Chapter 7 New Literacies, Old Standards for Excellence

Chapter 7New Literacies, Old Standards for Excellence Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2009). Background Knowledge: The Missing Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Today’s Purposes • Define the term “new literacies” • Discuss the tools and purposes for utilizing new literacies • Examine ways to support students as they search for, evaluate, and determine the relevance of digital information

Redefining New Literacies • The literacy skills needed to learn from, compose with, and communicate within digital sources • The ability to extract information from these sources • Includes information literacy, 21st-century learning skills, multiliteracies

Moving From Tools to Purposes

Table Talk Many students consider themselves to be “tech-savvy” because they can operate tools. However, they often have difficulty with using them purposefully. What strengths and areas of need to you find your students possess?

Reading Comprehension and New Literacies • Print comprehension strategies do not automatically transfer to digital text (Leu, et al., 2005) • Background knowledge is critical to new literacies • Made worse by unequal access to experiences in the classroom and outside of it that build background knowledge

Background Knowledge Needed for a Digital Age • Searching for information • Evaluating information • Determining the relevance of information

Searching for Information • Leu (2008) calls locating information a “circuit-breaker skill” • Inefficient search and analysis skills can interfere with a student’s ability to locate accurate information • Makes students vulnerable

Examples of Faulty Search Techniques Looking for information on endangered species… • Jay types endangeredspecies.com and got a plant nursery in California • Mariah types endangeredanimals.com and gets a referral site with no information • Andrew types turtle.net and gets a software company in London

Teach Students How to Search Effectively • Use quotation marks for phrase searches (“Alaskan glaciers”) • Use negative terms to eliminate unwanted information (Police -music eliminates all references to the band) • Limit by site operator (site:gov yields only results by government agencies) • Model searches in front of your students!

Table Talk How do you teach your students to search for information? What are their common errors?

Evaluating Information • Save the Endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (a series of bogus websites) • 47 of 53 seventh graders thought it was a real creature because of the website (Leu et al., 2007) • Even when told it was a fake website, they clung to this belief Just because it’s on the Internet, doesn’t mean it’s true!

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

Determining Relevance of Information • Plan: Set a purpose and develop a mental plan. • Predict: Predict where a reading choice may lead. • Monitor: Monitor after making a choice. • Evaluate: Evaluate the relevance of the choice (Coiro & Dobler, 2007).

Table Talk How do you ensure that students know how to search for, evaluate, and determine the relevance of information on the Internet? In what ways are these the same as, and different from, print texts?

Assessing Your Practice Use the rubric to determine your goals for building background knowledge in your classroom.

Building Your Own Background Knowledge • Check out the most current research on reading comprehension and new literacies, led by Don Leu and his team at the University of Connecticut: http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/ • Watch a 15-minute video on information literacy produced by UCLA at http://www.newliteracies.gseis.ucla.edu/video/index.html • Take a look at the resources Google provides for teachers at http://www.google.com/educators/all_grades.html

Chapter 7 New Literacies, Old Standards for Excellence