Adolescence Education: 506

Computers & the Study of English

__________________________________
SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, SUNY CORTLAND

Thursdays, Old Main, Room G-17, 4:20 6:50 pm

Professor Sarah R. Hobson
sarah.hobson@cortland.edu
Office Phone: 607-753-2230
Office Hours: Old Main: 115C
Mondays/Wednesdays
10:30 1:00 pm
by appointment

Course Description and Rationale:

In todays economy, fueled by on-line social networks and an open exchange of
information, more than ever before, reading and writing practices have become more
complicated, cultural, and artistic. Texts are no longer only print based or mono-modal.
They are multi-dimensional and multimodal. Writers are positioned as producers and
have access to expanded audiences. Everyday citizens function as reporters, editorialists,
graphic designers, moviemakers, social activists, fundraisers, and mass marketers.
Everyday citizens face the challenges of deciphering the agendas of producers, the
validity of their claims, and the cultural significance of web-based and other media
designs. Everyday citizens need design-based understandings about how to frame their
perspectives to affect their specific agendas.
Given the wide array of literacy practices required to succeed in this web-based, media,
and global economy, it is incumbent upon teachers of adolescents to steep themselves in
digital literacies and to re-examine their conceptions of reading and writing drawing upon
their knowledge of digital, informational, visual, and media literacies. Teachers of
adolescents need to be able to design instruction centered in the reading and production
of complex print-based and multimodal texts. In order to accomplish these goals,
teachers need to network successfully through social media with other colleagues. They
need to be able to develop critical literacies with adolescents that protect adolescents
from harmful messages, from flawed research, and from predators.
In order to form a practitioner inquiry experience, this course functions as a collaborative
inquiry. We will learn and share different technologies and literacies each week, and we

will help one another process and envision dynamic, adolescent-centered instructional
designs.

Course Goals:
In this course, we will
1. Conceptualize digital literacies, informational literacies, visual (design-based)
literacies, and media literacies and the relationships among texts and cultural
contexts.
2. Research the range of educational professional blogs and networks available to
teachers.
3. Research educational organizations and inquiry communities available to
teachers.
4. Develop an on-line professional network and presence through social media tools,
including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, a blog, and Aggregate RSS Feeds
Feedbly and Hootsuite.
5. Create a personal and professional website documenting who you are as a teacher:
your SUNY Cortland coursework, your theories of practice, your instructional
designs in each course, videos of your teaching, your professional networks, a
link to your blog and social media sites, and your personal goals.
6. Conceptualize and learn some of the digital literacies that correspond with
different technologies, such as website design, blog design, iMovie, Podcasts,
Prezis, and Powerpoints.
7. Research the range of instructional designs teachers are employing to engage
adolescents in dynamic, multitextual, multimodal, visually literate, and authentic
reading and writing.
8. Research the range of practices teachers are employing to help adolescents
effectively and authentically assess their print based and multimodally produced
texts.
9. Design pedagogical goals and curricula for one unit plan that positions
adolescents as critical and visual readers of digital technologies and of media.
10. Teach us and video record one or more lesson plans from your unit plan.

Course Standards:
2.5: Make meaningful and creative connections between the ELA curriculum and
developments in culture, society, and education;
3.2.1 Create opportunities and develop strategies that permit students to demonstrate,
through their own work, the influence of language and visual images on thinking and
composing.
3.2.2 Create opportunities and develop strategies for enabling students to demonstrate
how they integrate writing, speaking, and observing in their own learning processes
3.2.3: Demonstrate a variety of ways to teach students composing processes that result in
their creating various forms of oral, visual, and written literacy;

3.2.4 Engage students in activities that provide opportunities for demonstrating their
skills in writing, speaking, and creating visual images for a variety of audiences and
purposes;
3.2.5: Use a variety of ways to assist students in creating and critiquing a wide range of
print and nonprint texts for multiple purposes and help students understand the
relationship between symbols and meaning
3.6.1: Understand medias influence on culture and peoples actions and communication,
reflecting that knowledge not only in their own work but also in their teaching;
3.6.2: Use a variety of approaches for teaching students how to construct meaning from
media and nonprint texts and integrate learning opportunities into classroom experiences
that promote composing and responding to such texts;
3.6.3: Help students compose and respond to film, video, graphic, photographic, audio,
and multimedia texts and use current technology to enhance their own learning and
reflection on their learning.
4.6: Engage students in critical analysis of different media and communications
technologies and their effect on students learning;
4.9 Demonstrate how reading comprehension strategies are flexible for making and
monitoring meaning in both print and nonprint texts and teach a wide variety of such
strategies to all students.

Course Texts:
Dede, C. & Richards, J. (Eds.). (2012). Digital teaching platforms: Customizing
classroom learning for each student. New York: Teachers College Press.
Hicks, T. (2013). Crafting digital writing: Composing texts across media and genres.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Warschauer, M. (2012). Learning in the cloud: How (and Why) to transform schools
with digital media. New York: Teachers College Press.
*Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2008). Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and
Practices. New York: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers.* (provided
digitally)

Course Assignments & Assessment

1. Your personal blog: For each week, use the focus questions to provide an indepth summary and analytical reflection on the readings provided and how they
relate to your current and/or future specific theoretical frameworks and
instructional designs. Feel free to expand upon the readings provided with
outside research. You will be assessed on your ability to enact a close reading
and to translate that close reading into non-jargony, clear, coherent, and well
designed arguments capturing the influence of the research perspectives and
practices of others on your own theories of practice and practical designs. You

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

will also reflect on the design of your blog, the design-based principles you have
applied, and how its interface is intended to increase targeted followers. (25%)
Your Website Portfolio: You will apply your design-based understandings of
visual texts to your design of your own personal website. With this website, you
will market yourself, your thinking, and your work to educational colleagues and
future employers. You will be assessed on your ability to effectively position
your design such that it is symmetrical, thematically orchestrated, accessible,
dynamic, artistic, and rhetorically aligned with educators. (10%)
Class Wiki: We will collaboratively design a wiki for our class. Each week, I
will ask you to post your latest blog to the wiki and to engage in respectful
discussion with your classmates responding, raising questions, and interrogating
one anothers assumptions and thinking regarding the focus questions and their
instructional designs. These discussions will help you further develop your
thinking and revise your blog posts and your website portfolio accordingly.
(10%)
Social Networking Sites: As you join social networking sites, you will be
assessed on your ability to use these sites to join important educational inquiries
and conversations, to attract followers, to network with followers, and to use these
conversations to advance your research into theories of practice and instructional
designs and assessments. (5%)
Digital Literacies: You will have the opportunity to design and partake in
English assignments that feature iMovie, Prezis, PowerPoints, and Podcasts.
You will be assessed on your ability to design this instruction around English
instruction that positions adolescents as critical visual interpreters of the design of
texts, the validity of producers textual designs and arguments, and as critical
producers of their own texts and intentions. (20%)
Unit Plan: You will design a unit plan that incorporates Wikis and/or class
blogs, that positions adolescents as critical readers/consumers and producers, and
that engages students in reflecting on the cultural implications of their
interpretational and representational processes. (25%)

Cell phones and Computers

As a courtesy to our class community, please turn off and put away all cell phones before
class starts. Because there are multiple opportunities for online engagement within the
structure of this course, I welcome your laptop computers; however, use of computers is
restricted to class work only.

Attendance & Policies for Late Work

Attendance is expected at all class meetings. Please let me know IN ADVANCE if you
need to be absent for any class sessions for reasons of illness or family emergency or if
there is a mandatory school event that requires your presence. If you are ill, I will need a
doctors note. Unless you are having an extreme emergency, I need this information
ahead of time in order for you not to be penalized.

Because everything is carefully scaffolded so that you turn in parts of an assignment over
time and/or you have opportunities to revise, late work is not acceptable. If at any time,
you are struggling to keep up with the work, please talk to me individually or as a class
immediately, and we will work out a plan. Otherwise, for every day that an assignment
(all assignmentsdrafts and final drafts) is late, you will lose a quarter of a letter grade.

Other Important Information

A Note about Professional Dispositions: Our program takes the professional
dispositions teacher candidates acquire and routinely display very seriously. At the end
of this syllabus is a useful document, the Professional Dispositions Policy, to guide your
work in the AEN program. Please read. If you have questions about anything in this
policy statement, please raise them with your instructors.
Taskstream: This is an NCATE accredited program. In order to provide you with a
continuing accredited program that schools will recognize, we need you to enroll in
Taskstream. If you are not already enrolled in Taskstream you will enroll for the first
time. Those of you already enrolled will re-enroll in the 2014 portfolio.
At the end of the semester, you will need to upload to Taskstream, several examples of
assignments that fulfill each program standard. I will provide instructions for how to do
this before then. It is important that you do this at the end of the semester, and you will
not receive a grade for this course until this has been completed. See attached for
NCATE/NCTE and SUNY standards this course this course meets.
Office of Student Disability Services: Any student requesting academic
accommodations based on a disability is required to register with the Office of Student
Disability Services (OSDS). A letter of verification for approved accommodations can
be obtained from the OSDS. Please be sure that the letter is delivered to me as early in
the semester as possible. OSDS is located in Van Hoesen Hall, Room B-1 and is open
8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., M-F. Their phone number is (607) 753-2066.
Student Writing Support: At any time, please know that SUNY offers an Academic
Support and Achievement Program. You can find out more information about this peer
tutor on-line or in person support at http://www2.cortland.edu/offices/asap/.
Plagiarism and Academic Dishonesty: The College is an academic community whose
mission is to promote scholarship through the acquisition, preservation and transmission
of knowledge. Fundamental to this goal is the institution's dedication to academic
integrity. This academic community takes seriously its responsibilities regarding
academic honesty. In this setting all members of the institution have an obligation to
uphold high intellectual and ethical standards. Plagiarism, a form of academic dishonesty,
involves incorporating the words or thoughts of another into ones original writing
without proper documentation. Common examples include submitting a paper by another
student; failing to document properly paraphrased, summarized or directly quoted
material: or subtly altering the diction and content of a source author without
documentation. The minimal consequences for plagiarism will be a 0 grade for the

assignment and most likely for the course. Students should consult the College Handbook
(see Chapter 340 beginning on page 50) for full details of SUNY Cortlands policy on
academic dishonesty.
English Department Adolescence English Education Programs
Professional Dispositions Policy
(1) Students in the AEN program will be introduced to and held accountable for the
Dispositions in all courses with an AED prefix.
(2) Syllabi for AED courses should have a dispositions statement which exists as a
contract for that class. Statement to follow the Academic Integrity statement:
Professional Dispositions Statement
One goal of this course is to provide opportunities for continuous positive
growth toward strong teaching skills and dispositions as reflected in the
Assessment of Candidates Professional Dispositions. Positive teaching
dispositions are a basic requirement for all successful completion of the AEN
program. In the event of problematic demonstration of teaching disposition,
incidents will be documented and the departmental and Teacher Education
Council Fair Practice Policy and Procedures for action will be followed.
(3) Concerned faculty member(s) must meet with student, record the first annotation
on Candidate Consultation Report form and gain signature during the meeting. In the
event that a student refuses to sign the form, faculty should note that fact on the form
before the form is forwarded to the Program Coordinator.
(4) The Program Coordinator will periodically review students files to note multiple
cases reported for one student and/or non-resolution of requested correction. Near the
end of the semester, the faculty member(s) should provide a second annotation on the
Candidate Consultation Report indicating whether the problem has been resolved or
whether there has been failure to resolve the problem.
(5) Three weeks before the end of the semester, the AEN faculty will review the
status of all students with actions. As indicated, the committee will determine whether
to advance the student (with a contract) or to follow procedure for dismissal from the
program.
(6) Egregious breach of deportment/dispositions may result in dismissal from the
program at any time, as determined by AEN faculty and/or Program Coordinator.
(8) Student teacher supervisors will be notified of contracts concerning students
placed for student teaching in order to address and support dispositional aspects of
professional performance. When necessary, supervisors will be asked to participate in
final review of particular students.

AEN Program Assessment of Candidates Professional Dispositions

At SUNY Cortland teacher education is framed by a central commitment to liberal learning that
comprises the themes of personal responsibility, social justice and global understanding. Teacher
candidates are expected to develop and demonstrate the dispositions identified in professional,
state, and institutional standards.
Note: the default assessment is S = Satisfactory. Only those dispositions found to be lacking will
be noted with a U = Unsatisfactory.
Teaching Dispositions

Rating

Date

Faculty
Initial

Demonstrates content knowledge (masterful, innovative)

Is competent in arts/sciences (literate, articulate, well-read)
Sees children are capable learners (encouraging, supportive)
Maintains high standards (challenging, investigative,
curious)
Is fair (responsible, socially just)
Creates safe and nurturing classroom (supportive, aware)
Uses technology effectively (creative, innovative)
Meets varied learning styles (flexible, inclusive)
Respects diversity (accepting, inclusive, equitable)
Is reflective (thoughtful, resourceful, self-aware)
Uses assessment effectively (thorough, objective)
Communicates effectively (articulate, persuasive, respectful)
Integrates curriculum
Professional Dispositions
Conveys appropriate attitude to learning (participates, is
enthusiastic, analytical)
Is punctual
Demonstrates commitment (dedicated, persevering,
tenacious)
Collaborates (sensitive, open minded, gracious)
Is respectful (shows due regard, is polite, considerate)
Is receptive to feedback (proactive)
Is focused and organized
Pays attention to appearance (clean, groomed, appropriate)
Is honest (moral, ethical, honorable)
Demonstrates integrity (trustworthy, resolute, selfadvocating)
Is caring (empathetic, supportive)
Demonstrates strong work ethic (accepts challenges)
Is responsible (reliable, deliberative)
Is accountable (takes ownership, dependable)