Emotional literacy:
I chose to do emotional literacy because I feel that this is a very important concept in the younger years. I think that children need to learn and understand their emotions. One of the first definitions I came across was, "They are important, because they address mankind's most fundamental problems of violence, crime, abuse, addiction, prejudice, racism and dysfunctional families (http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/index.shtml)." These are important issues that children may be going through and are not sure how to handle. Another definition I found is, "The ability to express feelings with specific feeling words, in 3 word sentences. For example, "I feel rejected (http://eqi.org/elit.htm)." I think this is very important for children, especially younger children. This helps children put their emotions into words and help deal with what they are going to and speak to one another about issues they are facing. The definition that I felt combined both of these definitions into one is, "EMOTIONAL LITERACY is the ability to recognize, understand and appropriately express our emotions. Just as verbal literacy is the basic building-block for reading and writing, emotional literacy is the basis for perceiving and communicating emotions. Becoming emotionally literate is learning the alphabet, grammar and vocabulary of our emotional lives (http://www.feel.org/emotional_literacy.php)." I liked that this definition states that it is the ability to recognize, understand, and express emotions. I think that these are the most important concepts in emotional literacy. Joel- I know you have children. Do you think these are important concepts that your children should learn about at a young age? The traditional literacies of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing all come in to play in emotional literacy. You read about it, then talk about it and listen to others talk about it. You can also write about your feelings and emotions or create a story that involves emotional literacy. You can view it just by participating in all of these concepts. I think that if my students were exploring emotional literacy they would need support from their teachers as well as families and school employees to talk about different emotions, attitudes, and situations. They would need to read stories with a variety of emotions in them and be able to feel comfortable in their environment to discuss these emotions and see if they can relate to them. I think that this literacy is already present in the curriculum through various books that they read, however, I don't think that there is much discussion about the emotions in the books so they never fully understand emotional literacy.
Photos:
I chose photos because this is one of the technologies that I haven't worked with. I have been playing around with Photobucket and I really like it. Some different things I have learned about it are that you can upload different photos and create an album, or multiple albums. These can be titled, and each individual photo can have a caption. These photos can also be tagged. I'm not sure if this relates to Facebook tags or not, I haven't tried it. However, there is an option to post the picture or album on to Facebook, or to post a comment on the album from Facebook. You can also share it through email and other options. The pictures can be edited. You can choose a background theme for the album/webpage. There are different links as well for when you post or send a picture or album. I am using writing and viewing in a different way when using this technology. This is because I use writing to create a title and caption. I view the picture in a way that is different than I normally would. I normally would just look at the picture and think about what I like/don't like about the picture, but when I view it for Photobucket I think about what the viewer would see and what I should write in the caption/title for the viewer to understand what is going on in the picture or why it is important. I think that this could be a good way to teach about some basic emotional literacy. You could use pictures and have the students create the captions involving emotions that they believe are being felt in the picture. It could be difficult with some emotions, but others would be easy to portray. You could also represent situations like wedding, funerals, new babies, and see if any of the kids can relate to what is going on in the picture to bring out bigger subjects such as a death in the family, parents getting remarried, or a new sibling. We could enter captions on the spot after agreeing on one as a class for each picture. However, most people don't read long captions because the point of a caption is to summarize the picture and it can be difficult to keep it short even though there can be so much to say. My students would have to understand how to summarize a picture and look at it to figure out emotions in the picture. I could incorporate that in the language arts curriculum and instruction by teaching about different ways to write things, as in summarizing and captions, and also being a "good reader" and thinking about emotions while reading. It's a really neat site and I recommended it!
Numeracy:
ReplyDeleteI have found it interesting so far in my research into numeracy that it does fit in with the definitions of literacy that many of my classmates have posted. I remember the time that we were asked to do the assignment literacy was presented as something that could help the common good, but it was also presented as something that was evolving. Both of these traits are heavily referred to in the quotes. However, numeracy seems to be able to fit in with the fact that the definition of literacy is always evolving. Even though math has been around for a long time it is just now beginning to be thought of as a form of literacy. The websites that I have looked at so far describe many of the aspects of mathematics that we have discussed in the other half of this class as being a part of traditional literacy. We need to understand how students think about numbers. The students need to have many of the same tools in numbers as they need for literacy. They must have background knowledge, they must be able to decode what is written on the paper, and they must have knowledge of how mathematics works. These are all traits of a literate person.
I have been having a little more trouble finding new information relating to this literacy. I think the main thing that is new to me is a fresh perspective of mathematics as it relates to numeracy. I’m starting to realize there are other ways that students could be experiencing difficulties and they could be thought of as literacy problems. We have discussed in the math section how background knowledge can be a stumbling block to understanding a problem, but I wouldn’t have classified it as literacy. I am looking forward to more exploration so that I can see what other connections can be made between the two fields.
As far as my field placement goes, they are getting instruction in numeracy. They just don’t know it. The teacher calls it mathematics as I have all along, however she provides scaffolding in the ways they need to gain the different types of knowledge I have mentioned previously. This just proves that language arts is the one disciple that we use in ALL areas of our schooling.
Web Page:
ReplyDeleteFor my new technology I have decided to create a web page. I haven’t started trying to incorporate numeracy with it yet, but I have worked on creating a web page for my summer tennis program as an easier place to start. This goes to show once again how important background knowledge is. I wanted a topic I was very comfortable with when using this new technology. I have found that creating a web page is very much different than writing a paper for example. I have to consider how people are going to scan through my information. They will use this in a very different way. Users won’t read every piece of information that I put, but they will scan and select what is most pertinent to them. This makes creating a web page a much different task than creating other forms of media I have encountered so far.
I’m not sure how well this technology is going to apply to teaching numeracy. I have some hope because different pages will allow me to concentrate different ideas in different places much more easily. I have just noticed on many educational pages they have embedded fun activities that help illustrate the idea they are trying to get across. I’m not sure how well I am going to be able to incorporate those extra things into my page. I have been able to present data well, but making the web page interactive is a whole different story.
Everything I mentioned with regard to numeracy also fits well with being able to navigate a website. Users must possess many of the same skills that a literate person in other genres would possess. They must additionally be taught to skim and find information quickly. I think this is the skill that would be missing most in my field placement. I have had an opportunity to work with them while doing internet research and they seemed to struggle in finding information. A large part of this might be due to the artificial nature of the internet that is set up in today’s schools. We are so worried about keeping kids safe on the internet that in my field placement they are only allowed to navigate to pre approved sites. This makes searching for information very difficult. It also does a disservice in teaching them how to be safe on the web and teaching what content they should avoid. Students in my field placement also don’t get enough exposure to the internet. There aren’t enough computers and the ones they have are very slow. These reasons would make my technology very difficult for many of them.
I chose to do visual literacy because I really enjoy drawing and doing more of the creative things. I have noticed that a lot of LA curriculum that I have observed does not incorporate the opportunity to be very creative. Sure they get to write their own stories and all of that, but they never get to do anything more with them. I always liked getting to illustrate my stories and do more of the artsy things, hence why I want to learn more about visual literacy.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the links for making comics. This is a good way for younger students to be able to write their own stories, but with less words. It is really easy to do and the finished products are really cool. One school that I work at does these (not sure the program they use)and kids as young as first grade are able to make pretty good stories. It is also good for them to use the technology programs to make them.
I also like the picture aspect of visual literacy. Using photographs to tell stories is another important aspect to literacy. Most children cannot tell what emotion someone in a photo is expressing (like Taylor mentioned earlier) and so this is a good way to get them practiced with that skill. Telling stories with just pictures also sparks a more imaginative aspect to literacy. What one child interprets a series of pictures to mean could be completely different than another childs, so it can also lead to a good discussion and debate.
The research I have done has been primarily from the links on the wiki. I have found out some pretty interesting things, especially the aspects of education that kids are lacking (like the more emotional parts) and so this project will be beneficial in numerous ways. I like that I am learning more about different topics that I might not have otherwise learned about. I definitely see myself using visual literacy in my classroom and look forward to it.