Literacy project reflection blog

When I walked into this literacy class I thought of literacy as reading and writing. In a classroom I always thought of teachers teaching literacy through reading to a class and having them complete a written response to assess their comprehension. I never thought about teaching literacy through the literacy topics we discussed in class. When I explored my own project on cultural literacy, I learned how I can teach my students about different cultures. I even learned that cultural literacy is more than just cultures like Asian American, Mexican American, African American, etc. Through my project I learned that it is beneficial to teach children about different cultures such as the down syndrome community and autistic community because many students will encounter a student with a disability at least one year in school.
At this point in the year I am thinking like an educator. Whenever we discuss topics in class around the idea of literacy development, I am constantly thinking of ways that I could create a lesson around that idea so my students stay engaged and motivated to learn. Through this course, and conferences I have attended this past semester, I have also learned about many new technologies that I can use in my classroom to provide additional resources in literacy development for students. Through our literacy projects I have learned about websites that allow a person to create scrapblogs, blogs, and even creating your own website. These resources allowed me to think about how I could use these in my classroom one day. Websites would be perfect for communication with students and parents at home and in school hours where you could provide links to websites that are beneficial to student learning. Scrapblogs can be used to present information in a very creative and eye catching way to students and parents. Finally, blogs can be used to communicate with parents in the community, and also with students as another resource for writing practice. There is just so much a teacher can do with literacy instruction. MSU has provided many classes to prepare me to break that just “reading and writing” barrier and incorporate so much more into literacy instruction for my future students.
To provide “effective literacy instruction” to diverse learners means to create a lesson around the GLCES that can be modified for all learners. Since teachers need to perform around the GLCEs they can create many different types of lessons to make sure all students are learning to their full potential. For example, if a teacher needs to teach comprehension, many lessons can be made to center on testing students’ comprehension. Teachers could have students take mini quizzes after reading and fill out charts as they read to test text to text, text to self, text to world comparisons. Teachers could also have students create a visual model to represent their book to appeal to the learners who are more hands on and can show their comprehension through art. In my 3rd grade classroom I have seen my CT use many different ways to teach and assess comprehension and spelling. She always gives her students options on projects/assignments that they can choose from to complete. My CT said that this flexibility allows for her students to choose the learning style that works best for them, but creates a little more work on the teacher. She said that in order to diversify assignments teachers need to be able to bend once in a while to make sure all here students are learning to their full potential.
If students in my 3rd grade were learning to use my technology that I explored through my literacy exploration project they would have to be familiar with using computers and accessing the internet. As a teacher I would have to bring my students to the computer lab many times before sticking them into a situation where they would have to go to a webpage and navigate through the components on the webpage. Also my students would have to be familiar with the vocabulary and words on the page in order to read and comprehend the information presented on the webpage. As a teacher I would have to make sure my students have some information on the topics discussed on the webpage in order to make sure that they can understand the information on a computer screen. Computers are also very distracting to some students so as a teacher you would have to make sure you set ground rules on how to act in computer labs and what is appropriate behavior when working on a computer. I think it would be too difficult to have my 3rd graders create a website on their own. With 30 students in a classroom you would need more than 1 teacher helping the students navigate through the site. Therefore, students could benefit from a website already made, gaining the information directly on the site, and clicking around to see all the tabs and graphics displayed. As a teacher I could do some pre-assessments and provided my students with a good background to what the website I created was about, and then I could provide my students with a worksheet to fill out to keep the students on track and provide a way for assessment.
Using the website Weebly to create my website was very easy and fun! I never knew that creating a professional website could be so simple! I really enjoyed how the Weebly allowed me to organize my information in tabs to create an easy was to navigate through the website. I also liked how the Weebly provided me with set templates where all I had to do was type in my information and it was all set up for me. I also liked that I could insert and delete a text box or picture whenever I needed. I never thought of accessing information on the internet as a form of literacy development. I think I was just stuck in my old way of thinking that literacy is plainly just reading and writing from a text. I really enjoyed how this project challenged us to think of literacy all around us and how we as future educators can come up with creative ways to display information to our students. I think it is very important for student to use technology for literacy instruction. In today’s world, we are all on the internet. It is very important that students learn how to navigate the internet so that teachers can do lessons on website, blogs, etc. The more comfortable students are with using assistive technologies, the more creative teachers can be with there lesson playing and the more engaged students will be in the classroom.