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Increasingly, national standards require K-12 students to develop digital literacy practices. In literacy, teachers’ use of digital media platforms has unrecognized potential to impact students’ literacy engagement. Moreover, students gain English Language Arts skills and knowledge of the writing process when completing digital literacy storytelling projects. This study records the preparedness and willingness of participants in a graduate-level teaching English Language Arts to implement digital literacy storytelling projects in K-12 settings. Results indicate that some participants unlocked the possibilities of using the Digital Literacy. Storytelling Project as a learning tool for English Language Arts, while others remained blocked to the potential for the Digital Literacy Storytelling Project due to their challenges with technology. The study highlights the implications of supporting the digital development of K-12 teachers.

Teachers' knowledge is a critical component to students learning to read proficiently. The present research sought to determine the literacy knowledge of 150 urban, elementary school teachers from 11 low socio-economic schools in one of nation's largest cities. Teachers' ability to understand concepts relating to phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle/phonics, and morphology as well as their knowledge about teaching these fundamental skills were assessed through a standardized measure. Using exploratory factor analysis to understand the latent constructs underlying the survey scores and hierarchical linear modelling on factor scores of each construct, the results revealed that teachers located in low socio-economic status schools did not have explicit knowledge needed to effectively teach struggling readers. Although the teachers possessed a high level of knowledge regarding syllable counting skills, they lacked knowledge related to morphology. Practical implications are provided to assist teachers in increasing their literacy knowledge.

The purpose of this eight week study was to provide explicit instruction to improve spelling to 124 sixth grade students who are speakers of African American English (AAE). Two classroom teachers taught 14 different language arts class sections. The research design was a pretest/posttest/posttest design using wait-list-control. The treatment group consisted of seven classes, and the comparison group consisted of seven classes. After the first implementation of the intervention, the comparison group received the intervention. The results from the criterion-referenced spelling assessments showed that students who received explicit, systematic instruction, made gains in their spelling performance from pretest to posttest and in the follow-up posttest. Further, participants maintained the gains in spelling even after eight weeks.