I also see that a lot and it's like um it's you know I I know I I know I did it when I started teaching and I was like well I just never have enough time it's like well I just took out like you said I'm not chunking appropriately can you think of some particular frameworks that perhaps teachers should look at or consider when they're designing instruction with digital literacy yes I'd like actually to talk about two one is what's used really widely in schools so I want all of our teachers to be aware of what it is so that when they hear this acronym thrown at them in this school they know what it's what they're talking about it's called SAMSAMR and it stands for substitute augment modify redefining so what the framework is trying to help teachers think about when they're planning is that integrating technology and working with students building their digital literacy can happen along a continuum from substitute which means you're just merely replacing the print with the digital for instance instead of having a paper copy of a book a paperback book you have the book on Kindle it's the same pedagogy this you're having the students do the same learning they are reading a book it's just that the digital replaces the print but that goes all along a continuum on the other end of the continuum is redefine and redefine is allowing for new tasks that weren't even possible without the technology so like we talked about with flip read that allows if students are reading let's say a mall unbound which is a young adult book they could connect with students in Pakistan and learn more about the culture that they're reading about in the book that's something that's not possible without the technology that flip read right the asynchronous part of it means that they don't have to be in the same time zone the face and the speaking means that that cross cultural communication is a little easier so that's that's where we want to be we want to be thinking about redefining what we're having students do because we have this innovative technology in order to innovate our teaching there's another framework that just came out of the year before the association of literacy researchers and educators and it was written by broke Garcia as well as the other editors it is called a firm deep in critique and I really love this framework because just as the title of this podcast is deepening our students learning with digital literacy and going deep with digital literacy that's what this framework is asking us to do so a dc the a is a firm we start by validating that the literacies our students are using in their homelines literacies so using instagram using snapchat that is using multimodal reading and writing to communicate and learn about the world using twitter speak using emojis and hashtags and shortening of language in order to be able to fit an idea into 24 characters those are literacies and rather than putting them in a hierarchy of academic literacy is higher and that isn't is inferior we should be affirming that they are all literacies they all count as reading and writing and it's pretty innovative what our students are able to do with the tools that they have so a is for affirming then d is that deepening so we should be using our digital tools in order to help our students learn more about the content there should be critical thinking involved um so kahoot is fine kahoot is an online digital uh platform for a quiz like game show like atmosphere right and i'm in my own classes okay it's great for gamification it's great for um making it fun but because it's multiple choice it takes out some of the critical thinking that might be happening so when i'm using that i need to be thinking about am i using this to learn the way that i want my students to be learning in a deep and critical and meaningful way and if not then maybe i need to choose a different platform um if my objective is to review what they've already thought deeply and critically about then perhaps kahoot would be a good thing to use so we don't want the technology to just um make us teach at the surface level because it is more fun right no i love that i think that's a good point about um kind of going deep i use kahoot all the time because it's fun it's a great like five minutes left of class kids are burnt out like let's play a quick kahoot and review some of the things but it doesn't really get to that deep learning where the kids are really thinking critically about something especially i mean it can also for some kids it can be stressful because it is time-based and there are points it's very competitive um so thinking about a different tool maybe like ed puzzle where they're able to kind of think critically about an issue or even writing a blog post from the perspective of a character that they're reading in a novel where they really have to think critically about perspective or you know infer meaning or something um i'm not an english person but i could be so no i i haven't heard of this model so i don't want to stop you because it's really interesting tell us about the critique okay so the last part is also not using technology for technology sake and not just brushing under the rug the problems that are inherent within technology too i mean there are safety issues and privacy issues and there are also times that we don't want our children just stuck behind a screen we need them interacting face to face with other human beings so the the c for critique is problematizing our use of technology um now with problematizing we are thinking about the problems in society that manifest through technology like social media platforms or um because we're looking at a screen all day instead of talking to people so we want to problematize the use of technology in our classrooms in society at large and not just accept it as a good thing now critique doesn't just mean looking at the bad just looking at the problems but also is looking at the good things so what can it bring and it can bring about more collaboration if we use it for that way so the um the c for critique means that we're using technology in our classrooms for specific purposes and that the technology brings a new way of learning that couldn't be done otherwise this is really interesting so the whole process of critiquing and then how you would use the technology to problem solve and think about the problem in a new way can you give us an example of what that might look like in the classroom with somebody who's working at the level of critiquing with technology of course sure um okay so here's an example it's called the global read aloud and i am doing research on this right now so one of the things that the global read aloud um does is teachers connect over facebook and then after they connect on facebook they have their classes connect in whatever the way the teachers decide so there were students using flip grid to talk they're supposed to be talking about the book but there was an instance where um there was some bullying that was happening on the social media so cyber bullying is something that we know happens in society and then it replicated that problem was replicated in the classroom situation um and because the teacher who had the flip grid on the flip grid was inviting other students from other classes she didn't know who this person was so um it that's when we have to make sure that we're aware of the problems that are happening um that sometimes bullying um in cyberspace is easier and we have found that kids will do that even if they wouldn't bully someone face to face there's just a level of distance from the interaction that makes people do things that they wouldn't normally do so right um so what these teachers ended up doing were before even getting on the flip grid preparing their students by talking about um what bullying is why it's a problem why it's not right um to think before you speak is this going to be helpful is this going to be hurtful and only saying it if it's helpful and not hurtful um and um so just having some preparation which we've learned to do in our face-to-face discussions we call those creating group norms we need to do the same thing with technology right helping our students understand the norms for communicating using technology yeah that's so important i know uh we talk about social emotional learning and how that impacts the learners and you know i am a big fan of social emotional learning being part of the student's context and culture so piggybacking on this potential issue and how you can build in norms and teach students about what is acceptable behavior what is bullying what's not bullying you know how do we affirm and lift each other up versus you know put downs online and things like that so it's great to hear that the teachers looked at this potential problem that they were having and used it as um an avenue to really teach kids about um how to treat each other whether it's online or you know in the classroom right cool i have never heard of the the affirm deep in critique model you said that was Garcia well it's brand new um it is growth g r o t e slash Garcia and colleagues so it was she's the first author but there's an entire um it's all the editors of the yearbook for the association uh for literacy researchers and educators wonderful that's a great tool i i'm familiar with sammer and i like that you actually frame sammer as a continuum because sometimes we think of like each separate each separate um aspect of you know substitution so on as a separate piece and whether it's effective or not effective and i like that you're thinking of it as a continuum because we can walk in these spaces and we can be using substitution and we need to use substitution i would argue that maybe we can't get to redefining if we've never substituted and our students don't have the digital skills to really go to that level of redefinition right and and if you're going to substitute just know that that's what you're doing you know like uh it's not it's not that you shouldn't substitute um but substitution in and of itself is not teaching your students digital literacy right he's not preparing them for the kinds of thinking and problem solving and critical evaluation that they're that they need today and will need tomorrow when you're not when you're not around the scaffolded anymore so you talked about um both of those models and some examples can you give us another example of a content specific lesson that includes digital literacy and what you might see the teacher doing i call like the teacher moves and how the students are working yes so um here's another example um this could actually be used in any and any content but it is when you teach one student um the technology that you're going to have all the students use first so here's an example let's say that your students are going to be learning about the holocaust and then they are going to be making um an animoto which is a website to make videos and what what i do is i take the student that i think may have the hardest time with the technology part that maybe doesn't have access at home doesn't have a lot of opportunity to practice um and i teach them animoto one-on-one right and so i work with that that student until they get it then the next day in class we have stations so one station students are um they're looking at images on a computer um another station they are reading some background material about the author lab cell because we're going to be reading night and it's written by lab cell and then the third station they are working with this student to learn animoto and then the fourth station they're working with me on some um reading comprehension work so we have four stations going on um the student who may have the most trouble with the technology is now becoming the teacher of technology and learning it over and over and over throughout the class because she's the one teaching it to everyone else in the class so that's that's just one one way that i um i love it i love it yeah you focused on you know thinking about students funds of knowledge and then where they would struggle and then using that to kind of have them be the teacher leader i think that's so much more uplifting than the other way around which we traditionally hear like oh i'm going to take the strongest student and have them work with the struggling student right and i think at some point i realized wait a second i i should be working with this why am i doing this peer stuff when it really i'm the credentialed teacher i'm the teacher with the expertise right i should be building up that student and i love your model where they become the teacher leader talk about lifting up their confidence and getting them to feel you know that they can do the work i'm sure that's a huge shift have you noticed a change in their attitude as a result of this particular model yeah yeah for sure and just the ability to um present themselves as the expert to their peers so it's it's the teacher affirming that student and then the student is able to um to position themselves this is the word i would use that as the expert to their peers absolutely i always tell my student teachers that you know there's a significant amount of research showing that the best predictor of a student's success is the teacher's belief in them so if you have those low expectations for your students oh this you know he can't do this or he can't do that or she's not capable you're setting them up for failure i'd love for you to do a research study on this particular model it's kind of like a reverse reciprocal teaching or peer tutoring yeah and the person who came up with it is don lu lb u and if you want to read more about digital literacy and digital divides by income you should definitely look him up he's got some great articles out there great i'm going to write that up we're going to do like a date you know they do these challenges now across the teacher challenges all you listeners out there i challenge you to take your student that you think can't do it and train them to do it and then teach teach their peers and tell me how that shifts your classroom environment and then another thing speaking about the divide is another um myth or misunderstanding i hear sometimes is that teachers say well i can't assign digital literacy things because my students don't have access well we find don luisberg finds that that just creates more divides rather than less so rather than say my students don't have access so we can't do that say all students need to learn digital literacy so what resources do i need to leverage in order for my students to do it and so in some schools you may as a teacher not have to leverage anything all your tools and resources are right there but other teachers in other places may have to do more leveraging in order to make sure that their students are able to um practice and absolutely i always tell my teacher can it's when i started teaching back in 1999 there was one computer yeah and i actually came from the tech space i was a tech writer so i've always kind of been an advocate for technology so i just wrote a bunch of you know i was teaching in la and i just wrote um letters and emails to local organizations because i was like you know thinking about my own experiences i was like we were constantly every single year getting new computers and then i was like wow think about all those computers that are just being recycled that could be going into the classroom right long story short i ended up getting like 40 40 computers i had so many that my colleagues were coming in and getting all these donations that i that i was getting from local businesses and so you know things like donors choose or just reaching out even if you have friends that work in high tech companies and you know that's attacked right off right there yeah awesome so um we talked a lot about different skills is there any other recommendations that you have for our listeners out there that want to get started i think my my last recommendation is just don't feel that you have to be the expert in the technology in order to use it in the classroom technology is always changing and literacy itself is always changing so putting the digital and the literacy together you're just not going to be able to keep up right now that doesn't mean that you shouldn't try something or or find out a little bit about something before you bring it into the classroom but you don't have to be the expert on it um you can you can also see where your kids are already using and then bring it into the classroom and have them teach you so you can use your students as resources for your own learning and you can um try something new together um i i did that with uh digital storytelling we tried a new platform voice thread i had never done it before at the time and we learned it together and you know out of 30 students i was working with one was frustrated with me what do you mean you don't know how to use this you're the teacher but the other 29 were really excited to be in this challenge with me and that we were learning it together and at the end of the day even that one student came up with a great voice thread so wonderful without a man so it looks like you're building in some growth mindset with your work as well yes um do you have any other resources or sites or do you have a publication that our listeners can pick up if they want to learn more about digital literacy so i have a website it's shay kerbal sh e a k e r k h o f f dot weebly dot com and so you can see an example of a weebly but also if you go to the menu for publications i've hyperlinked all of my publications that i am legally allowed to hyperlink right there wow wonderful well i'm definitely going to be checking that out and are you on twitter as well or how i am what's your handle at shay kerbal twitter and facebook awesome we'll definitely hang out with shay soon and we appreciate your time and coming to speak to our listeners here today on teacher prep and we'd love to invite you back on to our show soon thank you this was wonderful thanks so much shay and have a great day and for those of you that want to learn more about digital literacy definitely check out shay's site and i'll also have our um the publications as well as all the resources that she shared on my tech tools list at teacher prep tech dot com