New Literacy

1) What am I learning about the new literacy I am researching?

• Review the definitions of literacy (see sidebar) that you and your colleagues posted.  How does becoming 'literate' in the area you are investigating compare and contrast with these definitions? Reviewing the definitions my colleagues have posted of being literate in the area we are investigating differs from my definition since I developed mine from the view point of a teacher whereas I think some of theirs are more in the eyes of a learner. I tried to think of how I would be incorporating this new vocabulary into my career as a teacher. We all came to the same root understanding of visual literacy, just had different points of view of them.
• What part, if any, do the traditional literacies (reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing) play in becoming literate in the area you are investigating? Reading begins with visual literacy as students associate words with visual cues which leads to letter recognition and then to word recognition and so on to develop sentences. Signs and symbols (stop signs, restroom symbols, etc) are alternatives to writing out words for convenience, a faster way to get across information, and as a more universal language than using one specific language. Visualizing doesn’t involve speaking or listening as much since it is viewing.
• What new content are you learning as you become more familiar with this literacy? What new skills and strategies are you learning as you become more familiar with this literacy? I was interested in learning about visual literacy since it is not something I’ve spent much time thinking, researching, or learning about. Through this, I realized how much of the world around me is made up of visual literacy and its importance in my everyday activities. Driving through town, I read signs that are wordless to know where to go and what lane to drive in. Dropping books off at the library, pictures show me how to insert the books in the return bin properly. Arrows placed at the entrance and exit of restaurants help avoid confusion and accidents in the parking lots. In education classes I gathered that it was important to have visuals available for students who are visual learners, ASL students, or just for reference, but now I understand the critical need to teach students how to read visual literature.
• What surprises have you experienced during your exploration?  As stated above, I didn’t realize how much of the world around me was influenced and convenienced by visual literature.
• Think about the students in your field placement.  If they were exploring this new literacy, what support would they need in order to become literate in this area?  Is this type of literacy already present in the curriculum at that grade level, or would this be a new learning area for the students?  Being that they are in first grade, they have already begun to associate pictures and words together, however, they struggle with using pictures in picture books to helping them read. I think kids learn early on to use pictures to assist reading and word decoding, but the reverse helps as well, reading and developing pictures. They are learning about summaries right now and drawing pictures from sentences they read could be really useful for them in organizing the story plot, events, characters, and leading into a summary.
• What else are you learning about your new literacy? I am noticing how integrated the other literacies are as I continue to research visual literacy.

2) What am I learning about how my digital literacy is developing as I use a new technology to create my product?

• Are you using reading, writing, speaking, listening and/or viewing in new or different ways when you use this technology? If so, how?  I am using all of those techniques in learning about my technology since I am completely new to mixbook. I have had to read the help tips on how to put the scrapblog together, write out an outline of what I want, I called Kelly from class to ask how she was structuring her mixbook and ask for some help, I listened and viewed the tutorial on youtube.com to also help me understand this new technology.
• What do you find especially challenging and why? Mixbook.com has so many options that it is hard to pick a theme to begin with and get started. There are so many different ways to create a scrap page, to change colors, add text, add pictures that I struggled with being overwhelmed with choices.
• How well do you think you are able to use this technology as a medium to teach about your new literacy? Now that I have one scrapblog under my belt, I think it would be much easier to use a second time around. For a lesson on genealogy or family this method would be great! The risk of losing, ripping, or finger smudging pictures would be diminished and everyone would be able to see this kind of presentation at once. How are you able to take advantage of its features to communicate your ideas? With lots of options, I can choose the text that stands out as far as size, shape, color or position as well as which pictures get put in and where. What limitations does this technology have in helping you communicate your ideas? Animations and sound aren’t available to add in so tying visualization in with other forms of literacy isn’t an option in this particular program to my knowledge.
• Which aspects are the same as when you use more traditional forms of print such as reading books or writing papers to communicate your ideas?  The structure of the scrapblog is much like a book and the text appearance is much like it appears in a paper.
• What else are you noticing as you work with this technology? The option to save this scrapblog to your own computer is not a convenient option as far as I see which makes me a little nervous for fear that my internet could disconnect and I could lose all my work!
• If students in your field placement classroom were learning to use the technology you explored, either as content readers or authors, what knowledge, skills, and strategies in reading, writing, speaking, listening and viewing would they need to develop in order to be successful? My students would need to have a very organized, clear, and detailed plan on what they were going to create their scrapblog on, what they were going to include as far as pictures and words because it can be overwhelming with so many options if you don’t have a clear idea of what to do. How would you incorporate that learning in your language arts curriculum and instruction?  The first part of the lesson we would develop an outline together as a class and the first scrapblog they did would all be on the same topic like “Our Class” for example so they could help each other, exchange ideas, and relate to each other.