Institute+Sessions

The week-long institute revolves around three types of sessions. In the **Digging Deeper** sessions, teachers explore elements of digital and media literacy in-depth, focusing on social networking, online reading comprehension, and new media literacies and video production. Each afternoon, teachers engage in a **Digital Text and Tool Session** featuring technologies such as Zotero, Animoto, Voicethread, Trailfire, Prezi, Gloster and texts such as Graphic Novels, RSS Feeds and movies. Finally, teachers participate in **Design Studio & Project-Based Inquiry,** where they collaborate with a partner to create an innovative inquiry lesson based on their state's curriculum standards. Beginning in 2011, inquiry lessons will be designed based on Common Core Standards when appropriate. = = = I. Digging Deeper Sessions =

During morning breakout sessions, teachers learn how social networking environments can be applied to the classroom and explore strategies for online reading using dynamic instructional and assessment models for 21st century learning. Additionally, they learn how to embrace the YouTube aesthetic by using video as a learning and creation tool that can amplify student engagement, creativity, and complex thinking.

New Media Literacies and Video Production
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= II. Digital Text and Tool Sessions =

The Digital Text and Tool Sessions (also referred to as "Cool Tools") focused on a particular technology and how it could be applied to teach new media literacies. Participants were able to choose sessions that would best suit their individual intellectual/pedagogical interests. Some past sessions included:

[|WordSift] (View the WordSift Cool Tools session )

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WordSift instantly captures and displays the vocabulary structure of texts that are pasted into an application embedded within the Word Sift website. Word Sift creates a Tag Cloud of the 50 most frequently used words text you pasted in. It and brings up Google images that correspond to any word that you click on and provides a Visual Thesaurus word-cloud web of target words. You can also instantly see how the words that you select are used in their original context. The possibilities for word study using this site are endless.======

[|Google Lit Trips] (View Google Lit Trips Cool Tools session ) The virtual expeditions housed on this site offer a unique reading experience that make it possible for students to visit geographical locations virtually as they learn more about the places where book characters lived, traveled, struggled, and triumphed. Google Lit Trips encourage higher-order thinking skills, such as interpreting, analyzing, comparing, and explaining.

[|Glogster EDU] (View Glogster Cool Tools session)

Glogster EDU is a Web 2.0 platform that easily allows users to upload photos, videos, text, audio, and other multimedia resources to create an online interactive poster. You can easily print out your poster or embed it into a website, wikispace, blog, or other social networking tool to share with others.

[|VoiceThread] (Click Here to view my Google site on VoiceThread)

VoiceThread is "[|a tool for having conversations around media."] Easily upload common media types like powerpoint presentations, documents, videos or photos. Once uploaded, others can provide comment on the media in 5 different ways. Comments can be shared via text, audio, video, drawing or telephone. The educational possibilities for this tool are limitless! Come try it out. We will set up educator accounts together and "play" with the comment features. Finally, we will develop ways to incorporate this tool within your existing curricula. These ideas will provide you and your students new ways to deepen thinking and conversation.

10 Great Ideas For Integrating New Literacies Into Your Classroom and [|Apple Remote Desktop] Not one cool tool, but 10 great cool tools and ideas for integrating new literacies into your classroom plus Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). ARD manages the Mac computers on your network. Distribute software, provide real-time online help to end users, create detailed software and hardware reports, and automate routine management tasks — all without leaving your desk.

Twitter (Click Here for the Twitter Cool Tools Session) Twitter is becoming a quick tool for teachers to build their professional learning network. In this session we will examine ways to use Twitter to start building your Professional Learning Network. We will also briefly discuss some learning activities to try Twitter in the classroom.

[|Zotero] (Click Here for the Zotero Cool Tools Session) Zotero 2.0, a free Firefox plug-in, is a collaborative library where your students can share resources, gather in discussion, and learn important skills using citation and note taking tools. Educators can use Zotero to model and assess the students need to read in complex environments such as the Internet.

We will focus on using both Zotero and Zotero Groups. Participants should visit the Zotero website and have the latest version of Zotero and Firefox installed on their computers.

Creating Visual Tutorials: [|Jing] and [|Skitch] //Jing is a free video screen capture tool for creation of video tutorials to allow students & teachers to easily follow directions on use of online tools.// //Skitch is a great, free tool that is dead simple and great for creating screencaptures that you can use to identify items on your computer screen you want to share with others. Then take the image and attach to powerpoints, emails, word docs, etc// //.//
 * (Click here for the Creating Visual Tutorials Cool Tools Session)**

[|Xtranormal] **(Click Here for the Xtranormal Cool Tools Session )** //A free, easy to use animation creation tool. Billed as a "text-to-movie" tool, if you can type, you can create a movie.//

= **III. Design Studio and Project-Based Inquiry** = The aim of the project-based inquiry approach was to provide the opportunity for teachers to engage in what Newman, Bryck, and Nagaoka (2001) describe as authentic intellectual work. They describe the distinctive characteristics of authentic intellectual work as the “construction of knowledge through disciplined inquiry in order to produce products that have value beyond school” (p. 14). Through a focus on authentic intellectual work, we aim to engage teachers in learning opportunities that connect to their world. Likewise, elements of project-based inquiry possess what John Dewey referred to as //productive inquiry//, which is "that aspect of any activity where we are deliberately (although not always consciously) seeking what we need in order to do what we want to do” (Cook and Brown, 2005, p. 62). Our aims are to engage teachers in intellectual work that has depth, duration, and complexity, and to challenge and motivate them toward knowledge creation that relates to their educational context.

Authentic intellectual work also requires that learners make use of a range of literacy skills as they interpret, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and otherwise work with materials and information. Authentic intellectual work involves:
 * //Construction of knowledge:// learning through analysis, evaluation, and other active high-level tasks.
 * //Disciplined inquiry:// in-depth learning on focused topics.
 * //Value beyond the inquiry activity:// the production of usable knowledge that has “personal, aesthetic, or social” significance outside of school or professional development.

Inquiry work was driven by questions that teachers generated given their intellectual interests and professional experiences in conjunction with a focus on media iteracies. Working in partner dyads during the week of the Institute, they collaborated to generate a motivating question and complete an inquiry project. Their inquiry may be content or pedagogy focused or some combination of the two. For example, partners might be interested in language concepts and the potential that off-the-shelf video has for teaching language-related content. The inquiry process could involve exploring the potential remixing video has for teaching content. More specifically, the work might involve remixing or mashing up existing historical video to communicate how to use alliteration. An inquiry question related to this topic might be: "How can students use historical video to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of language concepts?"

To facilitate the inquiry process, we take a Design Studio approach represented in the diagram below.
 * [[image:newlitinstitute:process.jpg align="center" caption="process.jpg"]] ||
 * process.jpg ||

With a question in place, partners continued through the steps of the inquiry process examined technology tools, content, and pedagogical strategies related to their topic. The primary goal was to create two products of learning that teachers shared at the end of the week in the Design Studio Showcase. The **Two Products of Learning** include:
 * An **innovative instructional plan** reflecting your knowledge of media literacu posted to your institute wiki.
 * A sophisticated **technology product** that teachers could use to either **//(a)//** facilitate and enhance the teaching of the instructional plan, or **//(b)//** provide an example of what students might create during the lesson to represent their content learning.

**References**
====Spires, H., Hervey, L., Morris, G., & Stelpflug, C. (In press). [|Energizing project based inquiry: Middle grade students read, write and create videos.pdf]. //Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy//.====

====Spires, H., Hervey, L., & Watson, T. (in press). Scaffolding the TPACK framework with literacy teachers: New literacies, new minds. In S. Kajder and C. A. Young (Eds.), //Research on English language arts and technology.// Greenwich, CN: Information Age Press.====