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.