Using Multimodal Literacy Tools to Support Learners Who Need Challenging

    The integration of modern technology into multimodal lesson planning is something that we as educators strive to do in order to make lessons more engaging and relevant to our students. Though it is challenging, between funding issues, general troubleshooting when things don’t go as planned, and adhering to curriculum, there are many options and ideas that we can use to creatively engage students in material. I will describe three studies that incorporate technology into lesson plans and the positive effects that were noted. In one study (Doyle-Jones, 2019), ten participating teachers were interviewed about how they plan writing curriculum through the new literacies theory, and how they integrated technology into their lessons. One teacher used Moodle in literacy and math programs, and found that it “encouraged his students to write more, both collaboratively and individually, as the students saw their work as authentic and purposeful” (p 55). The teachers were asked to...

  Interdisciplinary literacy is a concept that has risen in importance within the past few decades. It is a way to enrich students’ understanding of how various subjects (math, science, language arts) are interwoven, rather than just standalone, unrelated subjects. As teachers, we often include interdisciplinary elements in our lesson plans. Students might use art, music, and even math in writing projects, and an important objective is to do our best to relate the subject matter to our students’ lives. The three research articles I talk about in this blog post use interdisciplinary modes (photography, graphic novels, and a multimodal, music-related research project) to foster literacy skills in students and engage them in new types of writing. One study (Wiseman, 2015) uses a literacy through photography curriculum, which combines traditional methods like writer’s workshop with photography as another form of communication. The students in this study are third graders, and are sho...

  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...