Old Blog ?/New Post on Digital Literacy

I was a bit embarrassed when I took the digital natives quiz; I've utilized blogs, wikis, and instant messaging but couldn't give a solid definition-and I had no clue about modding, massive multiplayer online games, and smart mobs. So I am very much an immigrant to digital literacy; I have learned the definition of all six terms on the quiz, but in my opinion, knowing the definition without seeing its broader context does not classify me as an emergent learner.

I think Tompkins intertwines emergent literacy with the active scaffolding role of teachers. Tompkins constantly argues that teachers are pivotal when it comes to facilitating assessment of students and modeling new strategies; she also reinforces that teachers are constantly implicit facilitators of classroom activities. Thus I have direct responsibility to facilitate my own emergent learning so that I can simultaneously scaffold emergent learners and digital natives in their technology literacy; by developing my digital literacy, I will be able to relate to many students' active participation in digital culture and facilitate a vital learning trajectory amongst my future students.

As stated in my first blog, I have seen how useful technology can be in classrooms. I have appreciated how useful technology can be in providing alternative forms of education for special education students. However, our New Literacies projects as well as our subsequent analysis of peer projects reinforced how stimulating technology can be when combined with academic knowledge-how a daily lesson can come alive due to the sensory appeal of technology. Thus I am personally motivated to incorporate multiple explorations of different technologies into my professional development plans.

Old Blog ?/New Post on Comprehension

Dear all,

I had not written a post on digital natives or on comprehension, so I wanted to contribute; better late than never :).

It's interesting to me how everyone in this group struggled with comprehension, whether it be in terms of vocabulary or just being overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of information. I also struggled with reading comprehension, but this struggle centered around comprehending non-fiction work as opposed to fiction. I was an avid fiction reader as a child; my lack of interest in non-fiction definitely played a role in my comprehension struggle. Obviously my shaky conceptual knowledge and lack of vocabulary in the non-fiction schema catalyzed my lack of comprehension as well. My mom would often read my non-fiction texts for me and 'translate' the concepts so I could understand them; this was definitely counterproductive, as I didn't gain long-term strategies for how to actively comprehend non-fiction. My parents eventually hired a study skills tutor; I now utilize the tutor's suggestions in my everyday reading.

In terms of my current reading habits, I wouldn't say that I exercise pre-reading strategies like examining titles and subtitles or reading comprehension questions ahead of time (this is not a commendable trait, I know.) But I do a first reading of the assigned text and then go back through to analyze headings and highlight main ideas. This helps me in many ways; for instance, the material is more familiar upon a second glance than when I am first reading, so I am able to focus on sentence level ideas and word choice as opposed to worrying about broad concepts. Secondly, since I have a much clearer idea of what the main ideas are, I have a much clearer idea of what I should be taking notes on than when I am first reading. Thus this reading strategy has greatly enhanced my reading comprehesion for fiction and non-fiction.

I found Gibbons to be particularly interesting in terms of her take on comprehension. For instance, I am intrigued by her statement that "without knowledge of the topic and with limited linguistic resources, a young reader has no choice but to rely on graphophonic knowledge" (83). I find this statement to be very true of my experience with reading Spanish literature. I took Spanish classes up to the four hundred level at MSU; I feel that I was provided with a shaky level of phonics and very little complex reading. Thus I greatly struggled when I did encounter complex readings; as Gibbons eloquently argues, there was no bridge of cultural and contextual knowledge that helped me grasp the concepts behind the task. However, I feel that these struggles helped reinforce Gibbons' argument in my mind on the utility of challenging ELL's comprehension while paving the path for their understanding.

I also found Gibbons' multiple comprehension strategies to be very interesting, as I have experienced many of these strategies in my own elementary and secondary years; I liked the fact that these strategies are not restricted to ELLs but that they can be utilized by all learners. In terms of seeing these strategies in the field, I can't say that I have seen my CT explicitly utilizing these strategies. She does have weekly reading packets that focus on different aspects of reading; comprehension is definitely part of the packet. However, I recently saw her doing a neat lesson where she focused on the 'awesome adjectives' and 'descriptive verbs' in the book Owl Moon. According to Gibbons, this would be a "rereading for detail" strategy. The students had to listen to her read a page aloud and then name off the verbs and adjectives that stood out to them. I feel that this exercise innately touched on many of Gibbons' arguments, such as the necessity of repetition for struggling readers-students who were struggling with the concept of verb vs. adjectives showed greater understanding through their verbal answers by the end of the lesson. Thus I feel that comprehension is taught in all types of ways; it is our job to recognize and model those methods as future teachers :).

New Literacies Project Reflection

Since the beginning of this class, my conceptual learning has now changed. I now have seen first hand how important technology is for literacy. Before doing this project, I had never even heard of scrapblog before. After completing this project, I now feel like I can incorporate scrapblog into my future classrooms. I feel like this technology is a tool that allows a person to be creative, while at the same time getting an important message across. So, I could use this technology in my future classrooms as a tool for teaching many lessons. For example, if I am teaching a unit about recycling, I could use a scrapblog to teach important facts about recycling. Also, I think that scrapblogs are a good tool to use for visual learners. You have the ability to put multiple pictures on one page, allowing the students to visualize the point that any teacher is trying to make. Moreover, I believe that the students would really enjoy making their own scrapblogs. It would be a chance for them to express themselves and learn about their classmate’s cultures. So a good activity for the first week of school would be to have all my students create a scrapblog about their culture. If I modeled how to create one, I believe it would be easy and fun for the students to do. Also, they would learn a lot about their classmates and it would give me a chance to do the same. Furthermore, I am happy that I chose a scrapblog because it is fairly easy to learn how to use. It is very self explanatory and you have multiple options to choose from. For example, you are able to add borders around your pictures, add stickers to your pages, and add decorative backgrounds to the pages. You even have the option to add a video and sound on you pages. Most importantly, the program is free to use! All you have to do is sign up, create an account, and you can start creating your scrapblog! I would highly recommend this new technology to anyone!

The new literacy that I chose to focus on was cultural literacy. I think often times in many classrooms, the culture of a student gets overlooked. I have been in a classroom where students with different cultures simply just get ignored and feel left out. I think as a teacher, it is my job to learn about all my students’ culture. By doing this, I will be able to create lessons and activities that focus on the strengths of my students. In my classroom, I will make sure to contain cultural literacy in my classroom library. This will be a way for other students to learn about different cultures. Also, I could focus an entire unit about a specific culture. At the end of the unit, we could have a celebration and I could bring in food that is common for that specific culture. Just like discussed in class, I believe the culture of a person determines how we think, believe, behave, teach, and learn. Additionally, the culture of a person is learned, shared, and continually changing. So, in order to make an impact in my students learning I believe it is very important for me to learn about their specific culture. By doing this, I can build on what the student already knows and provide scaffolding that is responsive to the needs of students who do not know how to do a certain task. The more classrooms that I am in, the more I notice how diversity is on the increase. For my project, I chose to focus on Italian culture. I chose to do this because my boyfriend is from Italy, and so I have noticed many differences between his culture and mine. For example, sarcastic comments that I make to him, he will take seriously. So just from our time together, I have learned that it is very important to learn about someone’s culture and not to judge a person on what they say or do because it could be part of their culture.

New Literacy Project Reflection

My understanding of literacy is continually changing during this class and the project furthered this change. When I arrived at class my definition of literacy was “being proficient in reading, writing and speaking, thus allowing one to understand written or oral language.” However, throughout classroom discussion and reading I realized I was missing a lot of crucial ideas in my definition. Once again, after completing and viewing others New Literacy Projects, I realize I am still missing key ideas. For my project I focused on numeracy and was surprised to learn this is a type of literacy, since many of its topics are what I considered to be mathematics. I think it is essential to understand that subjects can overlap, which is something I previously had not thought about. Numeracy is so important in our society were numbers, mathematical vocabulary, arithmetic, percents, graphs, and other mathematical ideas are increasing. Similar to the definition of literacy my group developed a few weeks ago in class, numeracy also allows one to function in today’s society efficiently. I think this is one of the primary reasons the definition of literacy is continually changing, because different aspects are important in different societies to be able to function. For right now I still like this definition, ‘literacy means an individual's ability to read, write, listen, speak, compute, and solve problems, at levels of proficiency necessary to function on the job, in the family of the individual, and in society.’ This definition is very similar to the one I brought in to class (http://law.justia.com/us/cfr/title20/20-3.0.2.1.37.0.16.3.html), but has a few modifications that I think are important. I feel like it still does not include all the important issues of literacy, but is a great basic way to define the term.

I believe providing “effective literacy instruction” to diverse learners means to know how to teach with multiplies strategies, and having the knowledge to recognize and modify a lesson when it will benefit a student. In my field placement (kindergarten) I see the teacher modifying how she teaches phonemic awareness between the different groups during centers. She has grouped students together that she believes learn in the same way. I have not been able to see if this is effective because I have nothing to compare it too. It would be hard to use Scrapblog with these kindergarteners because they have a hard time with the alphabet games they play on the computer now. However, I think Scrapblog could be used in the classroom as a resource that could be sent to the parents. I think parental involvement is so crucial in the learning process, since teachers are not with the students all the time. As a teacher I may make Scrapblogs for each unit, so parents can understand what students are learning and ways to help. Since all families do not have computers or the digital literacy of accessing the scrapblog I could make copies to send home, along with sending out the email version.

Scrapblog was really fun to explore during this project and will be useful to know in the future. It allowed you so much freedom to develop the pages just as you imagined. I think this was a great way to display numeracy because it allowed me to give examples of numeracy problems, with pictures. I could use this in a future classroom to introduce new math topic/ numeracy because it allows the students to visualize what is happening when I saw a term like “subtract” or “take away.” Also, I think Scrapblog has many other possibilities than numeracy. From viewing other peoples new literacy projects that used scrapbook, I saw how effective it was at presenting environmental and cultural literacy.

Reflection on New Literacy

My concept of literacy has changed a great deal since the beginning of this class. Originally I thought that literacy was reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I thought that I was clever to include all for of these things because I thought that most people would only think of reading and writing. My definition then began to evolve into even more fields. My next step was including the idea that other knowledge can be literacy as well. My first big literacy break through was when I began to see that technology was a part of literacy. With the literacy project, I then realized that literacy is almost never ending in what it can contain. Literacy is knowing and understanding something to the point where you can effectively communicate it in some way to others. It is funny to me how my definition was very sort in the beginning of this class and began to get more specific in the middle, and is now broad again. Although my definition is broad, I feel that it includes much more than my previous definitions with an even better idea of what literacy is. Literacy really is diverse and it is in this diversity that we as teachers can find ways to appeal to all students’ interests and make them functional literate students.

I believe that effective literacy instruction to diverse learners involves what I just said before. My project was a wiki about environmental literacy. It was a lot different than projects I have done in the past because it I was dealing with something that I had not considered part of literacy. I had to break my paradigm of literacy and reform it to include virtually any topic. I think that if the students in my class had to use my wiki, they would have an easy time because the topics are pretty easy to find answers to questions that you have about environmental literacy. It is pretty much just click and read, which my fourth grade class does currently. In terms of making the page, I think that they would have a hard time. I have seen them in the computer lab and they have a hard time figuring out where things are and where documents are stored. There also is no spell check, so they would have to upload documents which are where the challenge comes in for them. Also the set up of the typing is different from word and would be problematic for them. They would need to be able to read and write of course, which everyone in the class can do. The students are where they need to be for the technology requirement because they can type and complete tasks with the computer. In later grades, I think that making the wiki page is an attainable goal. If they wanted to do one now I would have them pick a subject as a group and subdivide the subject. Then I would have them each research one part of the subject and type up what they wanted to say including any clipart they wanted to add. Then I would upload it into a wiki format. Learning this technology fits with my current conception of literacy because it is a means to communicate information which is a major component of literacy.

Reflection on My New Literacies Project

I feel that this project definitely expanded my knowledge on the components of emotional literacy and the multipurpose aspect of blogs. What I genuinely liked about my project was the easy accessibility of blogger.com; it would be very easy for my current field placement students to explore a similarly structured website and to understand blogs' multiple possibilities. This project also surprised me because my preconceptions on effective literacy exercises were false. For example, prior to this project, I felt that assigning a specific question for a blog would be the best forum for students to maximize their literacy potential. However, upon further exploration of a variety of blogs, I realized that broadly-based blogs produced the most metacognitive and interactive posts; narrowly focused blogs produce little to no emotional literacy. Thus my understanding of literacy exercises expanded through this project.

It was also interesting for me to see how the 'traditional literacies' of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing are intertwined with emotional literacy. Even though emotional literacy is primarily defined through individual metacognition, my blogging project reinforced that the 'traditional literacies' often catalyze emotional literacy. For instance, in "The Messy Mom" blog, the writer discusses her everyday life through writing, video clips, etc; she captures memorable moments with photos for her audience to view and she recounts discussions/interactions with friends and family. As stated in my powerpoint, the act of writing inherently promotes metacognition; thus blogging allows a writer to explore traditional literacy while catalyzing self-analysis of their emotional literacy. 

Based on my argument in the second paragraph, it could be argued that traditional literacies could serve as an ample forum for emotional literacy; why is it necessary to utilize blogs? I genuinely feel that blogs do allow for a much broader audience as opposed to handwritten diaries or letters. Because blogs allow for a much broader audience, they potentially allow for a much greater pool of constructive criticism. Blogs also give writers much more accessibility in terms of expressing themselves, such as the option of quickly creating a photo essay or uploading multiple videos to create a post. Thus I would argue that reflective blogs are an invaluable tool for fostering emotional literacy and vice versa.

Importance of Comprehension

The school I went to for 1-8 grade had an incredibly rigorous curriculum. Students were expected to read and write before entering the first grade. I could not. I was struggling to keep up with my reading group that was the lowest group and only had four out of 36 kids in it. I was trying so hard just to get the words that the meaning was almost an impossible goal to reach. Since I couldn’t construct a meaning, all of the comprehension questions were lost on me. I was hard enough for me to get meaning from a sentence, let alone an entire story. We were also tested in every grade with the Iowa Basics Tests. This is a little unusual because normally they don’t test you every year, but my school made an exception. I had a really hard time with these tests and usually fell below the normal curve, well below the averages of my class. I feel that the ability to read the passages and questions was a large part of this. Once my reading skills improved and I was better with comprehension, my other scores in math and science went up as well. I believe Gibbons is right in his emphasis on comprehension. It is a very complex thinking process that students need to master to be literate.
Now my comprehension skills are pretty good when i am reading passages or stories. I still have trouble picking out the main idea when it comes to textbooks with lots of information in small amounts of space. To me, it all seems very important, especially if it is new. So, when I am in my first bio class, I will take hours to read one chapter because I am really trying to remember everything because I really don’t understand what will be important later in the field. I usually refer to this as the pitfall of novice understanding where surface knowledge of a subject is being attained along with a deeper meaning. I feel that sometimes professors, being experts, forget that when you are new to a field, it is hard to sort out what is important. But, I digress because my thoughts on this subject could go on for a long time.In my classroom at Marble elementary school, I think that my students are being set up for good comprehension. There are literature circle roles where there is a passage picher, word wizard, summarizer, illustrator, connector, and discussion director. Each literature circle has one of each and the students rotate roles on a weekly basis. For all of their readings, each student does something dependent on their role. Word Wizards make notes of unknown words and look them up, making lists for their group. Each role teaches the student a different part of comprehension. I think that this is a very good idea because students take it seriously because their whole group depends on them. I would like to use a similar idea in my own classroom because it doesn’t bog the student down with all the responsibilities of comprehension, and it also allows them to work with the individual aspects and master them separately so that they can do them all for themselves later on.