E.+References

Bray, M., Brown, A., & Green, T. D. (2004). Technology and the diverse learner: A guide to classroom practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Januszewski, A., & Molenda, M. (2008). Educational technology: A definition with commentary. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mayer, R. E. (2009). Multimedia learning (2nd ed.). Cambridge,MA: Cambridge University Press.

Simkins, M., Cole, K., Tavalin, F., & Means, B. (2002). Increasing student learning through multimedia projects. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Tomlinson, C. A., & McTighe, J. (2006). Integrating differentiated instruction & understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.


 * Capstone Project, Task 6: Literature Review **

Seminal Book or Chapter
 * Literature Review as created by Lori: **

Dalton, B., & Proctor, C. P. (2008). The changing landscape of text and comprehension in the age of new literacies. In J. Coiro, M. Knobel, C. Lankshear & D. Leu (Eds.), Handbook of Research on New Literacies (pp. 297-324). Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Publishers. This handbook focuses on the best strategies in teaching literary skills while utilizing web 2.0 technologies. This handbook provides a framework for the emerging field, discussing the major issues, perspectives and research in this cross-disciplinary field of study. This chapter is relevant to our group’s Capstone project, since it reflects the synergy of teaching reading and writing skills, as applied using technology.

Research Study

Andes, L., & Claggett, E. (2011). Wiki writers: Students and teachers making connections across communities. The Reading Teacher, 64(5), 345-350. This article is the result of a yearlong collaborative project involving writing, using a pen-pal format, and including parental involvement. The teachers involved were a Title I teacher, two special education teachers, and a technology coach who created monthly authentic writing projects for students to collaborate on. They concluded that the projects engaged students, while motivating them, providing real-world authentic learning experiences. This article is highly relevant to our Capstone project, since it reflects the use of project-based learning to learn and practice writing skills. In addition, this study also reflects a collaborative project whereby several groups separated by distance used a wiki to write and respond to one another, much like our project will focus.

Santangelo, T., & Olinghouse, N. (2009). Effective writing instruction for students who have writing difficulties. Focus on Exceptional Children, 42(4), 1-20. This text provides a synthesis of the contemporary qualitative and quantitative research related to strategies which improve the performance of struggling writers. The authors contend that barriers to writing ability create obstacles for student education and later employment potential. This article focuses on the difficulties struggling writers face and research-based instructional strategies used to overcome these learner-centered obstacles to successful writing practice. These studies clearly address the population of students with whom our Capstone project is focused.

Stevens, R. J., Van Meter, P. & Hall, T. E. (2008). Reading and integrated literacy strategies (RAILS): An integrated approach to early reading. Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk 4(13), 357-380. The Reading and Integrated Literacy Strategies (RAILS) program provided integrated instruction in word reading, vocabulary development, and comprehension to students in regular and self-contained special education classes in 2 schools serving low-income populations. When provided with explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle, phonemic analysis, word reading, vocabulary development, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension, the students in the RAILS program had significantly higher performance on standardized reading and language achievement tests, as well as on individually administered tests of phonemic awareness and reading fluency over the control group. This study addresses the needs of struggling readers and writers, a similar situation that some of the learners in our Capstone project reflect. The issue of explicit instructional strategies used with younger students may very well be one aspect of our Capstone project: to see if the results shown here could be extrapolated for high school struggling students as well.

General Study

Alderton, E. (2010). Comprehension ‘oldies but goodies in the digital age. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 47(1), 30-32. The author discusses selective reading skills such as skimming, scanning, and reading to locate information as applied to internet use and locating information on a web page. This article applies to reading skills used with internet sources; the inverse of the focus of our Capstone project. Clearly, the project we’ve created entails writing and responding to one another’s written posts, however, in order to respond, each student will be required to read with understanding. Thus, employing reading and writing skills.

Brown, A. & Van Tryon, P. (2010). Twenty-first century literacy: A matter of scale from micro to mega. The Clearing House, 83(6), 235-238. This article describes the changes twenty-first century technologies cause in the perception of time, size, distance, audience, and available data, suggesting how one must teach by utilizing these differences to one’s advantage. This article applies to our Capstone project since it discusses issues and complexities related to using the internet when working with collaboration among students.

Keith McPherson. (2006). Wikis and student writing. Teacher Librarian, 34(2), 70-72. McPherson discusses the contributions that wikis offer teachers and librarians in developing student writing. One major strength discussed is that wikis provide an authentic audience for students, one that both reads as well as responds to the writing students post. This article addresses the use of the wiki to involve students in collaborative writing assignments, which involve students actively, thus engaging them, while at the same time, effectively providing an audience who is not the teacher, or a classmate. This is the same focus as our Capstone project which also utilizes the wiki as the technological medium for student collaboration.

Best Sources of Research Regarding Educational Technology When searching for research relevant to educational technology and the use of wikis to teach and practice writing skills for struggling writers or those with diagnosed written disabilities, I had the most success using the ProQuest research search. Several of the periodicals also appeared to offer more appropriate content, including Kappa Delta Pi and The Reading Teacher. I made the effort to vary the sources used, however, such that differeing perspectives could be represented in the research-base.

Seminal Book or Chapter:
 * Literature Review as created by Andy: **

Willis, W. Jerry (2008). Qualitative Research Methods in Education and Educational Technology (PB) (Research Methods for Educational Technology) [paperback]. Qualitative Research Methods are important to educational technology. This book looks at the many ways of research and how using technology can make a difference. It uses a combination annotated and research methods which extend the questioning of research and develop a depth of understanding about research methods in education and how technology can play major role. This book is relevant to our group’s Capstone Project due to the fact of the many facets of research which is required for reading, writing and applying technology.

Research Study:

Palloff, R.M. & Pratt, K. (1999). Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. “The existence of distance education relies on the creation of learning communities, according to Palloff and Pratt (1999). Interaction and technology play a vital role in obtaining the networks needed to be successful in collaboration and benefits which emerge through research. It helps and aids in the function and benefits of using the emerging technology. There are flexible learning experiments as well as the use of technology tools to make it all happen. This is important to our Capstone Project because we are using collaboration and emerging technology to create a learning environment.

Indiana University (2010). The Instructional Innovations Blog. Presented by the Office of Instructional Consulting, School of Education. Indiana University. Using Wikis to provide and promote collaboration causes an increase of interaction, feedback and creative thinking. You can interact with whom you’d like and how often you’d like. There is no set time for anything to take place and it allows everyone to see the development and progress of everyone. This is important to our Capstone as it lays out our own idea of using Wiki’s and Blogs to collaborate with my students. Both of these topics discuss and review the ideas of creating an interaction between student/teacher or students and others.

General Studies:

Fitzgerald, J. & Shanahan, T. (2000). Reading and writing relations and their development. Educational Psychologist, 35(1), 39-50. “both reading and writing require a linguistic knowledge at various levels; including phonemic, orthographic, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic. These two skills are connected through “similar knowledge representations, cognitive processes and contextual constraints” (Fitzgerald and Shanahan, 39).

Yadegari, S. A. (2002). Intensive reading and writing for struggling readers. The Education Digest, March. According to Yadegari and Ryan, implementing feedback on student work allows encouragement as well as relationship growth between home/school. It provides a connection which in turn, allows increase in student motivation and their skills.

Best Sources of Research Regarding Educational Technology When searching for research concerning educational technology, there are a lot of sites which have information to draw from. Several studies, pages and articles popped out at me but truthfully, I found research and my sources to be compared and contrasted between several. For example, “The Digest” played a major role in finding the information however, basic authors which we have studied over the program, provided more of a source than any one place. Pratt, Fitzgerald and even an Indiana University blog played part in the success of my research. When searching or researching a topic, I think it’s very important to find viable, valid and notable authors, articles and blogs.

Resources:

Fitzgerald, J. & Shanahan, T. (2000). Reading and writing relations and their development. Educational Psychologist, 35(1), 39-50. Indiana University (2010). The Instructional Innovations Blog. Presented by the Office of Instructional Consulting, School of Education. Indiana University. Palloff, R.M. & Pratt, K. (1999). Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Willis, W. Jerry (2008). Qualitative Research Methods in Education and Educational Technology (PB) (Research Methods for Educational Technology) [paperback]. Yadegari, S. A. (2002). Intensive reading and writing for struggling readers. The Education Digest, March.

Seminal Book or Chapter
 * Literature Review as created by Michael **

Richardson, Will. (2010) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Publishers. This book gives an in depth look at different web tools can be used to produce and how they can be used to communicate. The three quarters of this book is dedicated to blogs, wikis, and podcasts. The rest of the book discusses other web tools. The author describes what all of these tools do and how anyone can access them for use. This books discusses how these different tools can connect people with other people and experiences. Connectivism is such an important part of facilitated learning, this book is an important resource. Our group is using an Educational Blog for the purpose of a Literacy project that involves three different classrooms in three different locations. Part of this project is for our students to create use the blog to add parts to a story. Another part of the literacy project requires the students to create a podcasts or video. This book has helped me to understand how to better use our blog for our project. This book was very helpful in creating the tutorials we linked to our blog to help our students create and use these web tools.

Research Study

Alm, A. (2009). Blogs as protected spaces for language learners. In Same places, different spaces. Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009. This paper discusses how blogs are protected spaces for language learners because the writer has more control over the communication. This paper studies whether or not blogs are suitable for language learning. This study views the experiences of 15 language learners who used a blog for self-reflection. The fish bowl learning model is a an important experience where the learners are working inside where the facilitator is an on-looker. This study helped me to take a deeper look into this model. This paper is important to our project because we are using the educational blog as a protected space for our literacy project. We, the three teachers will manipulate the conversations so that the learners will receive the maximum benefit from them. We are using Edublog as a blog provider and along with the Edublog administrator we are using every vehicle to keep our blog a protected space for our learners. We have set-up all three classroom teachers as blog administrators so that each will get an email notification when a post has been made. The blog administrators have the ability to delete posts. Also, In the blog set-up we were able to list words and phrases that we didn’t want to allow. This study helped build our understanding to why these things were important.

Kim, Hyung N. (2008). The phenomenon of blogs and theoretical model of blog use in educational contexts. Computers & Education, 51 (3), 1342-1352. This article looks at how and why teachers are implemented blogs in their classroom for communication purposes. The author describes Computer-Mediated Communication Applications and how they can be used with Educational Blogs. This paper also constructs a model of how blogs should be used in a classroom using interactivity. Blogs should be used in a way that they create interactivity among the learners is what the author tries to prove in this study. This article is relevant to our project due to the fact that we have all already integrated technology into our classrooms, this article will help us use the applications we already have in our classroom with our Educational Blog. Learning is a process and any way that we can integrate technology is one more way to reach more intelligences. This study provides a good example of how blogs are used in educational settings.

Yao-Jen Chang, Yao-Sheng Chang, Chu-Hui Chen, "Assessing Peer Support and Usability of Blogging Technology," iccit, vol. 1, pp.184-189, 2008 Third International Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology, 2008 This article discusses how blogs put information into context through the discussions the bloggers are having. This article refers to this as the “contextualization of the information.” This article also refers to blogs as hybrid learning environments because they are set up, facilitated, and manipulated by an individual. The authors give us another fish bowl learning model. They use the term “hybrid learning” as a term to describe this fish bowl learning model in which the learners are outside of one individual learning environment. This article is important to our project because we are using peer support to complete a literacy project. This article looks at assessing peer support and blogging technology usability. Along with the peer support we are using differentiated instruction for all of our learners so that they are learning the same material at different levels. This differentiated instruction will help allow for peer support because of the different levels of learning.

General Study

Chugh, R. & Joshi, M. (2009). New paradigms in the teaching and learning of accounting: Use of educational blogs for reflective thinking. International Journal of Education and Development using ICT, 5(3), html. This article discusses how educational blogs can help students in reflective thinking. The authors used the Ramsden Model to show student learning in context. This article uses. Accounting Students as the target audience but this is relevant to us because of the higher order thinking skills involved. Analyze, compare, contrast, are some of the skills this study looks at thse learners using. Higher order thinking skills are important for all learners because if these skills are used retention of material increases. This article is relevant to our project because of the differentiated instruction. All students are working on a tasks but they are working at their levels. Therefore they are learning in context. We are going to produce permanent products that all of the learners have contributed too. The students are going to have to reflect on past experiences to complete different parts of the project. This article provided a great example of how educational blogs are used in reflective thinking.

Yang, S.-H. (2009). Using Blogs to Enhance Critical Reflection and Community of Practice. Educational Technology & Society,12 (2), 11–21. This paper looked at student-teachers used blogs as platforms for reflection. This study consisted of 43 student-teachers in Taiwan that participated in this study. This study showed conversations between teacher to teacher and teacher to student that resulted in positive reflection. Reflection is a higher order thinking skill that helps learners in retention of material. If learners retain material the chances of them using it increases. This use leads to expereince and information plus experience leads to knowledge. This paper is relevant to our project because we are seeking to enhance Critical Reflection in our Literacy Project so that we can put the information into context. Critical reflection is important to our project because we want our learners to draw on past experiences and use the newly acquired experience to solve future problems.

Zawilinski, L. (2009, May). HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking. The Reading Teacher, 62(8), 650–661. doi: 10.1598/RT.62.8.3 This article gives the reader information about ways to use blogs in elementary classrooms. This article talks about using new literacies on the internet and preparing students for them by using blogging. This article shares four types of blogs: classroom news blogs, mirror blogs, showcase blogs, and literature response blogs. All four require the students to use higher order thinking skills such as critiquing, comparing, contrasting, etc. This article is relevant to our project because part of our project is a literature response in which each classroom will us the literature response differently. The elementary classroom my respond to one of the characters and the high school classrooms could respond to the plot of the story. This paper was very helpful in providing us with a framework for using our blog to promote higher order thinking. After reading this paper we were able to improve our blog by adding story starters for our learners to participate in and use higher order thinking skills.

Best Sources of Research Regarding Educational Technology

When searching for research relevant to our literacy project and the use of educational technology, I had the most success using The Reading Teacher web site and various other blogs. I was important for us to use different resources because of the different levels and backgrounds of the students. This helped us because of the varying persepecitves on educational technology and its uses. The resources I used are viable and notable authors and articles. I was able to verify the authors and articles I used by searching for their other articles.