Full course description

Course Date:

Feb 6 - Apr 17, 2017

Duration:

10 weeks

Commitment:

5 hrs/week

Requirement:

iPad use/app purchase

Course Type:

Instructor-led

Credential:

Certificate

Description

This course prepares teachers to combine traditional texts and educational media—such as e-books, videos, and digital games—to develop student literacies for 21st-century family, civic, and career contexts.

By taking advantage of traditional and innovative resources, teachers can help students acquire facility with foundational reading and writing abilities, as well as with reading traditional and nontraditional texts. The course includes five two-week-long modules, each addressing an essential aspect of sound literacy instruction:

  1. Teach literacy with and through transmedia.
  2. Leverage transmedia to mediate text complexity.
  3. Build decoding skills to support reading success in a multimodal world.
  4. Deepen vocabulary and concept knowledge with and through transmedia.
  5. Support comprehension development with and through transmedia.

Participants may customize their learning experiences by taking modules individually or taking all five sequentially.


Objectives

By successfully completing all course requirements and modules you will be able to:

  • Use transmedia to develop your students’ literacy proficiency and knowledge about the world.
  • Assemble multimodal text sets that create a rich context for building your students’ literacy proficiency and knowledge about the world.
  • Use a transmedia approach to provide all students access to complex texts and tasks.
  • Create instructional plans that effectively integrate transmedia with effective literacy instruction across literacy domains (word study, vocabulary, and comprehension).

Prerequisite: To successfully complete course activities, you will need access to and be able to use an iPad. You are also expected to be able to navigate websites and be familiar with copying and pasting, attaching, printing, and saving documents in computer programs. Moreover, to successfully complete course requirements, you will need to purchase a book app for a small cost available on iTunes ($1.99-$2.99). Book apps will be specified once you complete Establish a Baseline in Module 1.1.


Target Audience: This course is for any K-5 educational profession who seeks to learn about ways to leverage transmedia into teaching and learning in support of curricular goals across essential literacy domains (word study, vocabulary, comprehension).


Course is offered by Boston University.

Course Instructors

Jeanne Paratore

Jeanne R. Paratore

Professor

Jeanne R. Paratore is Professor and Program Coordinator of Reading Education and Literacy Education at Boston University. Dr. Paratore researches and writes widely about family literacy, classroom grouping practices, and interventions for struggling readers. Dr. Paratore is a frequent speaker on literacy instruction, presenting at local, national, and international conferences as well as in school districts across the U.S. She is a former teacher, reading specialist, and Title I director.

Lisa O-Brien

Lisa O'Brien

Instructor

Lisa M. O’Brien is a lecturer at Boston University. Her research focuses on ways to provide all children access to opportunities that ameliorate early and later opportunity gaps and support families and teachers in understanding and implementing practices that enable equitable opportunities for learning. Dr. O’Brien has also worked as an elementary classroom teacher, head preschool teacher, and reading specialist/literacy leader.

The contents of this course were developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government. [PR/Award No. U295A100025, CFDA No. 84.295A]