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.