2018 VSTE Annual Conference

With the advent of technology, teachers need to embed digital and media texts into reading and writing workshops and create several venues and opportunities to engage students to be digitally literate. This workshop will hopefully equip and expose classroom teachers, specialists and literacy coaches on the hidden instructional value of multimodal texts and in using varied digital tools and multimodal media in reading and writing workshops.

The objective of this presentation/workshop is to inspire teachers to authentically embed digital and media tools and some multimodal texts to heighten students’ interests and to help them become digitally literate in this “techy” world.

Reading & Writing Workshop Framework Model. We will briefly talk about the reading and writing workshop framework so participants can have a perspective of where anchor, mentor, and independents texts would fit in.

Using Digital and Multimodal Texts as Anchor and Mentor Texts. In this segment, we will explore some multimodal texts (songs, videos, play, advertisements, speeches, etc.) as anchor texts where teachers can draw their lessons for the next few days, just like the way we use interactive read aloud.

Teaching Reading Comprehension Skills Using Digital and Multimodal Texts. We will explore how to use some digital and multimodal texts to specifically teach some reading comprehension skills like inference, text structure, character’s motivation, etc. The author will deliberately show how to target small skills from a unit of study and based on what she observed about her students, so participants can see the importance of zooming into small skills in the focus lessons.

Embedding Digital and Media Literacy in Writing Workshops - In this segment, the focus is more on critiquing and analyzing multimodal texts. The author will model  sample multimodal texts to specifically target some writing skills like author’s craftsmanship, lead, ideas, etc.

Participants will be given a list of resources to choose from so they can create their own writing workshop focus lessons/conference lessons embedding digital literacy.

We will also explore some resources where teachers can publish their own students writing in the internet through various forms like website, blogs, Google sites and e-Books (Laird, 2015).