Technology for Learning Engagement

You might be looking for ways to refresh or update your bag of tricks.

Or perhaps you’re just curious to find out how technology tools can enhance your teaching and your students’ experience and engagement in your courses.

Ryan Goble, who often coaches teachers in what he calls the “mindful” use of technology, has written today’s guest post on user-friendly tools that enable the creation of student projects.

I wanted to cry when I read about the recent widely publicized report from the Council of Great City Schools about the underachievement of African-American males in our schools. Its findings bear repeating: African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys; their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower; and black men represented just 5 percent of college students in 2008.

Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits – particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys’ gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.

We need to shift from remediation focused on weaknesses to mediation that develops strengths.

Motivation to Read Reading proficiency requires the reader to independently begin and persist in reading tasks, actions that hinge on motivation (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). As students move through the grades, especially at the middle school level, their motivation to choose to read tends to decline (Donahue et al., 1999; Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). Feelings of competence and self-determination engendered by a reading task likely affects the reader's intrinsic motivation for it (Deci & Ryan, 1985). In a study of four struggling middle school readers, Kos (1991) found that despite expressing strong desires to read successfully, these students had negative views of reading in school settings, which they associated with feelings of failure. By the secondary grades, they readily recognized the simplified text that has been written for their remediation and associated such materials with failure and social stigma. Authentic texts (such as newspapers and trade books) and choice in selecting reading materials are especially important for fostering reading persistence in struggling secondary readers (Cope, 1993; Worthy, 1996). Instructional scaffolding for choosing authentic materials has also improved reading interest and skill among these students (Ammann & Mittelsteadt, 1987; Collins, 1996; Ryan & Brewer, 1990).

Affect Intrinsically motivated readers persist in reading because of affective engagement, the pleasure or satisfaction that is gained from their value or interest in the task (Baumann & Duffy, 1997). In avoiding reading, the struggling reader has little opportunity for potentially motivating connections of emotions, feelings, and sentiments of transacting with text. Even secondary students who are competent readers may avoid reading unless it is required when they fail to see it as useful or interesting to them (O'Brien et al., 1997).

The teacher who is aware of literacy contexts outside the classroom can connect those contexts to reading tasks and the selection of materials. In structuring reading tasks and selecting materials, teachers should allow student choice, while providing support in making those choices.