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In an age of mobile technologies, digital animation creation can be an important tool for teaching adolescents how to communicate emotions multimodally. This article draws on appraisal theory and original research to illustrate the power of digital animation for multimodal literacy learning. Students from a culturally diverse cohort were taught how to interpret emotions in animated films and produced 2‐D cartoon animations using drawings with an iPad application and stylus. The findings show that impassioned multimodal communication is enhanced by knowledge of how feelings produce different facial expressions, gestures, body movements, and physiological changes in characters that are often exaggerated to powerful effect in animations. This includes an ability to invoke different intensities of emotions. The research has significant implications for engaging adolescents in the multimodal communication of emotions and feelings through vocabulary, images, and body language.

As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, complex global challenges necessitate cross-cultural collaborative efforts. Thus, developing cosmopolitan literacies among students and teachers becomes ever more important. Believing that cosmopolitan literacies are central to being literate in contemporary times, the authors build on their existing project-based inquiry model to include global themes (e.g., poverty, global water and sanitation, climate change) and cross-cultural exchange. This theory-into-practice article explains the Project-Based Inquiry Global process and six design features that enable teachers to facilitate collaborative inquiry projects with their students. As students interact during the process, they begin to practice cosmopolitan literacies by engaging in reading, writing, and inquiry with people and topics from around the world, becoming cross-cultural difference makers.

This case study examines one African American adolescent male's digital choices and experiences during the creation of a digital story about Minecraft. This study introduces digital participatory choice cultures as a framework to consider how he might recognize and use existing meaning‐making and composition strategies to bridge what young people know, do, and learn both within and outside educational settings. Data include interviews, observations, photo elicitation, digital photos, and digital and nondigital texts. First, the author highlights the student's choices to create a topic and digital story. Second, the author examines how the student's digital choices illustrate the literacies, agency, and identities inherent in digital participatory choice culture, which helped him express himself in both cultural and digital ways. The analysis demonstrates how race mattered in the student's digital composition, which suggests that literacy educators can design instruction to learn about and build from their students’ already existing funds of knowledge.

Print‐based literacy is no longer sufficient for the global digital age. However, distribution of the resources needed to learn new literacies is unequal. The authors describe a qualitative case study conducted with teachers in Kenya who participated in a professional development series on new literacies and inquiry. The professional development involved an inquiry‐based literacy approach that is technology‐rich and learner‐centered. Three themes emerged from the data: shifting to learner‐centered pedagogies: “I’m inspired to improve my teaching”; change is slow but coming: “We need to be empowered with more information about new technologies”; and strategies for teaching new literacies: “Creating is better than just talking.” The discussion focuses on the enduring challenges for educational transformation in Kenya coupled with the substantive changes that are being made by pioneering Kenyan educators.

Online synchronous collaborative writing (SCW) is ubiquitous among youths and has found its way into many secondary English language arts classrooms. Yet, to maximize the affordances of online SCW, teachers need a synthesis of contemporary, evidence-based practices for how to support students during this form of writing. The purpose of this article is to highlight best practices for teachers and schools interested in leveraging their one-to-one technologies in more collaborative ways that include online SCW. The authors situate SCW in contemporary educational initiatives and then describe ways that teachers can incorporate SCW in their writing instruction through a hybrid approach—face-to-face and online—that enhances rich, meaningful peer-to-peer learning. The authors present actionable recommendations for teachers to consider before, during, and after online SCW. The authors conclude with how this approach to writing provides students with the technical and social tools to achieve success in the information society.

Interactive read-alouds are a mainstay in traditional literacy classrooms because they support wide-ranging goals in reading development. As educators make the transition to virtual classrooms, it is paramount that core practices, such as the interactive read-aloud, are intentionally adapted to ensure that their purpose remains central to their use. Although the production of digital read-alouds has flourished during the recent pandemic, many of these videos lack key components necessary to foster meaningful literacy growth. Educators need to be aware of the affordances and limitations offered by digital read-alouds to analyze and create materials for classroom use. In this article, we offer resources to guide intentional planning to ensure that digital read-aloud experiences go beyond passive student consumption. In addition, specific recommendations illustrate how digital read-alouds can be positioned within synchronous and asynchronous classroom activities to preserve and amplify the sociocultural element that can be more challenging to maintain within virtual environments.

Composing is an essential part of literacy development in early childhood classrooms, and writing experiences are continually changing through advances in technology. Writing in a new language can be particularly challenging for emergent bilinguals as they navigate learning how to spell in English as part of the writing process. New pedagogical tools must be used to support these students as meaning makers and composers. In this study, we investigated how a group of first-grade emergent bilinguals used word prediction software as they created digital compositions over the course of a year. The results suggest several positive ways, such as basic spelling support, extended written responses, and additional opportunities to practice reading, that this digital tool enhanced the meaning-making process of emergent bilingual writers. Recommendations for educators to implement word prediction software in classrooms are included.

s Literacy instruction does not just happen during the language arts block, as students can learn more about reading and writing during science, social studies, and mathematics. This department features examples of how teachers can teach literacy across various content areas.

In today’s multimodal landscape, coding has a space in the elementary literacy curriculum. Coding and literacy have many parallels, which are described in further detail. The author also explains why coding should be integrated into the primary grades and the steps that teachers can take to implement coding in the literacy curriculum. The free app ScratchJr is used to illustrate how block coding can be integrated into literacy instruction. The author provides an example, embedded throughout, of how code literacy was implemented in a second‐grade classroom, with relation to content area literacy in science.

Young students must become proficient in the new literacies of 21st‐century technologies to be considered literate. This department explores how literacy educators can integrate information and communication technologies into the curriculum.