Purposes for Using Web 2.0
Tools in the Classroom: Use of
Digital Writing Tools to Teach
Literature and Writing
Rick Beach
University of Minnesota
Jeff Uteckt: Literacy Curriculum
Models
Tools Purposes
Reading/Writing/Communicating
Purpose: Acquiring and
subscribing to/sharing
information
• Social Bookmarking and sharing
links/tags
• Sharing links in class Diigo groups
• Adding annotations to online literary
texts for sharing responses to literature
Social bookmarking: Diigo.com
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Set up Groups based on classes
Students share bookmarks to the class
Students tag bookmarks
Students annotate online texts/sites
using sticky notes
Using Diigo for adding a stickynote response
1. Add Diigo to your toolbar
2. Find a an online text--a poem
3. Highlight sections of the text
4. Click on the icon to add a Sticky Note response
5. Have other students in Diigo groups add their
responses
“Womanhood,” Catherine Anderson
She slides over
the hot upholstery
of her mother's car,
this schoolgirl of fifteen
who loves humming & swaying
with the radio.
Her entry into womanhood
will be like all the other girls'—
a cigarette and a joke,
as she strides up with the rest
to a brick factory
where she'll sew rag rugs
from textile strips of kelly green,
bright red, aqua.
When she enters,
and the millgate closes,
final as a slap,
there'll be silence.
She'll see fifteen high windows
cemented over to cut out light.
Inside, a constant, deafening noise
and warm air smelling of oil,
the shifts continuing on ...
All day she'll guide cloth along a line
of whirring needles, her arms & shoulders
rocking back & forth
with the machines—
200 porch size rugs behind her
before she can stop
to reach up, like her mother,
and pick the lint
out of her hair.
Highlighting and adding a Sticky
Note to the poem
Purpose: Uses of mapping for
responding to literature
• Visually portray performances
according to three units of analysis:
o Events
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o Spaces
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o Social worlds/systems
digital mind-mapping -->
defining topics/connections
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Inspiration
Bubbl.us
Compendium
Freemind
OpenMind
VYM (View Your Mind)
Event as unit of analysis:
• Characters act and react to current and future acts
to create an event or context
o Utterances have consequences
o Uptake of speech acts or lack of action
• Events have boundaries
o People “in” the event
o People/forces “outside” the event but still
influencing the event
 “the elephant in the room”
Space as unit of analysis
• Spaces as gendered, raced, or classed
• Gendered worlds as mediated by language use
o Thorne: children on playground space: practices
not necessarily gendered
o Teacher: tells children to group up by “boys” and
“girls”
o Playground space becomes gendered as a binary
space
Social Worlds/Institutional
Systems
• Social worlds/systems
o schooling, workplace/economic, family, health
care, justice, government/political, media, etc.,
• Driven by larger objects or outcomes
o School: enhanced students’ literacy
o Workplace: higher profits
Map of “Womanhood”
Mapping storyline development:
Film: O Brother Where Art Thou?
Purpose: blogs and wikis: voice
opinions and share knowledge
• Blogs:
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Individual expression of
ideas/personal
accounts
Hyperlinking of texts
Comments from peers
Multimodal writing
• Wikis:
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Collaborative writing of
reports/essays
Shared revision
Hyperlinking of texts
Multimodal writing
Blogs as individual expression:
Response to Speak
Rather than using a traditional
journal, you can use blogs. This
student uses written words, oral
expression and a video to guide
us through a comparison of her
room and Melinda's.
Melinda is the main character in the novel Speak.
Students use blogs to hyperlink
Students used personal blogs to write letters from their character in our role-play to a character
in the book we read. This allowed them to use voice and audience in their posting. Students
also were required to hyperlink their suggestions for support and coping strategies to this
character in preparation for a Problem-Solution Essay.
Purpose: Blog comments for dialogic
exchange
• Creating “blog partners” to insure responses
• Comments: Descriptive feedback
• Comments: Challenge positions
Collaborative Construction
of Knowledge: Wikis
• PBWorks (http://pbworks.com)
• Wikispaces
(http://www.wikispaces.com)
• Wetpaint (http://www.wetpaint.com)
• Rhetoric and Composition wikibook:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki
Students used the experience of collaborative writing to
write papers and post them to their wikis
http://watsonmontana1948.pbwiki.com/Compare+and+Contrast
Shared revision is easy to do
and to see in the page history
Hyperlinking of texts and
MulitModal Writing
We used Toni Morrison's Beloved to create a wiki where we collected information on
the author and book, as well as research, notes and papers on literary theory in order
to write a college-level, formal literary analysis using one of several lenses.
http://tellmeyourdiamonds.pbwiki.com/Paper-Directions
Purpose: Virtual collaboration:
Literary Worlds site
• http://www.literaryworlds.org
• Students engage in synchronous chat
about frequently taught texts such as
Brave New World, Things Fall Apart, Of
Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, and
1984.
Purpose: Creating multimodal texts:
Digital comics
• Comic Life/Bitstrips
• Brent Eckoff, West Jr. High:
o
“I had students to a rough storyboard of
what they planned to create. Some of the
speech bubbles and text boxes they wrote
were both surprising, and innovative. The
students then exported the Comic Life
presentations as quicktime files, uploaded
them to YouTube, and then embedded them
on the class wiki.”
Purpose: Parodying/remixing
images and videos
• Remix America (remix historical
speeches/words with contemporary
events)
• Adbusters spoofs/parodies
Decontextualizing or
defamiliarizing images
Decontextualizing or
defamiliarizing images
Purpose: Creating digital poems:
http://eliterature.org/1
Purpose: Share responses to
images/video:VoiceThread
• http://voicethread.com/
• Audio and text commentaries of
slideshows
• Place-based writing
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Images foster use of the descriptive details
VoiceThread: Multiple audio/written
commends on same image
Purpose: Formulating
arguments: online role-play
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Select an issue
Formulate a primary argument
Choose roles and conduct research
Post arguments on a blog or online
forum
• Step out of roles and reflect
Using a Class Blog: UMD: “Fighting Sioux” Mascot
Issue: School internet policies
• Blocking of websites
o NRA site blocked
• Administrators accessing Facebook
o Determining if students are drinking
o Violation of the state’s athletic code
Using Social Networks (Ning):
Using Bubbl.us mapping to identify roles
and relationships between roles
Read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother
• 17-year-old Marcus,
a computer hacker,
takes on the
Department of
Homeland Security’s
attempt to control
society
• Issues of Internet
privacy/control
Creating Avatars:
taking stances on an issue
“Emo Girl”
Critique of school Internet policies
I think the internet
usage policies are ridiculous.
The policies are
almost impossible to find. I
spent half an hour trying to find
them and I'm a
young, computer savvy
person.
“Strict Father” cultural model:
Charles Hammerstein
• The issue with sites like YouTube is
that it is a helpful site when used
correctly, but the ratio of students
who would use it to the students who
would abuse it would greatly favor
the later of the two. R-rated sites are
not ok because they usually contain
information and content that may be
considered offensive. The internet
policies are very clear, if your
grandmother would not appreciate it,
then you probably shouldn't be doing
those kind of things at school.
Facebook: Character profiles
Post Role-Play Reflection:
• Use of arguments
• Comfort in role
• Targeted audiences/alliances
• Who has power?
(Reasons & strategies)
• Sense of potential change
Student’s reflection
• I think it was a valuable learning experience
because we actually got to argue back and forth
with other people. If this had just been a writing
assignment, it would have only been onesided. You can use persuasive arguments in a
paper but you can’t have a back and forth
conversation on it. I really felt like it helped me
get into someone else’s shoes and think like
someone different from myself.
Purpose: Developing a Sense
of Voice: Podcasting
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Book talks
Spoken word poetry
Readers’ theater productions
Radio shows
Skype interviews
Using Garageband (Mac) to
record and edit
• Recording podcast in tracks
• Editing podcasts
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Remove unnecessary material
Alter sound levels
Add music
• Export to iTunes
Using Audacity (Mac &
Windows) to record and edit
• Recording podcast in tracks
• Editing podcasts
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Remove unnecessary material
Alter sound levels
Add music
• Export
Using Skype to conduct
podcast interviews
• Skype as a free Internet phone service
• Skype can be used for
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Single person interviews
Multiple person conference call interviews
Purpose: Giving Feedback
• Audio files as feedback to writing
• VoiceThread comments
• VideoAnt: annotations for video
productions
• Using Jing to record audio comments
Feedback to videos: VideoAnt
http://ant.umn.edu
• Annotations specific to a clip or scene
• Teacher and peer feedback
• Feedback to micro-teaching videos
Teaching Writing Using Blogs, Wikis, and other
Digital Tools http://digitalwriting.pbworks.com
Literary Tools in the Classroom: Teaching
through Critical Inquiry, Grades 5-12
http://literacytooluses.pbworks.com
Picture of new books
here?