Wednesday, April 8, 2009

New Literacies Reflection

For my new technologies project, I created a set of digital books and then created a webpage to store my digital books. My website creation got very exciting and now contains resources for special and general education, things I have created and a blog for my thoughts. I presented my digital books to my students in field placement (4th grade) and they seemed intrigued. They paid more attention to this presentation than they usually do, and they shared very animated responses to how I could create this. Even though the website is more teacher-oriented, the website can be used in the classroom by the teacher to further develop his/her classroom.
I have come to understand that my knowledge of literacy has grown immensely. At the beginning of the semester, I viewed literacy as mere reading and writing. Reading happens from books and periodicals and that was it. But, as the semester has progressed, I have come to love the ideas of different subheadings of literacy (Cultural Literacy, Digital/Information/Media Literacy, Emotional Literacy, Environmental Literacy, Numeracy Print Literacy, Social Literacy, Visual Literacy).I feel that throughout this semester I have become more comfortable with using technology to present and teach literacy/language arts skills, and using technology as a medium for assessment of students. When I took the digital natives quiz, I found that I am not a native with as many digital tools as I had thought, but was introduced to many new tools.
In creating my digital books, I worked very hard to accommodate the student’s individual needs. I had originally created the books as movies that flowed through the pages as it read. But, as I played with the creation of this, I found that having the computer roll through the pages was a negative aspect because it determined how long the students could look at illustrations and text on the pages. As I created my webpage for storage of the digital books, I became enthralled with the creation and included lots of additional resources and even a page for me to blog not only on literacy but my education and classroom experience as a whole. As I developed this website and project for my class assignment and the digital books for my students, I found this to be very beneficial and useful for myself, and think I will continue working on my website, updating resources as my career continues.
I believe there are many possibilities of ways to incorporate technology into your classroom and literacy instruction, and I have found that out in a first person manner. In the classroom I am in now, there is not much of a student connection with the technology. The teacher presents power points and uses a smart board, but the students do not have much interaction with it. Also, the classroom has a “class blog” but is not updated regularly and appears to not be structured. Had the blog been set up like our blogs in this class where the students are grouped our have designated days to write, or blogging is a center, the blog could have been more authentic and useful for the students. There is also not much diversity in reading and writing instruction which I think turns the students off from reading and writing as a whole. IF the teacher would incorporate more of the new literacies that we had discussed in class, the students would have more of a connection with their instruction and their education.

1 comment:

  1. Chelsea,
    Okay, this is kind of weird. I swear I pressed submit when I wrote your comment on Friday, but I guess not. I'm glad that I checked it. Anyway! I just wanted to let you know that I checked out your site. I'm really impressed with how easy to navigate the site was. I could definitely see how the site itself could be used to communicate with students and guardians. The digital books were also really cool. When I was little, my mom would read to me a story before I went to bed. Well, my mom went on a vacation and I was left for the week with my dad. Well he was horrible at reading books because he would never finish, get preoccupied, plus no-one could make the Ms. Piggy voice like my mom. So my mom recorded her voice on my little Fisher Price tape player reading the books. I think that digital books are really a modern version of the book on tape. How cool would it have been if we had this type of new technology when we were little, instead of using the old Fisher Price thing. Overall, very cool Chelsea!

    ReplyDelete