New Literacy

Throughout this class and this project, my conceptual understanding up literacy has broadened greatly. Beginning the class, I though of literacy as the ability to read, write and comprehend written text. I now understand it to encompass much more of the communicating world. Literacy can involve using technologies to communicate thoughts and ideas, oral words to communicate emotions and feelings, social literacy, environmental literacy, and still more. Literacy is more an understanding than an ability. My research on emotional literacy has informed my view because it is very different from my original idea of what literacy is. I have discovered that emotional literacy is the ability to communicate ones feelings and emotions in a safe and natural way. This is nothing like the ability to read and write. Building a website also informed my thinking because I had to go about it in an entirely different way than I would writing a paper. I needed to think about how people would read it, what people would read it, how easy it is to navigate, where people would look first, etc. This involved an entirely different set of skills than writing a paper.

The growing world around us requires a great deal of skill in new literacies in order to participate. We need the ability to communicate in various different forms, technologies, circumstances, and places, whereas the more traditional definition of literacy involves only the skills of reading and writing.

Effective literacy instruction involves integrating literacy into every field of instruction, be it using emotional literacy techniques when solving classroom disputes, or teaching visual literacy when creating classroom rules, or environmental literacy when addressing recess. It is also necessary to incorporate technology into instruction where it is possible. These students are growing up in a time when technology is vital to professional existence. For example, I would use digital storytelling to teach students about emotional literacy by examining the emotions and communication of characters in a story that we would read.

In order to teach students about new technologies, I would use the following,

Target area and rationale: Parts of a narrative using a website. I would want to teach the students how to create a website because it is now expected that young professionals have a personal website and yet few people know how to create one. This is a skill that the students will use throughout their lives.

Objectives: students will create a basic website with a separate page for each of the following

· exposition

· rising action

· climax

· falling action

Materials needed

· Children’s text

· Computers with internet access

· Weebly.com

Key events

Read a narrative

· I will create a webpage as an example

o I will show the students how to create a web address, page design, and create pages

· I will discuss each part of the narrative

o After each part, the students will create a page for the book that we read.

Assessment:

I will review the students’ webpages both for content and for creation.

New Lit response

When I hear the word literacy, I go straight to the terms reading, writing, and listening. This class has showed me that literacy can be formed in many new ways. The use of technology in this class has provided lots of new information for me. I have never used a blog before, or even a wiki. Not to mention Jake and I did our new lit project on a website call a flicker ten minutes before we did it, either of us had never heard of it before. It helps me become more aware of what is out there to teach and make use of it. Experimenting in class with these new technologies has helped me set outside my boundaries. Not going to lie I have already messed up using the blog and the wiki, but as I continue to use them I become more familiar with them both. Having literacy be involved with technology helps make it become more interesting and creates more of a network. Would I say paste a whole book to read online, no but I would say post interesting books that might help increase more knowledge. Traditional literacy will always be apart of school settings, and I believe all children need to have the experience of learning to read a book from front to cover.

Jake and I created a project that was meant to be represented in early childhood classes. As I continue to think about this, it can help ELS students or students that have trouble reading. Picture walks can help them visualize the steps in a process. It is not only a good process for washing hands it can be helpful for science projects and other educational instructions. Not only do the pictures help to follow directions it also makes it a fun process. The descriptions can be interesting and funny to read. Motivation is the key process in learning and looking at colors or even seeing your own teacher trying the experiment can help motivate the children.

· Target area and rationale: Why/how would this area be needed for your learners to learn to use the technology to teach peers about the new literacy?

o The picture walk can be an assignment in the beginging but after that I want them posted in the classroom for the children to be reminded of the actions everyday.

• List your objective(s)
• Children will be expected to learn to recycle, wash hands, and use the right clothing for the correct weather.
• List the materials and supplies needed
• Soap towels
• Things to recycle
• A recycling box
• The correct clothing to go outside
• Outline of key events (use bullets)
• After using the bathroom (wash hands)
• Getting ready to go outside (clothing)
• A child has a job each day (recycling)
• Closing summary
• These are everyday situations. This should be an ongoing process in all classrooms. The environment is important to our lives, and it is key to understand it.
• Ongoing assessment
• Singing the song Snowpants, boots, coat, hat, and mittens, now were ready to go outside.
• A new student each day will have the opportunity to recycle one item.
• Children will be expected to wash their hands in the classroom

New Literacy Project - Self Review

When I first came to this class I new little about what literacy actually was. When I first came to this class I thought of literacy as only reading and writing. I quickly learned that there was much more to it than that. I am now aware that literacy also deals with talking, listening, and visualizing. I chose to focus on environmental and visual literacy as I felt they fit well together. I found that by combining different literacy's you are doing nothing but making the lesson more interesting for your students. For example, with my NLP we were able to take a few pieces from environmental literacy and convey them through visual literacy. I am now aware that there are many ways to teach literacy and the more that you use the more interested your students will be and the more they will want to learn. I have always known that literacy is important to all students but you can never stress how important it actually is. If you are illiterate you are putting yourself at a disadvantage to all of those who are literate. I think that you must be literate in order to participate fully in our society.

To provide effective literacy instruction to diverse learners means to provide the students with all the possible ways that they could use literacy. These include cultural, emotional, environmental, social, visual, and political literacy. For the literacy instruction to be effective though you need to do more then just present them with all of the possibilities. First, you as a teacher needs to be a master at what literacy is and be able to answer all questions your students ask of you. Next, I think it is important to allow students to learn about one anothers background. This can be done easily through literacy. It is also important to see where your students are at, if they need help with basic literacy principles then you should help them with that, don't just assume they are at the level of their grade. It is also important to be constantly assessing students to see how their literacy levels are growing and making sure that they are progressing. The last but if feel the most important is the teachers enthusiasm towards literacy. If the students see that the teacher is excited about learning then that will ware off on the students.

After working on the NLP I have realized how many options there are for helping to teach literacy. I think that as a teacher in this era you need to be technologically advanced and willing to use multiple new literacy technologies. Our students are growing up in an era of technology and it shows no sign of slowing down, so why not introduce it to them from the beginning. I think it is also important that you test out new technologies but you should realize when one is not working for you and your students. Not all technologies are good, but if you find one that works you should use it.

When I started to think about what I wanted to do my NLP on I thought about what my students would benefit from in my placement. I thought that a digital picture walk would be a great idea to get the point across to the students. I haven't seen my CT use this strategy before and I felt it would be beneficial for the students to see a new technology. I think it is important to keep in mind that when you are doing a project such as a digital picture walk to be as specific as possible. Many times just a picture will not convey your message so it is important to have multiple pictures that explore all possible answers. The good thing about visual literacy is that it allows students who are illiterate the chance to engage in literacy. I find this particularly beneficial for lower level elementary and special education.

Lesson Plan:
Target area and rationale: Environmental and visual literacy through a digital picture walk. Students will learn how to wash hands properly, recycle, and put on warm cloths when its cold outside. These are important life skills needed to be a functioning member of society.
Objectives: Students will learn how to wash hands, recycle, and realize when to put on warm cloths and what to put on.
Materials and supplies: Camera, sink, soap, towel, examples of recyclable items (plastic bottle, cardboard box), snow pants, boots, hat, mittens, coat.
Key events: A step by step process of how to wash hands, recycle, and what to wear when its cold outside.
Closing summary: By the end of the project students will have taken a digital picture walk and explored the ways of washing hands, recycling, and dressing warm in cold weather. All students will be expected to know how to do all three based on the pictures alone. Text will also be provided for those who are literate.

New Literacy Project - Notes

With our new literacy project we chose to explore two different literacy subjects, environmental and visual. Through this project I have learned many new strategies when dealing with literacy. I have leaned that literacy goes way beyond reading and writing. It also involves speaking, listening and observing. When dealing with visual literacy this is the most evident. Through visual literacy you are able to communicate with students who are either illiterate or who do not speak English. I would find visual literacy particularly useful when dealing with second language learners. Through this project I was able to learn how to use a new online program, flicker.com. This is a program where you can upload pictures, give each picture a title and description as well as organizing your pictures however you would like. This was the first time I used this program and it did not take long to get used to it. I found it particularly interesting how effective visual literacy can be for all levels of education. For our particular project we focused on kindergarten students but we could have just as easily made a visual literacy project for a fifth grade classroom.

The other form of literacy we chose to explore was environmental literacy. The thing that I enjoyed most about environmental literacy is how much you can do with it. There are so many options when it comes to learning about the environment. When I think of environmental literacy I like to compare it to life skills and how to become a part of society. I am a special education major and I feel that environmental literacy plays a big part in their education. The more you can teach them about how to become a contributing part of society the better off they will be. Things such as showing someone how to wash there hands properly are things that many teachers take for granted. I learned that it is very important as a teacher to help your students become one with their environment. While doing this project I found it easy and interesting to use environmental literacy with visual literacy. It is easy to connect with the environment all you have to do is go outside. Overall I found this project to be very beneficial as I learned new ways to teach literacy.