New Literacies Project

The new literacy that I am researching with my group is Cultural Literacy.  I am learning

what cultural literacy is in general, it is being able to understand and appreciate the things

that are the same and different in someone elses's culture and their own including

the customs, values, and beliefs.  Cultural literacy is something I always knew was 

important but never really knew what to do with it beyond the typical project where every

student has a country and they write a report on their culture and possibly share that with

their class.  I think teaching cultural literacy can also bring a class together and promote 

an inclusive environment for all students.  I've seen in my classroom that the majority of 

books we read portray one type of nationality and not really much else.  It is important that

all students are not only able to read and see other cultures represented in the books that 

they are reading, but that all students in the classroom are able to read books that 

represent their cultural background, so that connections between the text and themselves 

can be made.  What I am learning while I am researching cultural literacy would be all 

of the different ways teachers can incorporate it into their classrooms.  Overall, I am 

learning just how important it is to incorporate cultural literacy into any classroom, no 

matter how young or old your students are.  I look forward to finding more resources

and ideas for how I could one day incorporate it into my classroom in new and

interesting ways for my students.      

 

The digital literacy my group decided to use is Weebly.  We are going to create a website for

teachers that gives them resources and ideas for how to incorporate cultural literacy into

their classrooms.  I am learning that Weebly is a very user friendly technology to use.  It is

not hard to figure out and it gives users a lot of options on making the website your own.

What I like is that I can easily add pictures, text, videos, links, etc without much hassle.  This

is really important because the majority of our Weebly is going to be providing these links

and outside resources to teachers.  I really like how Weebly can be easily published and 

easily found by educators looking for resources.  Weebly is nice because it is not like a 

PowerPoint presentation where we would have to upload it to the computer or anything 

like that, it is much easier because we can just push the publish button and people can use 

it as resource.  I am looking forward to learning more about Weebly and creating a website 

that can be a good resource for teachers!