New Literacies Final Blog Post

Since this class started, I have learned so much about literacy.  I always just assumed that literacy was literacy but I've learned that there are so many different types of literacy and all of them are so important to incorporate into the classroom!  When I first started this project, I really did not know what a New Literacy was, and when trying to create my own definition, I had to search online for some help in defining the term.  Once I began to explore the different types of new literacies I was so interested!  Getting to learn about one specific new literacy and about one specific new technology really got me thinking about all of the different and interesting things my future students could be doing using literacy and technology in the classroom.  I've always known that literacy is important, but what I did not know until this project was just how many different directions I can take literacy.  Times are changing and my students will be 21st century learners which means they are living in a world where using technology is their main way of learning and gaining new information, I need to respect that as their teacher and give them opportunities to learn using technology. I choose to use a Weebly for my group project, which I know I will use in my classroom and I could even have my students use to make websites for their classmates on a book they have read or on a culture they were studying.  I also was able to see different technologies in action while looking at the rest of my classmate's projects, it was so interesting to see just how many different technologies can be used to teach students literacy.  My traditional idea of literacy was always just reading a book, maybe writing a paper or a report on the book, and possibly having a group discussion with the class on that book, the themes, so on.  While using technology, and different literacies, a teacher like me could do themes (like a week on cultural literacy, a week on social literacy, etc) and instead of just writing about these books, my students could do things like make a weebly or create an iMovie about what they just read.  I feel like using technology makes learning so much more fun for students today and using new literacies also makes the lessons more interesting.


I think to provide effective literacy instruction to diverse learners means that first, teachers need to have a knowledge of their students.  This includes understanding how their students learn, their backgrounds and home lives, what interests them in the classroom and in literacy, etc.  I think it is so important to keep your students engaged, so much literacy instruction can be boring to students so through this project we have been able to see different ways to keep students engaged while they are still learning a lot about literacy.  Researching cultural literacy, while creating a weebly really helped me generate ideas about incorporating technology into a classroom where I would be teaching cultural literacy.  I think cultural literacy is so intesting and there are so many different things you can do while reading about other people's cultures.  I think in order for my students to fully be able to understand cultural litearcy, my classroom would have to do a number of activities and read a number of books and such so that they fully understood other cultures and how they were both different from ours but also the same.  I think I would have a big responsibility, and I as their teacher have the most responsibility and could really make or break the lesson!  I need to be providing my students with the right materials and also provide them with the ability to understand what cultural literacy is as a whole, not just coming away knowing different foods for different countries.  I think for students to understand technology, they just have to have it explained to them.  Our students live in a world where technology is king, so they understand technology and are able to pick up on it quickly once it is explained to them and they are able to see an example.  When I have my own classroom, I want to expose my students to as many different types of technology that I can so that they are able to pick what they like to use and what they enjoy to use! Once again, it is my responsibility to make sure they have been exposed to digital literacy so that they have a really great understanding! I realized that literacy is so different than I thought it was, it includes so many different aspects that are so interesting and great to incorporate into the classroom! I can't wait to be able to use what I've learned from this project in my own classroom!