My conceptual understanding of literacy has changed quite a bit since starting this project. Initially, I used to only think of literacy in the sense of a subject, like language arts. While reading and writing are a part of almost everything humans do, most people just associate the formal context of literacy to a subject in school and then do not give it much more thought than that. I never thought of the different kinds of literacies there are, and am actually kind of glad that we did this project so that they all came to light. I have looked through a lot of everyone else’s projects, and it is incredible the amount of information we generated as a class. As a future educator, I think it is so important to not only be aware of multiple ways/strategies to teach topics, but to expose your students to what they can do with technology, like we just did in our projects.
I will be the first to admit that language arts is my least favorite subject. I was always good at it, I just found it so painstakingly boring and monotonous. Doing my project on the prezi, however, was surprisingly enjoyable and I actually took my time and added in a lot of extras because I liked doing it. I plan on doing activities like that with my students so that they don’t make the same associations with language arts that I did throughout school. There are so many ways to be creative and make tasks fun to do, and I fully intend on maximizing on that in the future!
Since starting this project, I have definitely grown in my understanding of literacy. Like previously stated, I just breezed by the definition with ‘the ability to read and write’ and left it at that. After completing my project on visual literacy (and viewing other projects), it is clear to me that literacy is much more than just words. Images, emotions, cultures, and all kinds of other aspects are involved and are important for students to grasp. Literacy is so much more than just reading and writing, and there are so many cool technologies out there to explore and utilize!
Providing effective literacy instruction to diverse learners means providing students with multiple strategies and venues to engage their learning. This means that you need to teach them from many different types of literacies as do so with different technologies. Students can learn about cultures, photography (or any image), and emotions by doing various projects with blogs, e-scrapbooking, digital storyboards, online presentations, and all sorts of interactive media. Doing so not only teaches them the different aspects of a subject, but it also allows them to be creative and use more of their skills than they would if they were just reading a book or doing yet another worksheet on nouns.
I definitely see myself using the different technologies we explored in this project in my classroom. I loved making my prezi, and I think a lot of other students would also enjoy it. Similarly, a lot of students can benefit from doing projects like this just simply for a break from the usual monotony of their school day. In order to do this, I would need to spend more time on the different technologies so that I could master them so that I could help my students in the case of an issue. Other than that, the only thing needed is a lot of patience!
To teach emotional literacy, you could start out the lesson by talking about different emotions and what you do when you are feeling those emotions. From there, you could look at pictures (or read a book) and discuss how the characters may be feeling at specific times. You could draw on prior experiences and ask a child about a situation that made them feel a certain emotion. To extend that, you could have them make a prezi that depicts a bunch of different scenarios of a certain emotion, or a collage of people who appear to be experiencing the same emotion (or an array of different ones). This uses the technology as an aid in the lesson, but does not overpower what the students should be getting out of the lesson. Similarly, prezi could be used to keep the students’ attention if the teacher presents part of their lesson using the program. This could be a good strategy for holding older students’ attention for longer or more monotonous lessons. It also gets the students involved if you have them do it, and it is very interactive which also keeps them engaged. It is fairly simple to run, so it does not take away from the point of the lesson.
Overall, I really enjoyed this project (surprisingly) and I will for sure be using prezi again! I also look forward to using visual literacy in my lesson plans!
My conceptual understanding, like yours Kelsey, has changed a lot throughout this course. I also thought of it as simply reading and writing, but I now realize there are many different aspects to literacy and different forms of literacy as well. Through researching emotional literacy I have learned that literacy takes different forms and there are so many different things involved in literacy. Emotional literacy has taught me the importance of teaching about emotions, understanding them, recognizing them, and learning how to handle them. This is just one small concept in literacy. Through looking at the other projects I learned about cultural literacy, numeracy literacy, visual literacy and environmental literacy as well as many important others. In my March 15th blog I listed different definitions of emotional literacy and through the different definitions it is visible of how my thinking is changing and my knowledge is increasing as I wrote about which definition I liked best and why I thought it was better than the others.
ReplyDeleteAs I stated above in agreeing with Kelsey, I also thought of literacy as mainly reading and writing. Through developing my digital literacy in photos, I’ve learned that reading and writing is changing and is involving more technology and many other new concepts as we become a technological society. I consider some forms of technology, like photos, to be a new skill and knowledge that I am now aware of. After reading through Katie’s comics I feel that I understand her technology and literacy (visual) more as well and this is a new skill and strategy to me. These different literacies and technologies gave me a different way of thinking about how to teach different things and how to present what is being taught. This takes away from the traditional forms of reading and writing because it is not straightforward “read this, then write about it.” However, it does still involve reading and writing in a way, because you are typing and then someone is reading but it is more visually pleasing and can meet the needs of different types of learners who may not have learned well with basic reading and writing. My growth of learning has gone from the basic understanding of reading and writing being presented in different ways, to a much larger understanding of different types of literacies, presented in different and possibly more appealing ways to accommodate to all different types of learners through the examples, ideas, and themes listed above.
Providing “effective literacy instruction” to diverse learners means to accommodate to all students learning needs. My research on emotional literacy and learning about photos/photobucket has increased my development of my own digital literacy and thinking by showing me different ways to teach about literacies and different literacies, other than the basic reading and writing, that can be taught. By teaching different literacies and using different programs to teach about them, teachers can affectively teach a diverse range of learners, some more visual than others, and hope to reach more students than ever before. This will help students better comprehend subjects or topics they may have struggled in before by teaching them in a way that helps them learn more effectively.
These are the skills/expectations that I used for my language arts lesson at the first grade level:
ReplyDeleteGLCE: S.DS.01.01 engage in substantive conversations, remaining focused on subject matter, with interchanges building on prior responses in literature discussions, paired conversations, or other interactions.
R.CM.01.01 make text-to-self and text-to-text connections and comparisons by activating prior knowledge and connecting personal knowledge and experience to ideas in text through oral and written responses.
It is important to activate the prior knowledge of the students so that they can make connections to the literacy, and in addition (also on my concept map) technology is really important and accommodating to all students.
I think that students at the first grade level could learn about emotional literacy as well as photos. I think that emotional literacy will be a concept that they would be able to relate to and could be effectively taught in many different ways. I could teach emotional literacy through books, photos, websites, and many other things. I think that the students might struggle a little more with photos because they are young and might have a hard time understanding how to use this type of technology. To my knowledge the school does not have a computer room and there is only one computer in the class that the students are not allowed to use. This would be more difficult to teach but I think that the students would be able to identify emotions through pictures and this could be a concept they could master. If they had access to a computer I believe that they would be able to play around with photos and be able to find some pictures that represent emotions. However, they are very young and still having trouble writing and putting stories together, so this may be just a little advanced for them if they had to draw on bigger issues or turn the pictures into emotional stories. In order to be successful, they would need to be able to successfully read (directions/definitions), recognize/understand emotions, be able to communicate about them to one another and be able to control them. They would need to be “digitally literate” to use the photos program meaning they would need to understand basic concepts about a computer (turning on, clicking, enter, typing, backspace, etc.). For example, I know how to use a computer well, but I know that my parents are always asking me how to do things (like copy and paste) which could be useful when using photos. Also, I had to read different directions to be able to put together the photos so the students would need to be able to do that. I know that a lot of my students are from a low economic area and they (including the school) have few resources. I’m not sure if they have a lot of experience with computers or not, but probably not specifically with the photos program. Also, since the students are young, they are still learning to read, write, and comprehend (basic literacy skills mentioned at the beginning) and I think they need to master these before moving on to more complex subjects so that they can use their prior knowledge to help them grow as learners.
The students could use Letterpop to learn about emotional literacy. They could create short columns about a type of emotion and situation where someone would experience this emotion and include a picture of the emotion. They would need support on how to write a column so they would spend a few days looking at examples and learning about how to write a “column” or a short story. They would spend time learning about different emotions and recognizing them and talking about when one might experience these emotions. They would also spend time talking about how to handle these emotions and control them. I think this would be a fun lesson to teach about emotional literacy as well as incorporate a new technology in their learning. These can be integrated by writing their first/second/final drafts of their emotional literacy stories while using Letterpop instead of writing original drafts. They could read one another’s stories and identify what type of emotions are going on in the story and offer ideas of how to cope with these emotions.
ReplyDeleteMy conceptual understanding of literacy has changed dramatically so far because of this course. When I started I thought of literacy as reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking. I wasn’t even sure about the last three of those, but knew it was covered in TE 301. I am now convinced that these are all parts of literacy. The Tompkins text has been the most instrumental for me in developing these understandings. The readings have taken me through some of the thought processes that good readers and writers use. These included so much more than just being able to decode what is on the page and being able to encode what we are thinking. I have to admit that I am still a little overwhelmed by everything that goes into these actual processes. Fortunately I will keep the book and refer to it in the future as I need ideas for individual students and whole classes.
ReplyDeleteOf all of the things we have studied, chapter eight in Tompkins is the area that has added the most to my understanding of literacy. In my beginning ideas of literacy I never considered how important comprehension was to the whole process. When I did I only considered the text factors from chapter nine. However, I know am starting to realize just how important the reader factors are too. There is a chart on page 262 that summarizes strategies that can be used to increase comprehension. The one that I have connected the most with is activating background knowledge. This is because when I originally thought about this, I thought that I was a good reader because I have a lot of knowledge at my fingertips. I didn’t consider the fact that this knowledge is a result of my experiences. I have been exposed to a lot. I have read and learned about a multitude of subjects. This scaffolding that was provided to me has given me the background knowledge that I have needed to be able to read just about anything that is set in front of me. I also see now that this is the reason that many students may have for struggling with reading. My sister-in-law is a teacher and just shared a story with me about one of her struggling readers. She has asked her students to bring in their favorite story as a child to share with the class. She has told them that she has books in case they forget or can’t find one. Last week she had a student ask her if she could use one of Mrs. Cross’ books. She said sure and asked if she had a favorite one from when she was a kid. The student told my sister-in-law that her mother had never read to her. Basic assumptions we make about kids are shattered in these instances and show why some students may have more background knowledge than others.
My study of numeracy also helped me grow in my understanding of literacy. When I started the project I picked it because few of my classmates had. I knew very little about it other than it would have to do with numbers. As I started exploring it I was surprised by how similar the definitions for numeracy were to those for literacy. At many points I found different groups referring to it as quantitative literacy. I referred back to the chart on page 262 of Tompkins and was surprised by how many of the strategies for comprehension also applied to numeracy. I could find connections in my mind between how background knowledge, connections, importance, inferences, and many of the others applied not only to literacy, but also to numeracy. In the end I determined that numeracy is just a small special part of literacy. I defined it in my project as literacy with a focus on mathematics.
The web site was also an interesting exercise in literacy. The Kymes article was illustrative in how I found my thinking was changing while I was creating a website. I found that I had to create something that I knew was going to be read in a different way. Users were going to scan over my site and pick and choose what they thought might be relevant to them. In order for me to get my point across as an author I had to make sure that the points I had stood out so that they would be looked at. This is a new way of obtaining information and Kymes is right that I must use this knowledge to teach my future students about how to be good readers when it comes to web sites.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to do a similar project to this with my class there would be many things I would have to teach them. There is a lot of knowledge that I think they see, but might not recognize. I had to visit many websites to get a feel for how I should set mine up. There is a level of creativity to it also. In my field placement I often see my CT address this by providing templates that the students must fill in with data. I believe that for this project this would be a necessary scaffold that I would have to provide. I had to use a template to create the project myself. The level of information provided in the template could change though depending on the level of the student. Some may need to know exactly what type of data they must put in each section of the template where others may be able to create it on their own. I also think that my students are going to need some basic skills when it comes to using a computer. I have been forced to navigate through many different computer programs in my studies. This allowed me to see how Google set up their site and how to use it. The site editing software is very similar to working with Microsoft Word, but there are some differences. I would have to make sure my students understood how to use these programs to be able to alter the website. I have also seen in our computer lab visits that there are some students who have experience and others that don’t. I am going to have to provide support for those who don’t, while pushing those who do to create more. Since the site would have to cover numeracy, we would also have to have a basic conversation about what that is. I think the vocabulary of the word numeracy is what would give them the most problems. Once they knew that it is basically literacy, reading, writing, thinking, etc., about mathematics I think they would have some of the basic knowledge to create a site based on mathematics. This class is well versed and makes good connections with their life in math class. It is not a static experience for them. They could tell some of the mathematics stories that have been shared in class on the website and do a great job connecting that to numeracy.
I think what I started to describe above would be a great one day lesson that would be used across the entire unit. I would teach the kids how to design just one web page, not the entire site. This would be simple for them since editing one page is basically the same as using a word processor. They could use this space to write a story as I described above about an instance of numeracy in their every day lives. Before, during, and after the writing of this page I will have to provide to them the support of how to create a web site, how to edit it, and how to save those changes. That would be the bulk of the lesson, but could be done in one day. Future lessons would involve things like how to add links, pictures, and charts.
I am excited by my exploration of technology. I plan to keep the web page I created and use it in the future. I am a little disappointed that I chose the site name I did because it won’t be applicable in the future, but I’m pretty sure I saw a way to change it. That is just one more thing for me to explore. I look forward to being able to use this in my class some day now that I’ve done it.