“Struggling” Middle Schoolers: Engagement and Literate Competence in a Reading Writing Intervention Class

Fostering Students’ Science Inquiry Through App Affordances of Multimodality, Collaboration, Interactivity, and Connectivity

“…By interacting with peer audiences, students know that they are generating texts to achieve audience uptake in ways that enhance their engagement and sense of agency; interaction on threaded discussions enhanced eighth-grade students' perceptions of themselves as engaged writers (Wolsey & Grisham, 2007). Students in the Reading Writing Intervention Class indicated that having a sense of audience for adding comments to the VoiceThread productions served to motivate them to craft their claims in a convincing manner (O'Brien et al, 2007). Students adding Diigo sticky-note annotations noted that reading each other's annotations provided them with alternative interpretations of the texts they were reading, leading them to adopt alternative perspectives on factors leading to climate change (Castek et al, in press).…”

“…In sharing their annotations on VoiceThread, students in the Reading Writing Intervention Class compared their individual perspectives on the meaning of different places in their school, including differences in the preference of certain places over other places (O'Brien et al, 2007). Such collaborative sharing of competing perspectives is an important disciplinary literacy in science related to formulating arguments based on claims and evidence (Shanahan et al, 2011).…”

“…In importing images or clips into VoiceThread, students can then use their annotations to analyze these images or clips based on making intertextual connections to other images or clips, resulting in alternative interpretations of an image or clip. Students in the Reading Writing Intervention Class contrasted images on VoiceThread of different spaces in their school based on their preferences for being in those different spaces (O'Brien et al, 2007). Students can also use intertextual connections to critique familiar popular culture or advertising images or clips through inferring consistent patterns across these images, for example, critiquing stereotypical representations of gender, race, or class consistently employed in advertising images.…”

“…Students who were reluctant writers preferred the use of the audio annotations, a multimodal option that enhanced their engagement. Analysis of students' interviews, along with classroom observations, indicated that students were more engaged with the VoiceThread activities than with other classroom activities; the students' mean engagement rating for VoiceThread was 4 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the ''most fun'' (O'Brien et al, 2007).…”

“…(O'Brien, Beach, & Scharber, 2007, p. 61) In this Reading Writing Intervention Class students took photos of different places in their school to upload to VoiceThread. They then added audio or written annotation comments about their perceptions of the meaning of these places (O'Brien et al, 2007). Because their annotations were based on images, the students employed concrete written descriptions of these images in their annotations.…”