Technology Tools to Enhance Literacy Instruction

In My Own Classroom

Grade 1 Application

In my grade 1 classroom, literacy development was essential; as students without them struggle to access curriculum content in later years. Grade 1 is a foundational year with the need for students to develop strong reading and writing abilities in order to perform better. In order to support the diversity in my classroom I relied on using a blended learning environment. Students were divided into center groups and a digital tool like Starfall was used. Starfall allowed students to work at their own pace in multisensory games to practice phonics lessons. The decodable stories allowed students to slowly build their vocabulary and confidence in reading fluency and comprehension. This especially helped my ELL learners as each student was working on their own phonics goal within Starfall, using the same platform. Another benefit of Starfall was that students had access for at home use. This enables families to participate in their child’s language journey, extending beyond the classroom. This authentic application reflects Mayer’s (2014) principles of multi-modal learning and supports Greer et al.’s (2014) use of blended learning environments.

Grade 2 Application

In grade 2, my students were developing more advanced phonemic awareness, phonics knowledge and decoding skills. All of these contributed to the development of fluent reading and are foundational to reach the goal of building comprehension. Since every student develops at different stages, I had students reading from emergent to advanced levels. This is also true with my ELL learners reading levels, but my ELL students struggled more with comprehension. In my literacy block I used the digital tool of Epic! as another way to help students get excited about reading. Epic! has a wide genre of books that can cater to any student’s interest as they explore and discover the vast library that is available at their finger tips. Each student has their own profile and can choose books at their own level or given access to the full library. The function that I loved was being able to assign books to the class as this was handy during various literacy units like Fairy Tales. The comprehension assessments at the end of the books helped build these critical skills and boost their reading engagement and critical thinking skills. This recommended application aligns with Universal Design for learning (Levey, 2021) by allowing diverse and ELL learners opportunities to acquire information in multiple ways in order for students to acquire information more effectively.

Grade 3 Application

In grade 3 literacy instruction grew to more advanced decoding, reading comprehension and structured paragraph writing. This allowed my lesson planning and instruction to branch across all subject areas when planning for my literacy units. The use of Listenwise allowed the varied abilities of my students to have opportunities to practice speaking and listening. Before we would listen to an audio story from Listenwise we would have a discussion about the topic. Having students use their prior knowledge and sharing the vocabulary that they knew about the subject was essential to build some understanding for my ELL students. While the audio book is being played there are opportunities for the teacher to stop the book and ask questions in order to ask questions, summarize information or ask questions of their own. This allows for students to continually participate in the comprehension of what is being said. At the end of the audio story I like to use the strategy Think-Pair-Share to allow students to work in small groups to answer the comprehension questions that came with the story. The small groups create an environment that allows everyone an opportunity to share their thoughts and this can look different depending on the group's ability or interests. The responses can be drawings or sentence stems depending on the learners needs. This reflects the First Peoples Principles of Learning (Kerr & Parent, 2018) because students learn through collaboration, relationships and multiple ways of knowing.