Using Digital Tools to Foster Social Practices Contributing to Connected Learning
Richard Beach
University of Minnesota
Keywords: digital tools, apps, affordances, social practices, transfer, reflection, reading, writing, discussion
Abstract
A “connected learning” approach helps students develop their interests and passions through building connections across their peer group, home, community, and school worlds. Drawing on research in secondary schools and the University of Minnesota, this presentation describes uses of digital curation, annotation, blog, wiki, online chat, image/audio/video production, and e-portfolios tools to foster social practices of collaboration, interactivity, multimodal production, online identity construction, and critical inquiry for helping students define connections across events and activities in their different worlds. For example, middle-school students connected school and community worlds through sharing digital sticky-note annotations using Diigo to collaboratively respond to readings on climate change. High school students engaged in an online role-play on Ning to address their school’s blocking websites while University of Minnesota students created a digital magazine addressing concerns with the student union’s policies, projects connecting their peer-group concerns with their school world policy issues.
Comments: This presentation focuses on fostering use of affordances of of collaboration, interactivity, and multimodality mediated by uses of digital tools for reading, writing, and discussing to learn. It describes and models ways to have students reflect on transfer of use of these affordances between online and off-line spaces, for example, how students may or may not transfer experiences in writing essays to writing multimodal digital texts. It provides examples from a study of students uses of mapping, Diigo annotations, Voicethread, and Google Docs in studying climate change. The session handout provides links to use of tools and apps for use in fostering students reflecting on such transfer; see also the digital writing and the apps for learning sites for other tools.
Related URL: http://digitalwriting.pbworks.com
Author Biography
Richard Beach, University of Minnesota
Richard Beach is author/co-author of 22 books, including Understanding and Creating Digital Texts: An Activity-Based Approach and Using Apps for Learning Across the Curriculum: A Literacy-Based Framework and Guide. He is former President of the Literacy Research Association.
