New Literacies Learning (from 4/14)

My ideas surrounding both literacy and technology have greatly evolved throughout this course. Throughout my collegiate classes, I can recall briefly discussing literacy as it applies to education and cirriculum within schools. However, throughout this course my understandings of just how in depth the term literacy really is has drastically changed. Before this course, I had little idea as to how involved the term literacy itself was, let alone all the forms and types literacy comes in! In choosing a new literacy, emotional literacy, I was able to research and expand my understandings as to what new literacies are and specifically emotional literacy. I feel that this project has made me realize more clearly the importance as a future teacher including instruction in literacy in multiple forms. Between emotional literacy, cultural literacy, visual literacy, and social literacy; there are a lot of aspects surrounding instruction we as teachers must keep in mind. I have learned that literacy instruction does not need to be limited to the simple, monotonous English instruction I can recall, but an encompassing of literacy instruction through various technologies in which students can discover and explore their individual identities.
The new technologies aspect of this project was also very educational and benefical in working with. Before this course, I definately considered myself to be a digital immigrant in that I was fairly unfamiliar with most technology. Beyond cell phones, email, and google, my technology experiences have been limited. This project allowed me to see just how many ways new forms of technology can be incorporated in all forms of classroom education. Through our use of the smart board in class, and the day in class that we explored the different technologies, I realized just how many ways teachers can utilize such technology as a resource to promote students learning in all forms.
I truly learned a lot in this project about both my new literacy and technology to ways in which I can modernize and incorporate these new ideas and technologies to create a more effective learning environment for my students.

My Learning of New Literacy and New Technology...

Since the beginning of class, my knowledge and conception of literacy has changed drastically! At the start of the semester, I thought of literacy as the basic "reading and writing" kind of thing. Now, however, I see that there are many different branches of literacies, including emotional, visual, print, social, environmental, and many more. Within these literacies, there is a common thread-- a full understanding of the specific topic is important towards becoming an expert at the literacy. There are so many important aspects of all of these literacies that, in the end, come together to make a person's overall knowledge of the world around them whole. The technology I used informed me that I am not as mush of a digital native as I thought I was! Technology expands by the day, and there is no way to keep up with it 100% of the time. I think it is important as future teachers to at least play around with some of these technologies in order to expose our future students to it as well. My first choice of new technology to explore was iMovie, a program on a Mac computer, which I have played with before. However, it was an older version that I was familiar with. I found the new update version to be more complicated and unfamiliar and it was very frustrating. I still plan on playing with this program to re-familiarize myself with it so that I can use it still in the future. The technology I ended up using was a Weebly (website). It was a lot of fun to explore this technology, because I have never made a website before! I really enjoyed using Weebly.com as my host site because the site guided me through working on my site. I was able to insert web pages and pictures and I learned how to make sub-pages on a main page. This project has showed me that with Language Arts, it is important to include other extra factors into the teaching. Nowadays, it is not enough to read a story and have students write a sentence about why they liked it--there are so many more meaningful ways to get so much more out of the activities that you do in your classroom! Have your students EXPLORE the authors by making websites or slideshows or scrapblogs. This way the student will be more engaged and will actually LEARN from their own projects, and expand their technological literacy.
To provide "effective literacy instruction" means different things. First off, you have to be aware of the types of learners in your classroom--this means having options. There must be multiple options for your students to choose from in order to engage their thinking and give all the learners a fair opportunity in the classroom. Using a Weebly made me realize that if I had more assignments/projects assigned that I was allowed to make a website INSTEAD of writing a 3-5 page paper on, I would learn a lot more and not DREAD doing the assignment. Yes, school is for learning, but I believe that the best learning is done when you are engaged in MORE than just the information-- you are engaged in the assignment as a WHOLE.
If my first graders were going to be using my technology, which I don't think they really would since they are in first grade, I think that they would have to first become more computer literate. They have had experience in the computer lab, but just with playing computer games and not really navigating the web. They would have to be aware of the different components of a webpage before making one. They would also have to be very patient in listening and viewing of examples done by the teacher in order to be able to do it themselves. I don't think it would be beneficial to have first graders making webpages because I think their focus should be on reading and writing at this level and becoming comfortable at a computer in general.

LESSON PLAN

Target Area: Adding Pictures

Rationale: This area is needed to use this technology because it will increase the appearance of the website and give the student more familiarity with using search engines for images.

Objectives:
Students will be able to add a picture box on their webpage.
Students will be able to use a search engine to find an image corresponding to their website topic.
Students will be able to insert the picture into the website.

Materials: Computers

Outline of Key Events:

The students will have been working on their webpage for some time now and the information regarding their topic will be on the page. Now they are at the point of adding pictures.
Students will observe teacher modeling how to search through a search engine for images regarding topic.
Class will follow steps as a whole towards finding their first image.
After first image is found, students will continue to search on their own while being supervised by teacher.
Students will try to find at least 4 images to put on their website.

Closing Summary: Teacher will explain to students that the appearance makes their website more attractive to viewers and also helps to show examples. Give the example of trying to read a book with no pictures!

Ongoing Assessment: Students will continue to use website-making for other assignments. As they progress through the year, their websites should become more complex and also be completed faster.

My learning from New Literacies....

When I first went into this project, I had full intentions of creating a project on emotional literacy using a comic. As I explored the comic path, I realized that it would be very difficult to convey emotions through this technology. What good would a project on emotion be if you couldn't even show or tell about the emotions? This is when I realized that a scrap blog may be a better route. I started to explore this technology and found that you could definitely convey feelings with colors, "stickers", pictures, different fonts, backgrounds and music. I decided right away that this would be the path I would take for this particular project and I have yet to regret that decision. The more I learned about emotional literacy, the more I realized that this entailed more than understanding what emotions are but also focused on learning how to share and communicate them properly. I found it easy to share what this meant by including pictures that showed different emotions and word bubbles with these people communicating their feelings. Even though this would have been possible with a comic, I found it much easier to include this aspect as well as the informational report on emotional literacy in a scrap blog. I was able to include text boxes with straight information as well as pictures and captions to example this information. I also added music as a last minute thing. I originally did not realize you could add music to a scrap blog but the more I explored it, the more I found it necessary. The program supplied it's own music and I was able to find an appropriate song that gave the project an uplifting feel. I wanted the music uplifting because the more I researched emotional literacy, the more I found it to be something that is sometimes pushed to the side but is absolutely necessary. I wanted the music to be inspirational and happy in order to give emotional literacy a good, positive feeling.
I really enjoyed researching emotional literacy. I had originally picked it because I thought that it had potential to be interesting and I felt that emotions are probably pretty important with children. I found that this was not only true, but it went above and beyond what I thought. The more I researched emotional literacy, the more I came across the benefits of teaching it. This made me want to become more involved in the subject because it has so many positive aspects to it, yet it is so new that it desperately needs publicity. That is why I included the FEEL group. This organizations sole purpose is to get the word of emotional literacy out into the public and gain support from the government. If you have not heard of it yet, I highly recommend checking them out at www.feel.org.