For our New Literacies Exploration Project I focused on how technology can be used when addressing Print, Visual and Social Literacies. I have been working in a fifth grade classroom this semester and have witnessed their struggle and progression in writing and have seen them work on the various types of genre writing, all except for Realistic Fiction. I happened to run across a book by Roni Schotter entitled Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street and this story deals with strategies that can be used when it comes to writing a realistic, but fictional story about a place that the author knows well. I decided to create my new technologies project around this book with the thought in mind that I would create a lesson that would teach the skills necessary for writing realistic fiction while using blogs and flickr slide shows. I have created a web page outlining the lesson on my mock classroom website and you can access this site by clicking here.
What I liked about using these three types of technologies is that I feel that they are completely accessible for students within the classroom. I think that by the time that I have become a working teacher, my students will have already experimented with these types of technologies and, because of that, will be easier to work with on a project like the one I have created. I think that when teachers focus on the educational usage of technologies that students are already using social, the learning process becomes something that is more fun, engaging and meaningful because it links social with school. Overall, I enjoyed this project because I got to practice my own skills in editing and creating web pages and blogs and because I was able to create something interactive using a printed book so that multiple literacies were involved.
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My conceptual understanding of literacy has changed tremendously in terms of relating literacy to technology through my project and others. I knew that literacy encompassed many aspects of the world, but I did not know how many in the technological world.
I am excited to use technology with literacy to explore the world. I was amazed by how many ways one can make more sense of the literal aspects of life through the different presentations. I learned about places I had never been through personal videos, maps and diagrams. Instead of the using the traditional lecture style to teach language arts I would use many of the projects that we learned about.
For example, I would use the video program to teach my students about issues in the public eye. I would be able to make my own video to enhance their literacy learning while censoring what is age appropriate for them. I would use e-pals for a book club or peer editing. I was fascinated at how easy the program worked and the diverse potential of the program. Communicating with other cultures and regions of the world is just a click away. This is so important to access in this global economy. People say it is a small world. That saying is becoming truer everyday. It is important for our students to have access to the new literacy’s.
There are other ways I would use the new literacy’s in the classroom as well. I would use Google maps to explore the world, but also to make diagrams for projects in social studies and other aspects of the curriculum. I did not like the virtual life technology and would refrain from using that in the classroom. However, I was happy to learn about it as I think it is important to know what my students are doing on the internet.
Many of the new literacy’s presented on involved using a computer. This would be fine in a school with money to support their technological needs. However in an urban area this may not be the case. It is frustrating to think that those kids in the urban areas are not able to make sense of literacy in a meaningful way by using other resources than traditional lecture and books. In order to have effective literacy instruction one must appeal to multiple intelligences and teaching with technology does just that.
At the beginning of this project I felt I knew a lot about technology and how to use it in the classroom. Now, I feel that I have been given several ideas of easy to incorporate language arts and literacy into the classroom. Many of these ways I would never have thought of until now.
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