Digital and Multimodal Literacies and Student Motivation

Introduction In this blog post I will reflect and share with you the positives, negatives, successes, and challenges of the QUEST model implementation plan I created to use with my fifth grade reading intervention students.  First, it is important to understand that teaching during this pandemic is most certainly a challenge and my rural district has done everything they can with the guidance of health officials to keep our students, faculty, and staff safe.  My original plan was that I would be teaching the QUEST model during the two weeks before our week-long Thanksgiving break.  Unfortunately, due to high numbers of faculty being absent, our reading intervention team was called to assist as substitutes for part of my first week of implementation.  In this week I was able to complete two of the lessons from my implementation plan.  The following week my district moved to all virtual instruction and grade levels were split among the reading team.  I was ...

  Introduction The theme of this blog is to examine the relationship of digital and multimodal literacies and the potential impacts on student engagement and motivation.  In my previous posts, I have explained how digital and multimodal literacies can be used to support motivation in early and adolescent learners, as well as how they can help struggling readers.  This post will strive to give examples and ideas of how to use and support digital and multimodal literacies in the classroom for a variety of learners from studies conducted by researchers.  E-Books and Digital Readers As previously mentioned, digital texts can provide a range of accessibility functions for students to have more positive experiences with reading.  In a case study with a class of second graders by Larson (2010), it was found that by allowing students to have autonomy with the e-readers and texts that the students were engaged and more motivated in the reading practices.  In thi...