A Professional Journey Through Multiple Literacies

Tammy Payton
Loogootee Elementary West
Loogootee, Indiana, USA

In more than 20 years working in education, I have taught kindergarten and first, third, and sixth grades; I have also more recently worked as an independent educational consultant. The school where I taught, Loogootee Elementary West, serves a small, mostly white student population from lower- to middle-class families. The K-6 self-contained classrooms typically have a teacher-student ratio of 1 to 20. The town of Loogootee is surrounded by a large Amish farming community.

In 1995 I began researching and later developing Internet resources while I was teaching first grade. As a result of this work, in early 1996 I was invited by my school corporation to create a Web site for Loogootee Elementary West. My first goal was to conduct research to determine the content that school Web sites should include; then I needed to find out how to publish information on the Internet. I began critiquing several school Web sites and studying style guides and tutorials on Web page creation. By the end of March 1996, our first Web site was live.

Extending Learning through Collaboration

In December 1996 I made my next Internet discovery, which profoundly affected my professional growth. I began joining mailing lists and listservs for the education community. Suddenly my independent research on classroom management, integration of the Internet in the curriculum, and content to include on school Web sites became collaborative. I found that there were frequently asked questions on these topics, so instead of writing similar things repeatedly, I began posting answers to those questions on the school Web site. When questions about Internet integration and school Web site development were asked on the mailing lists, I invited fellow subscribers to visit the site.

Teachers on the mailing lists soon began sending messages indicating that they were interested in undertaking collaborative studies with others whose students were studying similar curricular content. I joined a few of these groups and discovered that my students became excited and engaged in their learning when they were collaborating with schools outside our local community. One collaborative activity that we participated in is called The Monster Exchange, in which “Students try to communicate an original monster image into another child's mind using writing skills and technology.” Suddenly my students had a purpose for writing good descriptive information. The monsters the students created with written texts alone were re-created in drawings by students in another classroom. Examples from our partnership with a school in London, England, are available on our Web site.

Extending Literacies

My next venture was teaching my students what good content on the Internet should look like. I thought that the best way to do this was to have them become actively involved in publishing their own work on the World Wide Web. My students and their families and the community were enthused by seeing the children's work on the Internet.

I follow three simple guidelines when publishing material generated by students:

1. I obtain written permission from the student and her or his legal guardian to publish the material.
2. The student-created content does not reveal any personal information and must somehow be tied to the curriculum being studied in the classroom.
3. I stress that students should generate information for the Internet that is more than just a global show and tell, but that engages visitors and teaches them about the curricular content.

Many students write articles about content they have researched, but on the Internet, they should include some kind of interactive quiz that tests understanding of the information that visitors have just read. For example, in one unit, students in our third-grade computer club researched, wrote about, and illustrated information on China and published their work on the Web. Then they created quizzes that tested site visitors' knowledge of the content that was covered in their informational articles. For links to other examples that show how classroom work and Internet publishing can be connected, visit our Web site's project page.

Lessons Learned and Future Directions

Because of my research and desire to share information on using Internet resources in the classroom, new doors have opened for me. In 1998 I was invited by the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia to join them in a new fellowship program. I was also awarded a Milken National Educator award. I have conducted several local, state, and regional workshops on how to use the Internet. Now I have taken a 2-year sabbatical from my elementary classroom to work as the webmaster for The Buddy Project, an educational technology project funded in part by the Indiana General Assembly. I have recently created a tutorial for integrating Internet resources within the classroom curriculum, and it is available at the Buddy Project site.

We are living in a new era of information. The Internet has profoundly affected the way I think learning should occur in the classroom. Today, we must teach our students where they can find the best offline and online resources. We must teach our students how to evaluate critically the content that they find. We must teach our students how to work collaboratively outside of their classroom walls. And we must teach our students how to share their work by using the Internet's capacity for interactive information exchange.

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Citation: Payton, T. (2000, September). New Literacies in Action: A professional journey through multiple literacies. Reading Online, 4(2). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/lit_index.asp?HREF=/newliteracies/action/payton/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted September 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232