Kayla's New Literacy Reflection

Through doing this new literacies project I have been able to realize that literacy is all around us. I have been learning and interacting with literacy before I even began to read. I was learning cultural knowledge from my parents, visual images have surrounded me since I first opened my eyes, and many other forms. At the beginning of this project I thought that new literacy was simply going to be about viewing text with technology. Even through my definition of new literacy I focused on the digital aspects and not all of the different literacies. I now realize that literacy is not only text focused. Although we interact with text very often, we as learners, interact with lots of forms of literacy that do not involve text. With the increasing use of technology my students are interacting with literacy in more ways than I was able to at that age. They have more resources. As a teacher, I think it was important for me to realize technology as a great resource for students to interact with literacy in new ways. Technology can not only help students learn facts through text but they can interact with images, emotions, society and much more. There is no way for me to become efficient in all of the technological tools that are around today. However, I think that simply working with technology on a regular basis and continuing to try to learn about the different programs will increase my own digital literacy. Having strong abilities to work with and learn about new technology will help me teach my students in many different ways.

I am more aware of what skills it takes students to interact with the many forms of literacy. Being able to interact with images, emotions, environments, etc is so very important in many aspects of life. For example, I had no idea the implications of not having sufficient cultural literacy knowledge. This could drastically change the way a student is able to communicate in society. A huge purpose of traditional text is to communicate information and students will be losing out on important information if they are only skilled in traditional text and not all forms of literacy.

By searching through many of the new literacies projects I learned that there are a lot of ways to “effectively teach” these new literacies. I think that the most effective way of teaching are for the lessons to be individualized to each classroom/student. Although all the groups did a fantastic job giving ideas and examples of how to teach new literacies in the classroom I think that each lesson would need to be altered to fit in each classroom. However, I do notice that a lot of the example lessons are student-centered which I think is a great way to keep students interested and learning. I think that effective teaching is done through multiple modes of learning. For example, the lesson can incorporate technology and traditional text. By exploring my peers’ websites,  I think there needs to be an appropriate balance been written text and images, videos, technology for the students to interact with. All of our projects were very interactive which gives the learners more autonomy for their own learning. I think this is an important aspect of student-centered learning. Students need to be able to explore and interact with the knowledge they are learning in order to fully conceptualize the information.  The article K-2 Children’s Use and Understanding of the Internet by Dodge, Husain and Duke helped me further understand the importance of students interacting with technology at a young age.

Another article that I found very helpful was, Kymes teaching online Comprehension Strategies Using Think-Alouds. I think this article had a lot of good ideas on how to help students interact with technology and build their digital literacy. There needs to be an appropriate balance between students working with technology alone (exploring) as well as receiving the support that they need to be able to extract the appropriate information from the technology. For example, in my classroom I would want to go over the different aspects of the website or tool that I want them to explore. As a class we would go over the important and useful aspects and then I would let the students explore on their own while walking around and answering any questions they might have. I might also try to point certain aspects out to the students as I walk around to point them in the direction of helpful tools.

As for visual literacy in the classroom I think the students need to be taught metacognition. Students have been interacting with images since they first opened their eyes and I would want them to be able to notice how they interact with images so that they can strengthen this skill. For example, I would show them images that create positive feels and then show them images that would create negative feelings and have them discuss, as a class, how these images portray this emotion. Students need to figure out these relationships on their own but will need support as they go. The support that I would provide would be giving prompts and asking discussion questions but not interfering with the discussion. I would not try to explicitly teach megacognition but I would ask questions that would get students thinking about how they are interpreting the images.