W. Ian O’Byrne

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at College of Charleston

In a world where technology constantly reshapes ways of learning, playing, working, interacting, and engaging in civic life, digital media literacy is critical. With increased device use, children and teens must develop skills that will help them to be healthy and productive. A limited body of research suggests that increased digital media literacy...

The digital age has presented both advantages and issues in learning, communication, and overall well-being. Digital technology can provide entertainment, information, and connection but can also increase stress levels, and confusion, and weaken resilience. How can youth build the skills needed to stay focused and avoid digital distractions? What s...

Background and Context Using a transformative learning framework, this qualitative study examines the perspectives and practices of 70 middle and high school content area teachers who attended two or more summer professional development workshops. Objective This study describes how teachers’ disciplinary perspectives and backgrounds influence thei...

There is growing attention to the potential for developing professional learning experiences for content area teachers to infuse computational thinking (CT), which refers to the set of problem-solving practices related to the computer science discipline, into their classrooms. Although research has begun to document professional learning models and...

This article documents a collaborative inquiry between four parent–child dyads. Adopting an approach of duoethnography, the collaborative explored the question, “What happens when parents and children co-construct meaning regarding the challenges and opportunities in using digital technologies?” By positioning youth as co-researchers, the teams dis...

Although literacy research has traditionally focused on content area and disciplinary literacies; in this study, we argue for the importance of transdisciplinarity. We employed a participatory action research design to examine pre-service teachers’ (PST) planning of a transdisciplinary math and music lesson to understand how conceptual framing of p...

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” a list of curated and annotated works reviewed and selected by a large group of dedicated educator-scholars in our field. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts...

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an urgent need for professional development (PD) experiences to support teacher learning across hybrid and digital contexts. This study investigates teachers' experiences in a Virtual Pivot, a PD workshop designed to support computational thinking integration into disciplinary teaching. Participants were 151 middle and...

This article discusses a study on preservice education students and the implementation of digital identities through self-constructed websites in a technology course. Researchers investigated the process of helping educators create a create a domain of their own while they consider the role of technology and digital identities in their future class...

This entry explores the question of how to conceptualize literacy as a deictic concept, one that continually changes as new technologies for literacy and learning emerge. It suggests a dual‐level conceptualization of theory: a New Literacies theory as an overarching theory that encompasses perspectives and findings from the many studies of literacy...

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” and we are proud to share these curated and annotated citations once again. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts within the past year that may be of interest...

The bibliography is divided into nine subject-area sections. A three-person team of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in preK–16 educational settings reviewed and selected the manuscripts for each section using library databases and leading empirical journals. Each team abstracted significant contributions to the b...

Published in Ubiquity: The Journal of Literature, Literacy, and the Arts, 6(1), 8-43. In this article, we explore some of the challenges and trade-offs of defining and conceptualizing instructional text. A richer and more complex definition of literacy requires a complex theoretical framing of the “multiple realities” that exist within this frami...

This study tests an instructional model designed to empower students in an early childhood classroom as emerging digital storytellers. Educators can use digital storytelling to support students’ learning by encouraging them to organize and express their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way while developing voice and facility in c...

Purpose – To examine whether or not exposing novice teachers in a graduate literacy education diversity course to particular texts and activities focused on economic diversity and lifestyle differences among students makes them more likely to positively respond to these lesser understood forms of diversity in their own teaching and if so, in what w...

The intersections between learning, technology, and media are often the scene of tumult and change. The forces of learning, technology, and politics are pervasive in the lives of young people. These contexts of learning are fueled by the current political moment, but also informed by historical contexts that impact our youth, regardless of socioeco...

In recent years, tablets have been shown to serve as incredible teaching tools in classrooms around the world. In mathematics education, divergent thinking, creativity, and play may play a key role in formation of adaptive thinking and math achievement. This qualitative, participatory action research investigated the use of an instructional model t...

Lacking a digital crystal ball, we cannot predict the future of education or the precise instructional role games will have going forward. Yet we can safely say that games will play some role in the future of K-12 and higher education, and members of the games community will have to choose between being passive observers or active, progressive cont...

Transmedia storytelling occurs when integral elements of a particular narrative are dispersed across multiple delivery channels using multiple media for the purpose of creating an integrated and coordinated storytelling experience. Educators have the opportunity to reconceptualize what literacy and learning could and should look like in and out of...

Digital badges are web-enabled tokens of accomplishment that contain specific claims and evidence about learning and achievement along with detailed evidence supporting those claims. Badges traditionally consist of an image and relevant metadata (e.g., badge name, description, criteria, issuer, evidence, date issued, standards, and tags). This colu...

This quasi-experimental, mixed model study explored the use of an instructional approach that provided direct instruction and experiences in multicultural education while empowering preservice teachers to examine their perspectives using a hybrid classroom format. The purpose of the study was to explore preservice teachers’ attitudes and dispositio...

Open learning is becoming a critical focus for K-12 technology-supported programs as the importance of digital literacy and digital freedoms for all learners grows. This article describes current open learning policy, open educational resources and potential implications for open practice and ends with suggestions for future research in open learni...

October 06, 2014 This collaboratively written document is a product of the Badge Alliance , a network of organizations working to grow and evolve a self­sustaining open badges ecosystem. This document aims to provide a framework for open badges in higher educational institutions. A new, editable, 2015 version of this document can be found here. Our...

The Internet is the dominant text of this generation, and through intentional use it may provide opportunities for the critical literacy infused pedagogy. As we consider the online and offline literacy practices that our students will need as future events warrant, the one constant is change. This requires a continual re-defining, and re-examinatio...

What affordances do multimodal and digital information provide to the student and teacher with regard to responding to and writing poetry? This question juxtaposes one of the oldest literary genres in human history (i.e., poetry), with some of the newest technologies available. To enrich the content and affect as students experience poetry, technol...

Literacy has become deictic (Leu, 2000); the meaning of literacy is rapidly changing as new technologies for literacy continually appear and new social practices of literacy quickly emerge.Keywords:Internet;language in the classroom;literacy;online reading comprehension;reading

This commentary explores a central issue for our times, online reading comprehension. It first defines three issues that have largely gone unnoticed as the Internet enters our classrooms: 1) literacy has become deictic; 2) effective online information use requires additional online reading comprehension practices, skills, and dispositions; and 3) m...

Using a popularized notion such as Web 2.0 limits research efforts by employing a binary construct, one initially prompted by commercial concerns. Instead, the authors of this article, commenting on Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes (2009), suggest that continuous, not dichotomous, change in the technologies of literacy and learning defines the Interne...

Improving the ability to read and comprehend, especially for students who struggle with reading, is one of today’s most pressing educational priorities (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1994; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Despite extensive efforts, many students continue to struggle with reading, increasing the possibility that they will drop out of school (Hammond...

In the past decade, significant shifts have occurred in the nature of the Internet and the conceptualization of classrooms. Such shifts have affected constructs of learning and instruction and paths for future research. In this article, the authors build on three ideas set forth in comments on their article "Web 2.0 and Classroom Research: What Pat...

Abstract Online,reading,comprehension,differs,in,important,ways,from,offline,reading comprehension.,This chapter reviews the research showing,that the Internet is this generation’s defining technology,for literacy and learning. It then uses a new,literacies of online reading comprehension,perspective to explore,research on the,differences that take...