For my New Literacies Project I chose to do a scrapblog about visual literacy. I had never used a scrapblog before and so navigating through this took a bit of time but eventually I was able to become proficient in using this technology. I had some technical difficulties and had to contact their web-help, but was able to get my blog completed. In order to use this program you need to have a basic understanding of the internet, knowledge of how to upload photos, as well as time, just to explore the technology’s many functions and applications.
As for my growth in my understanding of literacy, my knowledge has greatly expanded. I had begun with only a very basic sense of literacy (reading, writing, listening, viewing, and speaking). However after doing my own project as well as viewing others, I am now able to see and understand that literacy comes in a variety of forms and is not as limited as I had previously believed. In addition, the discussions we have had in class have also informed my new view on literacy. Literacy is everywhere and becoming literate can greatly impact a person’s daily life. For me I had always thought literacy was only something that took place inside the classroom, but learning about visual literacy helped me realized what a huge impact it has on people everyday. Where my previous definition included viewing as a part of literacy, doing research on visual literacy greatly expanded my perception of this type of literacy. It’s not just looking at pictures in a book, but it is signs, symbols, and charts, any sort of image that relays a message without using words or in conjunction with words.
Additionally, learning about a technology itself I feel is another form of literacy—“technological literacy”. There are certain skills and abilities you need to have in order to be able to navigate through a new technology. As I mentioned earlier, using a scrapblog involves knowing about the internet, how to upload photos, as well as reading and writing skills; for other technologies there may be different skills sets necessary.
If the students in my first grade classroom were learning to use the scrapblog, there are various skills and knowledge they would need to have in order to be successful. Knowledge of how to run a computer, how to use the internet and how to upload pictures are the technological skills they would need to have. They would also need to develop strong reading, writing, viewing, and listening skills in order to even navigate to the proper page, not to mention create a project using scrapblog. This technology involves typing in URLs but also typing information on a page. Furthermore it involves being able to read instructions or viewing and understanding the symbols on the webpage. This kind of learning could be incorporated into my classroom through-whole class instruction in a computer lab where we learned about the different aspects of the computer and the internet. We would also need to continue instruction in reading and writing skills, however we could practice these skills somewhat authentically be viewing other appropriate scrapblogs where students would have to practice reading and viewing images. We could then practice writing captions or short pieces of writing in order to be able to better suit the writing style associated with scrapblogs. It would take a lot of time and work but with proper and effective literacy instruction, I think students would be able to learn about and use this technology.
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I do not know how, what , or where I got this from but when I was reading your blog; moreover, the section about how literacy is everywhere from inside the classroom and outside the classroom the first thing that popped into my head was how much literacy is non-verbal.
I really liked the section of your blog where you talked about how literacy affects a person’s daily life because after this project I really started to notice how much literacy influences my everyday life. In the café this week there was a horrible outbreak of food poisoning. In order to get the message I needed to have a background in visual literacy (finding the power button on the computer icons on the desktop relating to the email) and several other areas of literacy in order to comprehend the email.
I am glad to see that we had similar experiences in growing knowledge for understanding literacy and I feel that a lot of our class learned more about the literacy’s than they did about the technology.
To answer your question about teaching in a school that did not provide many technological opportunities for their students there are a couple of things a teacher could do. I am very fortunate that as a teacher I could provide a classroom computer for the students to use, granted that would only allow 1 or 2 students to the computer at a time it is still better than nothing. The other thing a teacher could do would be to demonstrate how the technologies work using a projector. The hardest part about teaching new technology is having the technology that you wish to teach about. There are different resources you can go about acquiring technology from cheep deals on ebay to government sponsored programs that require the teacher to follow specific guidelines.
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