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.