URI educates teachers on digital-literacy tools

‘I’ve had a lot of experience teaching teachers, but I’ve never had results … this astonishing.’
Renee Hobbs
URI Harrington School of Communication and Media founding director
‘I’ve had a lot of experience teaching teachers, but I’ve never had results … this astonishing.’ Renee Hobbs URI Harrington School of Communication and Media founding director

When Hope Hall got her master’s degree in education and technology in 1989, she saw herself at the vanguard of a new approach to teaching and learning.
“I thought I was on the cutting edge,” she said.
Since then, the technology landscape has shifted so far as to be nearly unrecognizable. And Hall, like other teachers, has had to adapt. “You just have to continue to grow and change,” said Hall, a Nashville public schools librarian who has also worked as a reading and language arts teacher. “The technology’s always going to be better and different and newer, but you have to have the foundation.”
Hall was one of 60 people from 15 states and three countries who arrived in Providence last month for a weeklong Summer Institute on Digital Literacy July 14-19 spearheaded by two University of Rhode Island professors. The group ranged from elementary school teachers and college professors to media specialists, a journalist and a filmmaker, and they convened for an intensive exploration of incorporating multimedia platforms and promoting digital savvy in the classroom.
It was, said Barrington public schools reading specialist and URI Ph.D. student Mark Davis, “like summer camp for literacy and media folks.”
For Renee Hobbs, founding director of URI’s Harrington School of Communication and Media, who created the institute with School of Education assistant professor Julie Coiro, the week was in part a chance to capitalize on what she saw as an emerging strength at the Harrington School.
“This initiative puts a stake in the ground around our commitment to doing the most cutting-edge, the most innovative teaching and learning with digital media tools, texts and technology,” she said. The cost was $600 for participants, many of whom said they were sponsored by their institutions.
It was also a rare opportunity for cross-disciplinary professional collaboration.
“It’s so much fun meeting smart people from everywhere that really are passionate about what they do,” said Ed McDonough, a high school television-production teacher from Canton, Mass., who said the institute was a departure from the conferences he usually attends, which are more narrowly tailored.
The institute’s nine-hour days began with mornings of guest speakers, ranging from R.I. Education Commissioner Deborah Gist to media theorist and author Doug Rushkoff, who encouraged broad thinking about the role of changing technology and media in society and education.
In the afternoons, participants taught each other about new digital tools, debated “hot topics” like “Wikipedia: Friend or foe?” and then clustered in small teams to collaborate on weeklong projects — like a lesson plan or a YouTube video – that they could take back to their jobs.
The results surpassed her expectations: In a survey at the end of the week, 70 percent of the participants said it was the best professional-development program they had ever attended. “I’ve had a lot of experience teaching teachers, but I’ve never had results that were quite this astonishing,” Hobbs said.
Joan Mandell, a filmmaker and museum curator from Detroit who produces documentary films for educational distribution, saw real-time news shape the lessons she drew from the institute: Detroit filed for bankruptcy while she was in Rhode Island.
Using digital tools she explored at the institute, she plans to collate news and voices from the city and put them on a platform where people outside Detroit can see what’s happening, she said. Some participants said they learned about the techniques and complexities of teaching students to be smart consumers of media in a technology-saturated world. The institute highlighted the necessity of “holding kids accountable for evaluating what they see on the Internet,” said Erica DeVoe, English and language arts department chair at Westerly High School. “We have to teach it; we can’t just assume that kids know how to do that.”
Such knowledge is increasingly important for the jobs market, as business leaders emphasize technological skills in the expanding knowledge economy, Hobbs said. And in a time of “political polarization and apathy,” she added, “digital literacy is essentially a practice of empowerment. Through collaboration, through knowledge-sharing, we reinvent ourselves as members of a community.”
The state education department has encouraged digital literacy, said department spokesman Elliot Krieger, by awarding competitive grants to schools to innovate with technology: At Providence’s Pleasant View Elementary School, the first winner of the grant, laptops and tablets are ubiquitous. And a new state initiative plans to provide wireless Internet service to every classroom within the next two years. For Davis, the excitement of a technology-infused week gave way to an unplugged reprieve. “The end of the week, I shut off my computer and my iPad and my cellphone, and I haven’t looked at those for about two or three days because it was just exhausting,” he said. “Wonderful and exhausting.” •

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