As digital portfolios become more prevalent in teacher education, the purposes and processes for creating them have become contested. Originally meant to be critical and reflective spaces for learning about multimedia and conceived as contributing to professional growth, research shows that digital portfolios are now increasingly being used to…

Electronic portfolio technology can be used in different contexts to create classroom communities in which everyone, not just the teacher, cares about each student's learning. The authors describe how students in an urban middle school, undergraduate teacher preparation program, and graduate leadership program used an electronic bulletin board and…

Electronic portfolio use within the context of a teacher education program is explored in this article. Although the use of e-portfolios has emerged as a topic that integrates new technologies and the education of preservice teachers, little work thus far has documented the complexities involved in the authoring process of e-portfolios. To address…

Along with discussion of format and design of electronic portfolios, this article addresses the larger question of what happens to teachers when they invest in creating a professional portfolio. Are they able to transform this experience into more authentic assessment with their own students? Beside acquiring proficiency in using portfolio…

Electronic portfolios allow students to include video, images, hyperlinks, and audio, along with written texts, to create varied and comprehensive representations of what they have accomplished. Such collections of information also change the ways that teachers and students choose to present themselves and the ways that we read these presentations…

The author shares insights gained through teaching middle and high school struggling readers and raises issues related to the complexity of addressing the literacy needs of adolescents for whom reading is difficult. The role of university-based reading clinics in helping inservice teachers' think differently about struggling readers and the…

Teacher educators can use active engagement strategies to help teacher candidates interact meaningfully with assigned readings for literacy methods courses. This approach to active engagement with required readings helps teacher candidates learn the content, concepts, and processes from text, and enables them to experience as learners the…

Tagging is not simply an act of vandalism or violence; it is a social practice with its own rules and codes--a literacy practice imbued with intent and meaning. Three aspects of tagging reflect its nature as a literate practice: (1) The purpose of tagging to achieve particular social goals and group affiliations; (2) The role of talent to be…

The integration of nature studies within language arts instruction offers multiple possibilities for guiding students toward close readings of literature, their changing selves, natural phenomena, and the world around them. The authors document their own rediscovery of nature study and what happened when environmental observations were…

A team of researchers revised the Motivation to Read Profile for use with adolescents. Instruments to assess adolescents' in- and out-of-school reading motivations were administered. A survey adapted for adolescents was administered to 384 teens at eight sites throughout the United States and Trinidad, and 100 students were interviewed using a…

This article discusses the participatory potential of YouTube, a social website that allows users to upload, view, and share video clips. The author provides examples of how YouTube was incorporated into a course as part of a "mosh-pit" pedagogy that involved both students and teachers in engaging with a variety of YouTube videos.

The question is not whether literacy practices are present in contemporary popular culture--it is hard not to find a movie or program without some representation of literacy in it. The more important and useful question is, How do we in the audience interpret the literacy practices we find in popular culture? What do such representations tell us…

Although research supports the importance and impact of using reading strategies in content area classrooms to improve students' comprehension, many secondary teachers do not use this knowledge to improve the delivery of content. This article describes a themed literature circle curriculum developed as part of a reading course for content area…

The Chinese people have great regard for those who read widely, yet little is known of the extracurricular reading behaviors of Chinese students. This study drew on data from two national surveys to investigate the amount of time Taiwanese college students spend on extracurricular reading. Findings are interpreted in relation to prior research on…

Developing students' ability to read is a critical educational goal, necessary in order that students can become successful members of society. Proficiency in reading increases opportunities for higher education and promotes positive social change.Unfortunately, many students struggle with comprehension, especially in the content areas. Some have…