Introduction

 Hello,

My name is Madeline Smith, and I am a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in Reading Education. In this blog I will analyze research on giftedness, gifted education, multimodal literacy, and how they all relate. The overarching question of the blog will be: how should classroom teachers use multimodal literacy to challenge gifted students, or simply students that are unmotivated? With the definition and practices of literacy changing in significant ways alongside the development of new technology, multimodal, interdisciplinary projects can be a wonderful way to engage all students and challenge those that need nontraditional avenues in order to be successful. This blog will provide insight to important research in the field of education that helps to answer this question.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Implementing the PEDDL Framework in an Art Integrated Lesson Plan

As a graduate student with an art background and experience of two years as an art teacher in Oklahoma City Public Schools, interdisciplinary literacy and arts integration are important concepts for me to focus on. When writing lesson plans, I often considered content that classroom teachers were teaching for all grades, and found ways to incorporate it into my lesson plans. I chose the PEDDL framework, found in Digitally Supported Disciplinary Literacy for K-5 Classrooms (Colwell, Hutchison, & Woodward, 2020) to implement a digitally supported, interdisciplinary lesson plan for a small group of fourth grade students. The lesson plan implements two different digital tools; a graphic organizer created on Bubbl.us to use for ideas, key concepts, and vocabulary, and a storybook creator website (Story Jumper or Little Bird Tales, depending on ease of access). The lesson will focus on fourth grade English language arts standards for second quarter, according to Oklahoma City Public Sch...
Read more

Motivation and Engagement Strategies

Image
  Student motivation and engagement strategies are key components of effective instruction in a general sense, but especially in reading and literacy instruction. Intrinsic motivation is essential to student success in reading, and students that have difficulty succeeding in reading are often disengaged with traditional print methods of literacy learning. The studies discussed in this blog found that different multimodal teaching tools such as graphic novels, blogs, videos, websites, and other media can be effectively used in combination with traditional paper-based texts to foster motivation and engagement in students that typically struggle with reading and writing.      One study (Hoch, 2018) sought to gauge benefits and constraints of using digital and multimodal text sets to guide personal inquiry and developed the Five Key Principles frame. The first principle focuses on attending to motivation and engagement, and the reasoning behind why some students fall b...
Read more

Multimodal Practices in the Classroom

Image
  The multimodal activities I have thus far discussed in this blog have included the use of comics, video games, photography, and many other mediums of expression in order to strengthen students’ literacy skills (this post includes even more comics and adds literature circles to that as well). An understanding of multimodal literacy and its value of making literacy learning equitable is essential for modern teachers. Students who need to be challenged in reading and writing, whether they are gifted in this area or not, will benefit from inclusion of multimodal elements in praxis in the classroom. In one article I will review (Dallacqua, 2020), students used a comic entitled The Black Death (World History Ink, 2009) to study the plague. The author notes that “even though comics are positioned to engage readers, especially those often struggling, scholarship contends that they are valuable for a “wide range of subjects and benefit various student populations, from hesitant readers...
Read more