Bonus Post: The Requisites and Raptures of Digital Storytelling by Brett Pierce

 The Requisites and Raptures of Digital Storytelling

by Brett Pierce

This blog has the singular aim of introducing, for your reflection, consideration and practice, the idea of integrating digital storytelling – the ‘writing’ side of digital literacy – into your classroom; of making this normative. The reasons are multifold and, I would argue, critical to the future success of your students. But I’ll begin with our burgeoning understanding of the moving target that is encompassed by the word, ‘literacy.’

Amidst the technological maelstrom that has enveloped us all, text is no longer the only game in town. The 2020 NCTE Committee on Global Citizenship wrote:

At its simplest, literacy is the way that we interact with the world around us, how we shape it and are shaped by it. It is how we communicate with others via reading and writing, but also by speaking, listening, and creating. It is how we articulate our experience in the world and declare, “We Are Here!””

Think about it: how do students ‘interact with the world around [them]’ and how do they ‘articulate [their] experience in the world and declare, “We are Here!”’? The answer: digitally.  The digital realm is their communication platform. It’s their social life. It’s their source of knowledge. It’s their language. It’s a full-blown communication spectrum the breadth and depth of which is unprecedented in history. 

Has there ever been a more all-consuming and far-reaching literacy? Has the need to teach toward ‘writing’ fluency in this literacy ever been greater? The question then is: Are we preparing our kids to be meaningful contributors to this digitally literate universe; to declare, ‘We are Here!’ in a meaningful and impactful way? And the answer is mostly, ‘No.’  

This is where digital storytelling comes in. Digital Storytelling is the capacity to communicate using text, sound, music, and imagery – still and moving. You don’t have to use all of these tools, but they are the main components of digital storytelling. If we think of this in terms of primary and secondary colors, then text, sound/music and imagery are your primary colors. Pacing, visual palette, graphics, voice, tone, and genre (comedy, game show, news, mystery, etc.) might be your secondary colors. It’s a relatively vast range of tools with which to work in order to effectively communicate. And in that range lies both its complexity and wonder, challenge and opportunity. 

Is it teachable without prior media production knowledge? Yes! All you need to know is what you know: the content. The answer to any question from the students about digital production and IT-related questions is this: “You figure it out.” Here’s the reality. In traditional text-based literacy, you, the educator, know the rules and you teach those rules to your students…whether you are teaching science, math, history, or literature. Text-based literacy is powered by rules of syntax and grammar, word choices and punctuation. Digital Literacy is not about rules as much as it is about mechanics. Digital Literacy is about knowing 1) the individual operations of the different digital parts (imagery, music, sound, editing, zooms, etc.); and 2) how those different digital parts all synchronize with each other. For the students, discovering these digital mechanics – including cool apps that let letters fly or distort an image to comic effect – is like letting them loose in an educational playground designed just for them. Except it’s digital.

Discovering the various components of digital literacy is part of the learning experience. Teaching you, the educator, what they, the students, have discovered, is also a vital part of the learning experience. We all know the power of this flipped classroom model, even in this micro format. But it still takes guts and confidence to yield that control of information and knowledge. 

But the payoff is huge. 

Can you assess a digital story like you grade a paper? Yes-Plus, is the answer. Your assessment falls into four categories: Content Command, Storytelling or Narrative Command, Digital Literacy Command, and Human (or 21st Century) Skills Command. To see some free examples of how digital storytelling projects approach the curriculum and provide clear assessment rubrics, check out the free language arts projects from the non-profit, Meridian Stories, as well as the annual Digital Storytelling Competition for middle and high school students that I run.  

One of the many beauties of digital storytelling is the depth of the narrative bench at its disposal. In addition to traditional text-based narrative genres, there is well over seventy years of television and twenty plus years of the Internet that has yielded myriad narrative forms that can be applied in the classroom. We are talking Game Shows, Reality Shows, Sitcoms, Music Videos, Sketch Comedies, Vlogs, How-To Tutorials and Product Reviews. Imagine asking students to create a Product Review of … a novel, a current global leader, or your town’s recycling commitment.

Digital Storytelling in the classroom is an invitation to students to utilize their intimate knowledge of television, podcasting, and social media narrative formats to explore curricular content. That is part of the attraction for students – tapping into their practically organic knowledge of these genres of storytelling. 

All of these different narrative structures champion different storytelling strengths. From the personal journey of the vlog to the focus on voice and character in the radio drama; from the variety of perspectives and expertise in the special news cast (think anchor, color commentator, field reporter and interviewee) to the use of comedy to communicate important, visceral content in an SNL-esque parody sketch, the digital story offers students a seemingly infinite series of creative choices that open portals into understanding and communicating serious content, and all inside of the digital universe in which they spend half of their lives.

In the end, if we are to properly prepare our students for life after secondary school, we need to set them up to succeed digitally; to communicate meaningfully inside the digital landscape of stories; contribute responsibly to these new libraries of digital stories. This means consistently experimenting with text, sound, music, imagery, voice, story, tone, perspective, narrative format, time, color, …the list goes on. And to do this, the students need to collaborate, create, think critically, problem solve, work iteratively, present publicly, manage time and schedules, make decisions, master digital apps, …that list goes on too. The educational value is clear and inexorable.

And here’s the concluding killer piece to it all. For the students, …it’s a blast!  

Finally, if you’ve made it to the end here, I’ll assume that something here has captured your creative educational imagination. Meridian Stories can help jumpstart your integration of digital storytelling in the classroom and I am happy to offer it to WPCTE members and their schools for free ($300 value) for this school year. Just drop me a short email (brett@meridianstories.org) and we’ll make it happen. 

Thanks for your time and mind. 

About the Author

Brett is the founder and Executive Director of Meridian Stories, a Digital Storytelling nonprofit for middle and high schoolers that challenges students to create digital narratives around core curricular goals in a friendly, annual competition (brett@meridianstories.org). Brett recently authored his first book with Heinemann Publishing, Expanding Literacy: Bringing Digital Storytelling into Your Classroom, and wrote the National Geographic Storytelling for Impact course series in 2022 which won the Gold Anthem Award.

Brett has spent much of his professional life at Sesame Workshop in New York City, serving as a Co-Executive Producer on media projects about literacy, math, science, global citizenry and conflict-resolution for youth around the world, including projects in China, North Macedonia, Indonesia, Poland, Iraq, and South Sudan. He is currently working on a new SEL television series for pre-schoolers that is slated to launch worldwide in 2026.

Brett began his career teaching English in a high school in Virginia, and has continued teaching intermittently at Fordham University, University of Southern Maine, and Colby College. Brett has a BA from Kenyon College, and Masters Degrees from Middlebury College (English) and Columbia University (Education). He is married with two grown children and lives in Freeport, Maine.

Literacy for Liberation: PCTELA ‘25 Behind Us, and the Future of our Classrooms Ahead by Hannah Lewis and Sarah Wilt

 Literacy for Liberation: PCTELA ‘25 Behind Us, and the Future of our Classrooms Ahead

by Hannah Lewis and Sarah Wilt

This post celebrates Mx. Sarah Wilt and Ms. Hannah Lewis’s experiences co-chairing the 2025 PCTELA conference in October, and is co-written by the two of us.

Collaborating on the PCTELA '25 conference was a new experience for us, but we agreed to the task in part because we value and appreciate one another’s approaches to our work, but in larger part because we felt an imperative: to address the inequities in PA classrooms that the Covid-19 pandemic had made visible, exacerbated, and created the opportunity to address, but which instead had gone largely ignored.

As the year of planning went on and threats to literacy education proliferated, we wanted to organize our conference in a way that would empower educators–help us to see the urgency of the work we do. We needed to reclaim literacy as a liberatory force, and ensure our pedagogy aligned with that goal. So we came up with the conference theme: Literacy for Liberation.

From the featured speakers who shared their unique and diverse perspectives with us to the classroom teachers who showed up with strategies to uplift student voices, our community of educators came through. This conference was an incredible opportunity to think together as a community about what it means to harness the liberatory power of literacy in Pennsylvania classrooms in 2025 and moving forward.

We’d like to highlight a few of the exemplary presentations for members who could not attend.

Featured Speakers

Featured speakers included youth librarian and mental health advocate Caiden Feldmiller, whose insights into the needs of LGBTQ+ teens and those with mental illnesses provided thought-provoking guidance that all of us can use to better handle sensitive topics in our classrooms and ensure each and every student we teach is seen and has a space to be their authentic selves. Find out more about his work at the Sewickley teen library here.

Saturday, former NCTE president Alfredo Luján started our day with his own story of his ongoing literacy liberation–you can find his take-aways later in this post.

Finally, professor of education and advocate for sex education and bodily literacy Dr. Stephanie Jones reminded us of the imperative to create space for students to learn about their bodies and how they exist in the world. With a prolific career and a significant online presence, it may be difficult to know where to start exploring her work, but this provocative podcast episode provides a way in for those who missed her talk, and introduces the exciting liberatory practice of a “read in” for a book challenged for its LGBTQ-supportive content.

In addition to our featured speakers, we want to highlight a few other conference attendees, but we invite you to review the full program to see all of the great work that was showcased.

First-Time Presenters

We want to share work from presenters new to NCTE affiliate conferences, but whose participation in PCTELA and other NCTE affiliate events we hope to see continue in years to come, including at NCTE in Philadelphia in 2026.

Dr. Jim Gerencser of Dickinson College’s Digital Resource Center for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School provides primary sources and free teacher resources that we can use to educate ourselves and our students about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the widespread assimilationist mission of boarding schools for Indigenous children in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Americas.

While his colleague, Dr. Amanda Cheromiah, was unable to attend, her work with the college’s Center for the Future of Native Peoples deserves mention, too. We invite you to explore the myriad resources and initiatives the Center makes available.

Dr. Karen Detlefsen of the University of Pennsylvania Project for Philosophy for the Young, along with colleague Dr. Dustin Webster and veteran Philadelphia educators Kathryn Sundeen and Francesca Canterini shared resources to promote reasoned ethical discourse in the classroom. Their work focused on Ethics Bowl events, but the resources they shared, including the National Ethics Bowl Case Library, are excellent tools for use in middle- and high school classrooms. In fact, Hannah’s already used one of the cases in her A.P. Seminar classroom this year, and her students loved it!

WPCTE members who double as WPWP teaching fellows, with WPWP director Dr. Khirsten Scott. Left to right: Heather Bixler, Khirsten Scott, Hannah Lewis, Carol Frow, and Katie Katkich.

WPCTE Members

And we’d love to acknowledge the work of WPCTE members below:

WPCTE Executive Director Carol Frow presented “Do You Want to Learn about Upstanders or Be One? Teaching Holocaust Literature to Create Student Upstanders,” highlighting how discussions around literature can inform students’ attitudes to their agency when others are treated in ways they know to be wrong.

WPCTE Slam Poetry Coordinator Katie Katkich presented “Amplifying Student Voices Through Slam and Spoken Word Poetry: Culturally Sustaining and Socially Engaged Learning in the ELA Classroom.” Check out her related work on the WPCTE’s Poetry Slam page.

WPWP teaching fellow Heather Bixler presented “Family Matters: Adapting Our Literature and Lessons for Adoptive and Foster Families,” reminding us that youth in foster care or who have been adopted deserve to learn in supportive classrooms.

Featured speaker and former NCTE president Alfredo Luján and WPCTE Vice-President Hannah Lewis co-presented “Free(ly) Writing the Word and the World,” exploring the ways we can disrupt traditional attitudes towards literacy in our classrooms and celebrate our students’ literacies (plural), including in free writes and sustained multimodal projects.

We’ll leave the last word on the experience to Alfredo Luján, who expresses the take-aways we’d hoped all our members would internalize, and leaves us with a call to action that we hope to echo and amplify:

This literacy event has helped me realize what my daughter Amanda, an ASL interpreter, said to me one day when I was espousing Vygotsky’s theory on language acquisition. “Language is never acquired. It is always being developed.” Each of us continues to develop liberation through literacy, as do our students. Our literacy is everything under our hat, the air and things around us, plus what we listen to, what we read and write, what we say and do, our home languages and cultures – our heritage. Our ability and each student’s ability to claim our, her, his, their own name and identity through being, reading, writing, and listening is emancipation from assimilation. The Secretary of Education and the Federal Administration should embrace and respect multi-cultural/multi-lingual literacy in current America.

Dear literacy educators, grow a thick skin to repel the bureaucracy. Resist. As you help liberate your students through their literacies, your way to heaven is being paved.

Clunky to Clever: AI's Journey from Clippy to Classroom Chatbots by Jason Kosmiski

Clunky to Clever: AI's Journey from Clippy to Classroom Chatbots

by Jason Kosmiski, M.Ed.

This article was written with contributions from Jill Skala, Teacher of English, Greater Latrobe Senior High School.

The Clippy Calamity: When AI Was the Annoying Office Guest

The first chatbot that I ever encountered was named Clippy. Remember typing in Microsoft Word and being annoyed by an animated paper clip asking, "It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?" Clippy first came packaged with Microsoft Office 97. It was one of the first AI assistants to utilize natural language processing and context to support users. Users hated Clippy. He popped up and got in your way while you were typing. Users called the chatbot annoying, intrusive, irrelevant, and obvious. Despite Microsoft spending millions of dollars on user interface research, Clippy still became an example of bad human-computer interaction. In 2010, TIME Magazine even named Clippy one of the 50 Worst Inventions. User complaints grew so intense that in 2001, Microsoft shipped Office XP with Clippy disabled by default. He made a final appearance in Office 2003. Then, in 2007, Office 2007 was released with no Office Assistant at all. Clippy was relegated to being a punchline – a nostalgic pop culture joke.

Cassidy, Benjamin. (2022, August 23). The Twisted Life of Clippy. Seattle Met. https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2022/08/origin-story-of-clippy-the-microsoft-office-assistant

ChatGPT Unleashed: The AI That Flipped the Script (and Scared the Teachers)

Two decades later, however, the AI assistant would re-emerge — this time, not as a cartoonish helper, but as a powerful generative tool capable of reshaping entire industries, not just word processing. In 2022, education would involuntarily evolve thanks to a chatbot, not unlike Clippy. To much fanfare, artificial intelligence start-up, OpenAI, publicly launched its AI platform on November 30, 2022. ChatGPT was an AI-powered chatbot using GPT-3.5, a Large Language Model (LLM), to mimic human-like conversations via natural language processing. As more educators became aware of this new technology, a sense of fear gripped them, especially English & language arts teachers. This thing could write essays – accurately – with quotations from the source material – and MLA documentation. ELA was dead – and ChatGPT killed it! It was true; during one of my first sessions using AI, I prompted the chatbot to generate an essay on the symbolism found in J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” which it did in about 30 seconds. It generated the essay I tasked it to – complete with evidence and documentation. Was this the first step in the obsolescence of teachers? This would completely destroy critical thinking skills! Districts immediately responded by discouraging AI use by their students and rushing to ban student access to all artificial intelligence platforms.

I was apprehensive about AI, too – at first. It took me three years actively using ChatGPT and Google’s Bard (later Gemini) in my classroom to understand the power of artificial Intelligence as an assistant for educators – a smarter, better, and more well-rounded Clippy. During this time, I have used AI to generate writing prompts, brainstorm lesson ideas, draft sensitive parent letters, and build rubrics. I discovered that these tools weren’t replacing me – they were actually supporting me in ways that made my teaching sharper and more efficient.

"O Romeo, Bot!": 9th Graders Get Chatty with the Bard

We read Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet in my 9th-grade class. Every year, it is a struggle to make a connection between Gen Z and text that was written over 400 years ago in iambic pentameter. I want my students to understand Shakespeare as a human being – the man behind the legend. I dug out my A&E Biography DVD from my cabinet and showed it to my classes. It did little to dispel the mythic stature of William Shakespeare – in many ways, the video built him up even more. I developed a way to meld cutting-edge AI technology with a man who wrote over 400 years ago as a way to humanize him for my students. I introduced a custom AI chatbot that role-played as William Shakespeare himself.

I already had some experience building chatbots in Magic School AI. Located on the Magic Student side of the platform, this feature lets students “chat” with any “historical figure, author, or fictional character” in a controlled, teacher-monitored environment.

Magic School allows educators to build student rooms and deploy these AI tools in a very controlled environment. A dashboard lets teachers monitor usage, the AI will flag inappropriate interactions, and generate activity summaries that highlight tool use, student behavior, strengths, interests, and areas for growth. The platform also includes the ability to activate and deactivate access to these rooms to ensure security. Magic School is also FERPA and COPPA compliant and emphasizes student privacy by avoiding the collection of personal data.

Leveraging the controlled environment and customizable tools offered by Magic School, I was able to implement a specific learning experience centered around a customized AI chatbot housed within a virtual student room. Students were encouraged to “interview” William Shakespeare “himself” in chatbot form. They were tasked with creating five questions about his life, his writing process, the motivations of his characters, and the meaning behind famous lines. Once the students wrote their questions, they “chatted” with the “Bard bot,” recording its responses. Suddenly, Shakespeare wasn’t just a mythic Elizabethan icon – he was a living voice, responding in real time to their curiosity with wit, insight, and Elizabethan flair. Lastly, students wrote reflections about their experience with the chatbot.

Kosmiski, Jason M. (2025, March 19). A Chat with William Shakespeare Lesson Plan. Google Classroom.  

These written reflections revealed just how deeply the chatbot experience shaped their understanding of Shakespeare – not just as a playwright, but as a real person. One student admitted, “I didn’t know much about Shakespeare in the first place, but this definitely helped me learn more about him.” They were surprised to discover how actual historical events, human nature, and even Queen Elizabeth I influenced his work. Another student was intrigued by how Shakespeare’s plays had to appeal to diverse audiences, writing, “I didn’t realize that so much had to be taken into account… so that they could be enjoyed by all.” Both students found the chatbot experience more “entertaining and specific” than traditional methods of learning – like passively watching the A&E video. The most telling comment came from the first student, who concluded, “After this, I don’t think I have any more questions for or about Shakespeare – I definitely have a better understanding about him now.” Allowing students to directly engage with William Shakespeare through AI made the experience of learning about his background more memorable and exciting than traditional approaches had ever achieved – at least for some of my students.

The Mid-Winter Slump: From Bard to Bored

While the Shakespeare chatbot initially sparked student engagement and a richer understanding of his life, this success gradually gave way to a noticeable decline in enthusiasm during the long stretch from New Year’s Day to Easter. I had been pushing the limits of my creativity, trying to develop new and exciting learning experiences in my classroom, while my students sighed and rolled their eyes at everything I did. In frustration, I posted all the cool things I had been doing for my Facebook friends, many of whom are teachers, to appreciate instead.

Kosmiski, Jason M. (2025, March 21). Facebook post. Facebook

Across the Teacher-Verse: Sharing AI Strategies with a Colleague

Not long after my post appeared on Facebook, I received a Facebook message from a friend, former Saint Vincent College classmate, and colleague, Jill Skala, who teaches 9th-grade English at Greater Latrobe Senior High School. She was looking for a way to inject some AI into one of her lessons, one that would be observed for her yearly evaluation. I shared my experiences with the chatbot with Jill. She was teaching To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Jill developed a lesson where students “talked” to the main characters: Scout, Jem, and Atticus, asking them ten open-ended questions about the novel (events that have happened, other characters to ask about, thoughts about the setting, etc.), plus supplementary follow-up questions. Her students also wrote a reflection paragraph at the end of the experience.

Skala, Jill. (March 2025). To Kill a Mockingbird Character Chatbot Form. Click to view full size image.

Jill’s students responded to the character chatbot activity with enthusiasm and insight about the experience. Many reflected that it helped them connect on a personal level with Scout, Jem, and Atticus. Students described the experience as “fun,” “cool,” and “honestly really fun.” One student noted, “It made the characters so much more personable, and really added to my understanding of the story,” while another shared, “I feel more connected to Atticus, almost as if he taught me in a nearly fatherly way.” Several students discovered how the AI responses revealed subtle traits in the characters that they hadn’t noticed before, like Scout’s attention to detail or Jem’s quiet empathy. A few even wrote that the chatbot felt surprisingly human: “I was surprised… it was really like talking to a real person.” The experience even changed how students viewed the book itself – one student even wrote that the activity helped them see the novel in “a new way, rather than a dark, gloomy book.” As in my experience, Jill’s students also found that the AI (often portrayed in the media as a cold, calculating, murderbot) brought human warmth, personality, and connection to characters that have only existed on pages in a book.

From Pesky Pop-Up to Powerful Pedagogy: The Evolution of the Chatbot

From the days of awkward Clippy ungraciously interrupting our workflow with unsolicited advice, chatbots have evolved by leaps and bounds. Today’s sophisticated AI can do far more than offer clumsy letter-writing tips as we type. This constant evolution mirrors the timeless wisdom of Jedi Master Yoda. In Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda wisely tells Luke, “Always in motion is the future.” The same can be said for teaching English language arts. Unlike Clippy – who was often swatted away with a click – today’s AI tools empower teachers to stay relevant and engage students in fresh, dynamic ways.

Author Bio

Jason M. Kosmiski is a seasoned English teacher with over 25 years of experience. He recently earned his M.Ed. in Educational Technology and Online Instruction from Penn West University. He's an expert in Google Classroom and a Magic School AI Pioneer. A member of PAECT and a Keystone Technology Innovator, he's passionate about leveraging AI in education. He's presented on AI at various professional development sessions and has used it extensively in his classroom to enhance teaching and save time.

Falling in Love…with Reading: Bringing Readers of All Ages Back to What They Love by Danielle Thompson

Falling in Love…with Reading: Bringing Readers of All Ages Back to What They Love

by Danielle Thompson

Confetti flashes across my screen, Goodreads displays 50/50 for my 2024 Reading Challenge. Completing this challenge is an accomplishment I should be proud of, since it’s only May and I  have finished my goal. I check my friends on Goodreads and denote their progress… almost everyone has 100+ books so far; instantly my sails deflate. 

It’s not a competition, but I have the same reaction to reading as playing a game of bowling; I have to get at least one hundred points, or I feel like I failed myself. Due to my own intrinsic motivation, I smile, square my shoulders, and go browse my TBR (To Be Read) pile for what’s next on the menu.  

A friend recently asked me to reflect on my journey as a reader, and I hadn’t really given it much thought other than I read WAY more now that I used to. Even as I write this, I stare at the shelves now ornately decorated in my room of some timeless tales that I have found solace in. Three years ago none of these tomes called my house their home; reading was the least of my worries or interests.  

During and immediately following the pandemic I was struggling, like the majority of society, with ways to bide my time. Being able to read filled the void of losing several parts of my life in 2020. I grieved for things that wouldn’t happen, missed opportunities, and struggling friendships.  Life has a funny way of distracting us from the things we love most because of a terribly valuable word…time. Once I had time sequestered and waiting for me, I threw myself into my hobbies, one of which being reading, and enjoyed re-kindle-ing new and old parts of myself.  

How to Find Time to Read:

I would venture to say around middle school and high school I fell out of love with reading, not because I didn’t have the opportunity, but because I didn’t have the time. Being a high achieving student, juggling sports, and trying to have a social life took a toll on my reading journey. I am thankful that I read some outstanding novels during those years that kept the flame stoked, some of which were in the curriculum while others were recommended by my knowledgeable teachers:  

• The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton 
• Animal Farm by George Orwell 
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd 
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barba Kingsolver 

When we get beyond elementary school, we lose the time built into our day to read “for fun”. As educators we know that students leaving primary school are no longer learning to read but are instead reading to learn. The academic demand of reading often smothers the joy we experience as readers. Some novels, like those I mentioned above, are able to bridge the gap between amazement and assessment; however this isn’t always the case. Many schools have initiatives in place to promote independent reading, such as National Reading Day (January 23rd), Read Across America Day (March 2nd), Drop Everything and Read Day (D.E.A.R, April 12th), and Freedom to Read Day (October 19th). These initiatives and incentives are effective in small spurts but generally do not encourage perseverance and priority for reading.  

Moving on in a student’s life, the struggle to find time to read only becomes more dire. Ushering into high school and college, students are inundated with texts they have to read, annotate, comprehend, and oftentimes memorize in order to find success. Academic literacy, while vital, does not produce the desired effect that reading for enjoyment does. In many cases students feel guilty reading something they enjoy when they could be studying, re-reading an assigned text, or working. As those students transition into adulthood, many people do not have time or the funds to do something as trivial as read.  How do we as a society prioritize reading and not kill the love of it? 

How to Read on a Budget:

A startling realization occurred to me several months ago when I made the connection that my Netflix was cheaper than my Kindle Unlimited. Reading a book, regardless of the format, takes a great deal of brain power and comprehension. Personally, regardless of the genre, reading calms my mind and settles my nerves. I enjoy the clarity of opening a book and being pulled from my present life to exist in something entirely else within the pages. That luxury is not for everyone, but if it is, I have compiled a list or reading sources that help maximize your book budget.  

Ways to read on a budget:

• Local Library Card 
• Libby (Digital Library Access for Digital Books and Audio Books) 
• Amazon Products (often in a subscription) Audible and KindleUnlimited 
• WEBTOON (Graphic Novel/Comic Strips for various ages) 
• Libro.FM (Teachers can keep several titles each month free) 
• Little Free Library (registered libraries can be located on the site)
• Public Library Book Sales 

How to Model a “Love for Reading”:

Additionally, in order to break this trend where reading is a chore and encourage people, regardless of age, to want to read again, we need to normalize falling in love with books and essentially romanticize reading as a daily activity.  

As an educator I become so excited when I see my students carrying books in the hallway; almost always we end up having a chat about the plot, and I ask them to give me a synopsis of what they have read so far or predictions for the future. Other times, I have read the book already and I check in from time to time just to see if they are making sense of the story. Something as easy as asking about a book can really make someone's day. Simultaneously, a conversation about a non-academic text helps improve so many foundational skills for students including: summarizing, recall, analysis, etc.  

Often my students don’t initially get excited about reading. However, texts from authors like Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven”, have helped improve some perspectives on literature. Despite the level of difficulty of the text, we explore gothic writing and the macabre. In class we decorate to showcase some of the themes, simultaneously this fits with our study of the Salem Witch Trials and Halloween. While not every student initially invests in the story, by the end they are making connections to modern day works like Netflix’s Wednesday, rewriting parts of the story, and asking for similar story recommendations.   

Reading has been further romanticized with the use of popular social media apps including Tik-Tok and Instagram. Particularly “Booktok” has exploded with popularity in the past few years as a sub-community for books and literature. The idea of a “Blind Date with a Book” where readers can choose a genre and be surprised with a random book and various goodies (book marks, scents, annotation materials, coffee/hot chocolate, book merch, and more) have also increased as a way for readers and non-readers to dive into a story they might not normally choose. These “blind dates” are a great idea for adults and kids for any special occasion, or just because, especially when you don’t know what to read, or where to start. Who knows, you might just end up falling in love with reading again!

Ultimately, knowing your students and having a vast classroom library or school library will help encourage school age kids to read more. Representation is also a critical piece of a good library with cultural representation, multiple levels of reading (offer works a few grades above or below to meet everyone's needs), and choice of format. Some textbook and curriculum companies offer an E-Reading library for teacher and student benefit alike.  

Ironically, several of the stories I love the most are actually characterized as YA (Young Adult) or Children’s Literature. I teach in a middle school, and these are some of my favorite authors and series to kickstart a young adult’s reading journey: 

• The Inheritance Games Series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes (Mystery/ Thriller) 
• The Wings of Fire Series by Tui T. Sutherland (Adventure/Dragons) 
• The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins (Dystopian/ Post-Apocalyptic Fiction) 
• Natasha Preston’s Young Adult (Psychological Thrillers/Murder Mystery) 
• Arc of a Scythe Trilogy by Neal Schustermann (Dystopian Fiction) 
• They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera (LGBT)  
• The Cursebreaker Series by Brigid Kemmerer (Romance/ Fantasy) 
• Powerless Trilogy by Lauren Roberts (Dystopian/Fantasy) 
• Shadow and Bone Trilogy (The Grishaverse) by Leigh Bardugo (Epic  Fantasy) 

Apps for tracking your reading progress, finding reviews,  connecting with readers, etc.: 

• GoodReads
• Fable
• Storygraph
• Libby

While my shift back to reading was more circumstantial than planned, I encourage anyone who is thinking about picking up a book to start in a manageable way. It does not have to take a great deal of time for teachers or students to make a habit of reading daily. My suggestion, start by reading for 15 minutes a night or use a page or chapter requirement (the more you read or enjoy a story you will definitely move past this). You can gamify reading by participating in a “challenge” or trying to keep a reading “streak”, which can be done on your own or with friends/family. For example, simply holding everyone accountable to 15 minutes of silent reading post dinner could help improve literacy. Imagine the example parents and educators could set by putting down their devices and turning off all of the noise that consumes our existence every day in favor of a book. 

Whether you are finding joy in reading for pleasure, trying to accomplish a quantifiable reading goal, participating in a reading challenge, finding joy in a community book club, listening to an audiobook on your drive to to work, or replacing social media scrolling with digital graphic novels, “Welcome back to falling in love with reading!”

Author’s Bio: 

Danielle Thompson is the Social Media Coordinator of WPCTE. Her role includes creating a majority of the content displayed on the WPCTE Facebook and X accounts. In 2020 Danielle completed her Bachelors of Science in Secondary Education at California University of Pennsylvania, in addition to also completing her M.Ed. in Special Education in 2021 at the university. She has been teaching for six years, mainly as a Middle School Integrated Language Arts teacher at Elizabeth Forward Middle School. At Elizabeth Forward Danielle co-sponsors the school Newsletter and is the 8th grade student council sponsor. Her favorite thing about teaching is seeing students take ownership of their learning and invest in their own educational opportunities. She encourages her students to share their creativity through written forms, read extensively, and always ask questions!

Just Right or Just Write? Separating Grammar from Content to Inspire Students’ Love for Writing by Emily Malovich

Just Right or Just Write? Separating Grammar from Content to Inspire Students’ Love for Writing 

by Emily Malovich

If there is one thing I vividly remember about writing in school, it’s the red pen. Pages and pages of handwritten or typed work, all of it decorated with red ink to point out the missing comma, the dangling modifier, the unclear antecedent. In classes with one of my favorite college professors, it was a badge of honor to receive a paper back with an entire page free from corrections.

As a student who loved writing, I saw this feedback as an opportunity to grow as a writer. It didn’t take long into my teaching career for me to realize that most of my tenth grade students did not feel the same way. Over time, I began to understand the unintended message I was sending with my red pen, and later, with my Google Classroom comments: your ideas don’t matter if you can’t express them with perfect grammar.

Research about authentic writing instruction supports this perspective: students are more engaged with writing when they feel that expression is valued over conventions. When our feedback predominantly consists of grammatical corrections, it signals that we value mechanics more than our students’ ideas. This introduces a dilemma for writing teachers. We might accept that overemphasizing grammar makes writing less authentic, but we also know that our students need to write clearly and correctly so that others will understand their ideas and take them seriously. How do we strike a balance?

This year, I experimented with strategies to separate grammar assessment from content assessment. Here are some of the methods that I used to make writing experiences more authentic without neglecting grammar instruction:

The Writing Non-Negotiables List

Inspired by this blog post from Dave Stuart, Jr., during the first week of school, I created a “Writing Non-Negotiables List” with my students. The list functions as a grammatical minimum bar for students’ writing. Any submissions that do not meet that bar will be returned without a grade until students make corrections. The list establishes the minimum writing expectations that are acceptable in my class.

Importantly, the list must be generated based on the writing abilities and needs of the students in your class. While I review my students’ first writing task, I identify about five frequent errors that are within their capacity to fix. These are grammatical concepts that they know, but just tend to ignore when they write. The next day, we work together to populate our list and correct mistakes in anonymous student samples. I post the list for students to reference and update it as they progress. At the beginning of tenth grade, our list looked like this:

On my writing rubrics, the criteria for Mechanics reads simply, “There are no errors from the Writing Non-Negotiables list.” If I see these errors, I return the submission so the writer can make corrections and resubmit. With this approach, students know that when I give feedback on their writing, it’s about their ideas and expression, not grammatical perfection. There is a concrete, accessible list of errors for them to correct during proofreading rather than an endless list of possible mistakes to worry about.

However, while the Writing Non-Negotiables List might increase the authenticity of the writing experience and create a very basic level of quality control, it doesn’t really help my students become more grammatically correct writers. To this end, I implement a second strategy.

Writing in Context Quizzes

During each major writing assessment, I assign a Writing in Context Quiz. These quizzes ask students to demonstrate skills from recent grammar units within the writing task. Writing in Context quizzes don’t appear on the rubric and are entered as a completely separate grade. 

I introduce the Writing in Context Quiz early in the writing process, but students have permission to completely ignore it while writing their draft. Then, during the editing process, we revisit the task. Students who completed the quiz tasks as they drafted simply add comments or other annotations to show where they demonstrated the skill; students who needed to focus on their content during drafting can edit their work to complete each task. This strategy challenges students to stretch their abilities and take grammatical risks with their writing, but within a targeted, supported context.

A Work in Progress

As someone whose education took place in the era of the ubiquitous red pen, it has been a process for me to let go of extensive grammatical corrections. I’m still searching for innovative ways to strike a balance between authenticity and mechanics (next year’s experiment: grammar journals!). But despite the effort and trial and error process, I have experienced how separating grammar from content evaluation makes writing more accessible and enjoyable for my students. During the 2024-2025 school year, my students expressed that they felt less like they would be "caught" making a mistake and more capable of exploring their ideas in their writing. For me, that is reason enough to surrender my metaphorical red pen and try a new approach.

Author Bio:

Emily Malovich (she/her) is the new WPCTE blog coordinator. She teaches sophomore English and AP Literature at Sharpsville Area High School in Mercer County. Currently, she is pursuing her D.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction at IUP. Outside of teaching, her hobbies include the “three B’s”: books, birding, and sourdough bread. Contact her at emalovich@sasdpride.org.

PowerPoints to Purpose: Pioneering AI with Pedagogical Purpose by Jason M. Kosmiski

 PowerPoints to Purpose: Pioneering AI with Pedagogical Purpose
by Jason M. Kosmiski, M.Ed.

Back in My Day: We Thought PowerPoint Was High-Tech

I began my teaching career in 1998, long before educational technology was a thing – when having a computer lab was a luxury and AI was more associated with Terminator 2 than classrooms. Back then, integrating technology often meant typing papers in Microsoft Word or having students create a PowerPoint presentation, which rarely enhanced student understanding in meaningful ways. These early attempts were more about adding technology as an afterthought than using it with purpose. Today, the idea of “intentional use” has become a common buzzword in education, but it really does carry weight when it is clearly defined. Simply assigning tech-based projects, like PowerPoints, didn’t achieve that; students reorganized existing information without deepening their comprehension. Making a presentation about Abraham Lincoln, for instance, didn’t further students’ understanding of Abraham Lincoln beyond what the textbook already said.

The Great Handbag Heist: Teaching Character Through Clutter

At Cranberry High School (Venango County), we get to choose the lesson for our yearly state evaluation. With a new, younger admin team – and me turning 50 – I felt like I had something to prove, especially to my evaluator, our new assistant principal. After all, I did start teaching back when Will Smith was still “Gettin’ Jiggy wit It.”

One of my favorite lessons was developed in conjunction with a block student from Clarion University a few years back. She told me about a creative writing exercise one of her classmates designed for a class, where the prompt included items from a purse. The writing exercise consisted of telling a story about a fictional character using the items from the purse. I was teaching characterization at the time and thought that, with modifications, this prompt could effectively be used to teach indirect characterization to 9th graders. 

I ransacked my basement for items: broken glasses, an old cell phone, a circuit board from an old PlayStation, among other things. I grabbed an old purse from my wife’s stash and went into school early. I pulled a student desk to the front of the room and laid out the purse and all five of the items I pilfered from the junk in my basement. I found an article online called “What the Inside of Your Purse Says About You,” by Sam Escobar, and added it to the assignment. I also developed a Google Form where students could create a character profile. I told my students that this “lost purse” was discovered. The assignment:  describe a character who would have these items in his/her purse. Students were permitted to work in groups and were encouraged to go up to the desk and look at the physical items displayed there. Group discussions during this project are always interesting, and students really get into developing their characters using indirect characterization and the random items I choose to display.

The Lost Purse Project: five items discovered in the “lost purse.” Groups of students use these items along with methods of indirect characterization to develop their own fictional characters. 

 

Lost Purse 2.0: Leveling Up Character Creation with AI

I have been actively using artificial intelligence in my classroom since 2023, but I haven’t integrated it directly into lessons that would allow students to use it. After much thought, I decided to add an AI component to this year’s version of the “Lost Purse” assignment. I used a very targeted approach to dip my toe into the proverbial waters of AI in the classroom. 

There was no way that I was going to allow students unfettered access to artificial intelligence in my classroom. Besides, most AI companies have policies that state that users must be 18 or older to use their products. Artificial Intelligence is also subject to the same old pedagogical missteps of using technology for the sake of the technology, and not adding to student learning. I wanted my use of AI to be “intentional.” I wanted to use AI as a vital part of the assignment, not as a novelty divorced from the objectives of the lesson. I didn’t want a PowerPoint assignment for the sake of “using technology” in my class.

I was familiar with Magic School AI and knew it was compliant with COPPA, GDPR, SOC 2, FERPA, and state privacy laws. The platform has a feature that allows educators to customize AI tools for students and deploy them in a very controlled environment called “student rooms.” My initial idea for this year’s lesson was to allow students to use their character information to train their own, unique chatbots who would take on the personas of their fictional characters. Because of the educational nature of Magic School AI, this was not possible. They weren’t able to ask their chatbots personal questions, and I received alerts that students were misusing the platform in the teacher dashboard. 

Fail Forward: When the Chatbot Chat Fell Flat

That iteration of AI integration failed; I needed to pivot (the fancy buzzword is “fail forward”). I piloted this activity in my sixth-period academic English class (the one that was being observed by the assistant principal for my evaluation), but I had four more sections of English to introduce this lesson to the next day. Magic School AI also contains an AI image generator in partnership with Adobe Express. Instead of a chatbot, I created a Magic School room where students could use this image generator to produce portraits of the characters they created during the assignment. 

Student Example: Ninth-grade students used the image generator tool in Magic School AI to supplement their character profiles by creating photorealistic portraits of the characters they thought up in the “Lost Purse” project. 

Student's Character Sketch: Stephanie Moon is a very recognizable person but her skill of stealth makes her seem invisible. She has red hair and a face full of freckles. She always wears her classic gold hoops. If you want to be her friend, good luck, because she is very rude and distant. When she was a kid, she was orphaned because her parents died in an electrical fire. She was adopted by her parents. As she got older, she was always quiet and had a knack for computer things. She was so good she was offered a job as a hacker. To keep this from her parents she said she wanted to be a yoga instructor at her friends studio. They strongly resent her for this. By day, she is a yoga instructor, by night, she is a hacker that protects the world from an organization called "THE LETTERS". She lost her purse after a mission. She purposely left it so hopefully another hacker would find it, follow the clues, find Stephanie, and help her stop LETTERS.

So, AI Art – Hot or Not? Students Spill the Tea

I gave my student an opportunity to evaluate the Magic School’s application of the image generator tool through a survey I conducted after the assignment was completed. Eighty-four students out of ninety took part in the survey. Overall, 69.1% of the students who used the Magic School student room and the image generation tool rated these tools as easy to use and understand (see Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Ease of Use

69.1% of the students surveyed felt that using the Magic School AI image generator tool and student rooms were very easy.

Figure 2: Ease of Use Challenges

While 17.8% of students found Magic School’s execution of their image generation tool difficult to navigate, 34.5% didn’t experience any challenges while utilizing the AI tool.

    My goal in designing this AI experience was to integrate it as an important part of the assignment – to use the AI “intentionally.” I asked students if using the image generator helped them to visualize and develop their characters better. The results here were mixed. 45.2% of the students stated that the AI image of their character made them feel more real. On the other hand, 44% said that they already had a preconceived idea of what their character looked like in their heads, and using the AI only somewhat influenced the design of their characters. Furthermore, 10.7% felt that using the AI had absolutely no influence on their character design at all (see Fig. 3). 

Figure 3: The Influence of AI Images on Character Design

The percentage of students who felt that the image generator had an impact on the design of their characters was almost equal to those who felt satisfied with the preconceived character concepts they envisioned.

Do I consider this experiment a failure? Not at all. I consider this attempt at intentional AI integration a BETA test. I actually began this learning experience trying to incorporate an AI chatbot into the assignment, but ended up with a lesson in AI image generation. I learned several things, some unrelated to my English class, and a lesson in characterization. The experience taught me more about my students and their experience with using AI. As noted in Fig. 2 above, 40.5% of the students said that their initial prompt didn’t generate the results that they intended, causing them to have to tweak their prompts and eventually run out of the free credits they were initially provided (One of the drawbacks to using the “freemium” version of Magic School; unfortunately, students were only able to revise their image prompts ten times before they ran out of “credits.”). One student noted, “Maybe it [the image generator] could give you a better description of what you are looking for when you are generating your AI.” Another student wished, “For the AI to be able to understand the prompts better, so it takes less time to find an image.” These challenges stem from a lack of experience writing prompts for AI, not any deficiency on the part of the AI. I feel like there is another lesson somewhere in these findings. One that would familiarize students with the basics of effective AI prompting. A lesson I would incorporate before setting off to use AI in my classroom for the first time.   

The Final Byte: What I Learned About AI and Imagination

My early use of AI in the classroom, like those “groundbreaking” PowerPoint lessons of the past, showed that having tech isn’t the same as using it well. The Magic School image generator hinted at AI’s potential, but nearly half the students still preferred their own mental images – proof that AI won’t completely kill creativity just yet. This experience highlights the need for thoughtful tech use. Moving forward, we must teach students how to prompt effectively and understand AI’s limits – like bias and hallucinations – so it truly enhances learning, rather than becoming another flashy tool we use without purpose. Otherwise, we risk merely going through the motions, much like those early PowerPoint days, without truly leveling up our pedagogical practices.

Author Bio: Jason M. Kosmiski is a seasoned English teacher with over 25 years of experience. He recently earned his M.Ed. in Educational Technology and Online Instruction from Penn West University. He's an expert in Google Classroom and a Magic School AI Pioneer. A member of PAECT and a Keystone Technology Innovator, he's passionate about leveraging AI in education. He's presented on AI at various professional development sessions and has used it extensively in his classroom to enhance teaching and save time.