Module 5, Blog Post 4: Annotated Bibliography

 

Annotated Bibliography 

Jennifer Parker 

SUNY Empire State University

(2025FA-CURI-6010-01) New Media & New Literacies

Dr. Emily Schindler

9 November 2025

    

    As I began researching new medias and new literacy ideas for my final project, I had a myriad of ideas. I wanted to research ideas that were familiar but also ones that were completely outside my comfort zone. In researching different new media and new literacy projects, I learned what I am not quite comfortable with, i.e. gaming and computer programming. As well as topics that were very interesting to explore: podcasting and writing. After compiling the data, I have decided to focus my final project on a synchronous writing project.

Burke, Q. (2012). The Markings of a New Pencil: Introducing Programming-as-Writing in the Middle School Classroom. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 4(2), 121–135. 

Quinn Burke uses a writing workshop to facilitate students learning computer programming while also working on digital composition and storytelling. Through a seven-week long writing workshop focused on students’ own digital stories, using the program Scratch, students learned the connection between programming and the writing process. 

Burke’s process involved prewriting/planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing, the steps used for the writing process were also a key component of this digital literacy as well. As a result nine out of the ten students created a complete digital story and published it online.

I love the idea of integrating writing and digital literacy. I think this project was so successful because Burke had a wealth of prior knowledge on the digital platform Scratch and was able to seamlessly integrate this new technology into the classroom and add it to the writing process. I have no prior knowledge on coding or using platforms like Scratch, so to be able to incorporate a unit like this in my classroom would take a lot of learning on my part. 

Elmore, P. G., & Coleman, J. M. (2019). Middle School Students’ Analysis of Political Memes to Support Critical Media Literacy. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(1), 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.948

This article researches how students' analysis of political memes supports their learning of critical media literacy. The authors: Patricia G. Elmore and Julianne M. Coleman, of this article, is the teacher who created this unit and a professor of elementary literacy research at the University of Alabama. The researchers sought to answer the questions: How can analyzing political memes through rhetorical analysis support students learning critical media literacy (CML) skills? Through a well-thought out and standards based unit, they accomplished what they set out to do. 

Elmore planned out a thorough two week lesson, including vocabulary words, and readings and designed lessons that sought to cultivate CML skills. “She chose discussion questions, activities and graphic organizers with our research question in mind: How can analyzing political memes through rhetorical analysis support students in learning CML skills?”(Elmore and Coleman, 2019). The research, the preparation and the execution of this lesson are exemplary. 

While I don’t think that I would replicate this exact lesson with political memes,  there are a lot of aspects of this research that I would absolutely use to teach critical media literacy skills and rhetoric to students. The vocabulary lists and the exercises with the word walls, are key ways to teach students CML vocabulary. Especially logos, pathos, ethos and kairos, it is so important to teach students the rhetoric and then the analysis of the rhetoric. The graphic organizer, Figure 1, was a great way for students to organize their thoughts and information from the political meme they had chosen. Having them break down the rhetorical information into practical portions was also key to students' understanding. Overall, this is a powerful lesson of how teaching CML can deeply impact students, “Students responses are evidence that secondary students can and should be taught CML skills because they live in a world where social media has connected humans at unprecedented levels, saturates our lives, provides platforms for marginalized voices and influences and bears consequences on real lives”(Elmore and Coleman, 2019).

Krishnan, J., Cusimano, A., Wang, D., & Yim, S. (2018). Writing Together: Online Synchronous Collaboration in Middle School. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(2), 163–173. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.871

In “Writing Together: Online Synchronous Collaboration in Middle School, the authors investigated synchronous collaborative writing to research if it improved students' independent writing. The students in this study completed two source-based argumentative writing activities using google docs. Each writing activity consisted of a text set written by authors with differing perspectives on a central issue, a writing prompt, and guidelines for argumentative writing. The researchers utilized the app DocuViz to support students’ writing. This plug in generates history revision of a shared document to show who has contributed when, where and how. Allowing researchers to measure the collaborative efforts of the participants. 

Online synchronous writing addresses critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity. The two questions the study sought to answer: 1. Are there differences (in effectiveness and length) between essays written by groups and essays written by individual students? 2. What are students' perceptions of their group writing experience? The measures of writing used were the rubric scores, essay length and grade level text complexity. On average the source based argumentative essays written in groups outscored independent writers on overall rubric scores, were significantly longer in length, and students felt their collaborative writing was more efficient than writing independently. The students also perceive that the use of Docuviz was informative and promoted accountability and motivation. 

Synchronous writing to improve individual writing is a great area of study for middle school students. I would consider doing a project like this in my classroom/for my final project. I like the two- source argumentative piece as well as the critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity that this project entails. One area I need to research is if our chromebooks are compatible and our firewalls allow the downloading of Docuviz. I feel the key to this project is being able to measure the collaboration of all group members. 

Latham, G. (2022). Podcasts: Activating voice, hearing the words, making the meaning. Literacy Learning, 30(1), 32–38.

Gloria Latham discusses how middle school teachers can adapt a collaborative approach to teaching writing by using talk to generate ideas. Latham begins by her idea of creating a podcast based on her experiences going daily to the dog park. The steps to creating a podcast are pre-writing, drafting, reflecting, finding voice, and then narrating the podcast. 

This article was helpful in showing the parallels between creating a podcast and the process of writing. However it was largely focused on Latham’s singular experience of launching her dog park podcast and her thoughts on how it related to middle school writing. There was not any data or actual research conducted with a middle school class to show how podcasting increases or helps students in their writing process. 

As I am considering doing a podcast unit for my final research project, this was helpful in showing the steps to creating a podcast. However, there is no supporting data or how to incorporate a podcast in the classroom. I would need to find other sources if I wanted to explore this topic further.  

Orhan, A. (2023). Fake news detection on social media: the predictive role of university students’ critical thinking dispositions and new media literacy. Smart Learning Environments, 10(1), Article 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-023-00248-8

In this article, Ali Orhan researches the predictive role of critical thinking dispositions and new media literacies on university students' ability to detect fake news. Through a study group of 157 university students, ages 17-24, using a Sosu critical thinking disposition scale and a new media literacy scale, students read 6 news items. Three of the articles were fake news and three of the articles were real news content. The study found that students who were exposed to critical thinking recommendations presented better performance to detect fake news. Students with high New Media Literacy skills could critically access, decode, understand and analyze the messages that different kinds of media content convey. Overall students with high critical thinking dispositions are more powerful than new media literacies in fighting fake news. 

Overall, this article is a thorough study on critical thinking and new media literacies and how they impact university students' abilities to detect fake news. The study was conducted in a manner that was fair and accurate and the data was extremely reliable and beneficial. “In short, this study showed that CT dispositions and NML were significant predictors of university students’ abilities to detect FN. Therefore, we can say that enhancing individuals’ CT dispositions and NML would be a good idea to equip them with the necessary skills that are useful in the fight against FN on SM” (Orhan, 2023). 

While this study was done with university students, I still feel that the data is impactful for my middle school students. Students need critical thinking skills and new media literacies in order to comprehend and detect fake news. This has me thinking about how I can recreate this type of lesson/study in my 7th grade ELA classroom. This study was done in Turkey and the two websites used to compile the articles for the research were: www.dogrula.org and www.teyit.org which are not in English. I am currently researching websites to use to find credible articles and fake news articles to see if this is an avenue I want to pursue.