Reading Online - Electronic Classroom: The Exploring Literacy on the Internet Department from RT

“I just don’t have the time.” Whenever literacy educators tell me they have not integrated the Internet with their literacy curriculum, this is almost always the explanation they provide. When I ask what they mean, I hear two different explanations. Some teachers say they don’t have time in their schedule; other teachers say they don’t have time to learn new instructional strategies for using a complex tool like the Internet.

I understand. The demands on us today, especially in the world of reading and writing, are enormous. Where do you find the time to fit another period into an already crowded schedule? You can’t. How do you find the time to learn complicated new instructional strategies? Impossible! There is never enough time in any day to do all that needs to be done. Extras have to rest on the back burner while priorities are met first.

And yet, I don’t understand. To me, preparing children for their future is not an extra, it is central to our role as literacy educators. Clearly we require an instructional framework that takes little time to learn and does not require us to sacrifice another element of the curriculum. It should also be consistent with what we know about the new literacies of the Internet.

For several years, a number of us in the literacy community (Karchmer, 2001; Kinzer & Leander, in press; Labbo & Reinking, 1999; Leu, 2000; Reinking, McKenna, Labbo, & Kieffer, 1998; and many others) have been exploring the changing nature of reading and writing. We believe that the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the nature of literacy and literacy learning as they become an increasingly important part of our lives. This work is leading toward a theoretical framework in which to understand the changes to literacy that are taking place today.

We have argued that global economic changes have generated new information technologies that generate new literacies. In this new world, what becomes critical to our students’ literacy future is the ability to identify important problems, gather and critically evaluate relevant information from information networks, use this information to resolve central issues, and then clearly communicate the solution to others. In short, a global economy and the changes to ICT that accompany it change the nature of work (Mikulecky & Kirkley, 1998) and change the nature of literacy (Leu, 2000; Luke, 2000; Warschauer, 2000).

At least three themes emerge from this exploration, each of which is essential to understanding the new literacies of our future. First, literacy is deictic; new literacies emerge from new technologies, regularly changing what it means to read and write (Leu, 2000). Second, literacy learning becomes increasingly social as multiple literacies emerge from rapidly changing technologies (Leu & Kinzer, 1999). No individual can be expected to be literate in all of the new technologies for reading and writing. Instead, what becomes important is knowing how to acquire a new literacy from others when we need it as we share and exchange strategies useful in the new literacies of reading and writing. Finally, learning how to learn continuously new literacies becomes just as important as becoming proficient in a current definition of literacy (Leu, in press); learning to learn is at the core of the new literacies. It is not just that we want students to know how to read and write; we want them to know how to continuously learn new skills and strategies required by the new technologies of literacy that will regularly emerge.

There is much to add and to revise as we build this theoretical framework. As we do, we must also seek instructional practices consistent with what we know about the changes taking place in literacy as the Internet and other ICT become increasingly important to our literacy lives.

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This column describes a new instructional framework, Internet Workshop, one designed around the three themes identified in this emerging framework of how literacy is changing. Because Internet Workshop fits easily into the instructional schedule of any classroom, it can be used without sacrificing another element of the curriculum. In the time it takes to read this article you could learn how to use Internet Workshop in your classroom, preparing students for the literacy future they deserve. Give me 10 minutes of your time, and I’ll show you how to integrate the Internet with your literacy program.

Internet Workshop (Leu & Leu, 2000) consists of an independent reading of information on the Internet around a topic and a location initially designated by the teacher; it concludes with a short workshop session where students can share and exchange the ideas and strategies they discovered during their work on the Internet. Internet Workshop permits students to learn from one another about content information, critical literacy skills, and the new literacies of Internet technologies. It is one of the easiest approaches to use with the Internet, being familiar to anyone who is already using a workshop approach for reading or writing instruction.

Internet Workshop has many variations. It may be used as a directed learning experience, a simulation, a center activity, or with many other instructional practices you already use. Generally, though, it contains these procedures:

Locate a site. Prepare for the Internet Workshop by locating an Internet site containing information at an appropriate level for your students and related to your classroom unit. Once you have found the site, set a bookmark for your students. This limits random surfing and exploration of sites unrelated to your unit, an important child safety issue, especially in the younger grade levels.

How do you quickly find a site on the Internet containing useful information related to your classroom unit and at an appropriate grade level? One strategy is to simply use a search engine or a directory organized for teachers and children, one that also screens out inappropriate sites for children. You might begin with one of these locations:

A second strategy is to select one of several central sites for each subject area and explore the resources for use during Internet Workshop. A central site is one that contains an extensive and well-organized set of links to resources in a content area. In a sense, it is like a directory for a content area: reading, math, science, social studies, or another topic. Most are located at stable sites that will not quickly change. As you explore the Internet, you will discover these well-organized treasure troves of information. They will become homes to which you will often return, and you will develop your own favorites. (Table 1 lists some of the better central sites within content areas common to schools.)

Design an activity. The second step is to design an activity related to the learning goals of your unit, using the site you have bookmarked. The activity may be designed for several purposes:

It is important during this step to provide an open-ended activity for students, one where they have some choice about the information they will bring back to the workshop session. If everyone brings back identical information, there will be little to share and discuss during the workshop session. You may wish to prepare an activity page for students to complete and bring to the Internet Workshop session, or you may simply write the assignment in a visible location in your classroom. An example of an activity page appears in Figure 1.

The activity page in Figure 1 was created by two sixth-grade teachers to develop background knowledge about Japan and to help students think more critically about information they find on the Internet. The teachers located Kids Web Japan, a site developed by the Japanese Information Ministry for students in other countries who want to learn more about Japan. They set a bookmark to this central site on the classroom computers.

Notice how the tasks on the activity page are open ended, inviting students to make their own discoveries at this location and bring these to Internet Workshop to share at the beginning of the unit. For example, each student is invited to read different news articles about events in Japan. This is an essential aspect of any assignment prepared for Internet activity. Open-ended questions invite students to bring many different types of information to Internet Workshop for discussion. Little discussion will take place if you have students search only for facts like “How high is Mt. Fuji?” Discussion is at the heart of Internet Workshop.

Notice also how critical thinking is supported by asking students to think about who created the website and how the stance of the authors might shape the information they place there. Critical literacy skills are essential to develop as you use the Internet.

Complete the research activity. The third step is to complete the research activity during the week. If you have access to a computer lab at your school you may wish to schedule a period to complete the activity in that facility. This is essential if you have a departmentalized program in the upper grades and see your students for only one or two periods each day.

In self-contained classrooms with one or two Internet computers, you may wish to assign students to a schedule such as the one in Table 2. This provides each student with 1 hour of Internet access each week—30 minutes by themselves and 30 minutes with a partner. This is usually sufficient time to complete the research activity for Internet Workshop.

A schedule, such as the one in Table 2, is possible only when you control your time. It will also require one or two students to be working on their Internet Workshop research activity while other lessons take place in your classroom. Students quickly catch up on these experiences, but you should regularly change your schedule so that no student misses the same lesson each week. In addition, you should never schedule your weakest student in any subject area to miss that subject during the day. Having 30 minutes with a partner every week can effectively help students learn from each other and lets them try out new skills independently.

Have students share their work. The concluding experience each week is a short workshop session where students share and compare the information they discovered, discuss their developing skills in critical analysis, and raise new questions to be explored in upcoming weeks. In the example on Japan, students brought notes from the news articles they read to the workshop session. The discussion of current events proved useful in introducing the unit on Japan because it developed background knowledge for future reading experiences. At the same time, the unit introduced the resources at this Internet site, one the class would use many more times in upcoming Internet Workshop activities.

The most exciting parts of this workshop session, however, were the second and third activities. Students reported finding many different clues that led them to believe that the site was developed by the Japanese government. This prompted a discussion of how important it is to look for a link that explains who developed any website you discover. These links are often labeled “About this site.” Students learned that information at this location helps them to understand who created the information on a website. It also helps them to think carefully about how this determines the author’s stance toward the information presented. The students also learned how an author’s stance shapes the information provided to readers. Each weekly workshop session will provide many opportunities to learn critical literacy skills and strategies like this as you work with your students.

Internet Workshop can be concluded with ideas to explore in the next research activity, and the Internet Workshop cycle continues. Over time, as students become familiar with the purpose and practices of Internet Workshop, they may begin inquiry projects as groups or individuals and bring the information they discover back to the next workshop session.

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Internet Workshop may take a variety of forms. As I worked to develop this instructional framework, I invited teachers from around the world to share their instructional needs with me and allow me to design lessons based on this model. The process has helped me better understand the potentials of Internet Workshop and expand my thinking about its use.

A simulation. A particularly challenging assignment came from a reading and language arts teacher in Wisconsin, USA. Her class was reading about the sinking of the Titanic, and she wanted to conduct a simulation of the U.S. Senate hearings on that disaster. She also wanted four students to take the roles of U.S. senators and listen to testimony from survivors, ask questions, and write a final report with recommendations to steamship lines. The other students were to each take the role of a survivor or newspaper reporter and research the story of a survivor, then compose a written presentation with testimony about that passenger’s experience aboard the fateful ship. The teacher planned to use the simulation experience to conclude her unit on this topic in an engaging fashion as she helped students develop research and writing skills.

In half an hour of searching, I found all of the resources needed for the simulation and quickly put up a Web page for her class to use. You may view the Internet Workshop we developed at Ms. Fields’ Internet Workshop on the Titanic. An especially important central site for this activity was The Encyclopedia Titanica, an extensive collection of links to resources about the disaster, including a database of the passengers, with links to information on the Internet about many of them.

Letter names in kindergarten. Internet Workshop is not limited to the upper elementary grades; it may be used at every grade level, even as low as kindergarten. Another teacher who was interested in trying Internet Workshop with his students had been told that they were too young to use the Internet. We developed an Internet Workshop activity for his writing center to help students develop letter-name knowledge and the ability to form letters.

First, we found a multimedia resource to help children learn letter names, ABC Gulp, and quickly developed an age-appropriate Internet Workshop activity. At ABC Gulp (see Figure 2) you click on the frog’s belly to hear the name of one of the letters displayed on the right side of the screen. Then you select the letter to match the name you hear and click on it. If you select the correct letter, the frog’s tongue whips out and eats it. If you select the incorrect letter, a fly appears in one of the boxes at the top. At the end of a session you can see how many letters you correctly identified. Young children enjoy watching the frog eat the various letters.

I suggested that we place ABC Gulp on this teacher’s Internet computer before students arrived in the morning and provide them with a simple assignment when it was their turn to visit the reading and writing center. Each child was to play the game with the frog, attempting to identify each letter correctly. When he or she completed the experience, each child was to write his or her favorite letter on a large piece of paper with a crayon and bring it to the Internet Workshop session. At the end of the week, each did so and shared the letter name with everyone else. The children engaged in several quick activities around the names of all the letters they had selected. One was to name as many letters as they could. Another was to stand up with other students and use their letters to spell a child’s name.

It was a great workshop session and showed how the Internet can be used effectively with children at the kindergarten level. In addition to learning letter names, the children developed several new literacies of the Internet as they showed one another various strategies. These included how to use the Reload button on the browser software to call up the site again when it didn’t completely download to their computer. Some students also learned how to use the mouse to navigate on the screen and how to use the clicker to select an item. These new literacy skills were important for many children and were used by them frequently during the rest of the year.

Children’s literature. Another variation, suitable for any grade, is to develop independent Internet Workshop activities around the works of exceptional literature children read in class. In this model, students read a work of literature and then complete an activity from the Internet related to the work they have read. Afterwards, they share their experience with the rest of the class during the weekly Internet Workshop session. An exceptional central site for Internet Workshop literature experiences is Cyberguides, organized around standards developed in California, USA. Linda Taggart-Fregoso and her colleagues in San Diego have done an exceptional job of developing Internet activities around major works of children’s and adolescents’ literature for Grades K–12. Each cyberguide has four different activities for each book, with links to resources on the Internet needed to complete each activity. Students choose at least one of these activities to complete each week and then share their work and the book they read, prompting others to consider the book for their next reading experience.

Author studies. Is your class reading the works of an important author (or illustrator) in the world of children’s literature? You can easily have an Internet Workshop session on that person. Locate the author’s home page on the Internet and invite students to search for two or three important ideas about the person’s life to share at the workshop session. I like to use the extensive collection located at Authors and Illustrators on the Web.

Mathematics. Internet Workshop may also be used in a content area such as mathematics. Here, you might assign students a challenging math problem of the week. You can use locations such as the following, which provide a different weekly math challenge for students to solve.

When Internet Workshop is used in math, students can bring back to the workshop session the strategies they used to solve a problem, as well as the answer to it. In this way Internet Workshop may be used to develop new insights and problem-solving strategies in mathematics while introducing important new resources to your math program.

Internet Workshop can have as many variations as a creative teacher can have good ideas. We have seen how it may be used to introduce a unit in a content area, conduct a simulation, teach letter-name knowledge, develop critical literacy skills, integrate the Internet with a literature program, conduct author studies, and develop problem-solving skills in math. Internet Workshop is a very flexible tool, designed to assist you in your important work.

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Another important aspect of Internet Workshop is that it permits you to discover the new literacies emerging from Internet technologies with your students. These new literacies emerge as rapidly as new technologies and new websites develop. It is hard to keep up, but Internet Workshop will provide a vehicle for you to do so.

Some of the new literacies you can uncover during Internet Workshop might include skills and strategies such as how to do the following:

All of these tasks reveal new literacies important for our students to develop. Many of them will be discoveries your students will make and then teach you. Discovering the new literacies and learning together with your students is one of the important aspects of Internet Workshop; it models for students how they will need to learn from others the continuously emerging new literacies of Internet technologies.

Using Internet Workshop as an action forum for discovering and exchanging the new skills, strategies, and insights demanded by the new literacies of the Internet will help you to prepare students in important ways for their future. In addition, Internet Workshop is consistent with what we are discovering about the new literacies of Internet technologies including these observations: Literacy is increasingly deictic, literacy learning is increasingly social, and the new literacies require you to learn how to learn continuously emerging new literacies from new technologies. Used in this way, Internet Workshop may become an important new tool for you to begin using in your classroom. And because it’s so similar to other workshop approaches that may already be familiar to you, it requires little additional time to integrate the Internet with your reading and writing curriculum.

Today we all face many new challenges and responsibilities in our work. We can begin using the Internet in our reading and writing classrooms quickly with Internet Workshop; we can learn new lessons together as we begin our Internet journeys. The Internet can become a regular part of our classroom literacy program, allowing us to prepare students for the futures they deserve.

Now, be honest. Did that take much more than 10 minutes of your time?

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Karchmer, R.A. (2001). Teachers on a journey: Thirteen teachers report how the Internet influences literacy and literacy instruction in their K–12 classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 442–466.
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Kinzer, C.K., & Leander, K.M. (in press). Reconsidering the technology/language arts divide In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J.M. Jensen, & J.R. Squire (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Labbo, L.D., & Reinking, D. (1999). Negotiating the multiple realities of technology in literacy research and instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 34, 478–492.
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Leu, D.J., Jr. (2000). Literacy and technology: Deictic consequences for literacy education in an information age. In M.L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research: Volume III (pp. 743–770). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Leu, D.J., Jr. (in press). The new literacies: Research on reading instruction with the Internet and other digital technologies. In S.J. Samuels & A. Farstrup (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
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Leu, D.J., Jr., & Kinzer, C.K. (1999). Effective literacy instruction (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
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Leu, D.J., Jr., & Leu, D.D. (2000). Teaching with the Internet: Lessons from the classroom (3rd ed.). Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon.
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Luke, C. (2000). Cyber-schooling and technological change: Multiliteracies for new times. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures (pp. 69–91). London: Routledge.
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Mikulecky, L., & Kirkley, J.R. (1998). Changing workplaces, changing classes: The new role of technology in workplace literacy. In D. Reinking, M. McKenna, L.D. Labbo, & R. Kieffer (Eds.), Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world (pp. 303–320). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Reinking, D., McKenna, M., Labbo, L., & Kieffer, R. (Eds.). (1998). Handbook of literacy and technology: Transformations in a post-typographic world. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Warschauer, M. (2000). The changing global economy and the future of English teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 511–535.
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About the Author

The author welcomes reader comments on this department. E-mail: djleu@uconn.edu. Mail: Donald J. Leu, Jr., Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut, 249 Glenbrook Road, U-33, Storrs, CT 06269-2033, USA.

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For an index of Exploring Literacy on the Internet columns available at this site, click here. To print this column, point and click anywhere on the main text; then use your browser's print command.

Citation: Leu, D.J., Jr. (2002, February). Internet Workshop: Making time for literacy [Exploring Literacy on the Internet department]. The Reading Teacher, 55(5). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/electronic/elec_index.asp?HREF=/electronic/RT/2-02_Column/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Published February 2002 in The Reading Teacher
Posted simultaneously in Reading Online
© 2002 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232

1.	Locate a site on the Internet with content related to a classroom unit of instruction and set a bookmark for the location.
2.	Design an activity, inviting students to use the site as they accomplish content, critical literacy, or strategic knowledge goals in your curriculum. (As children progress, you may also invite them to develop independent inquiry projects.)
3.	Complete the research activity.
4.	Have students share their work, questions, and new insights at the end of the week during a workshop session. You may also use this time to prepare students for the upcoming workshop experience.