New Literacies Blog

1. Conceptual Understanding 
My understanding of literacy has changed since the beginning of this class. Prior to this class, if you asked me what a literate person was, I would probably just tell you someone who can read. Now I have changed that understanding to include not only to read a book, but the ability to read all types of text in many different forms. In order to be literate you must be able to make choices that are benificial based on information you find from various types of texts. Researching about environmental literacy helped me to think about how we make choices based on information we have read about the earth and environment. In order to make these decisions we cant just look outside and make these decisions. In order to learn about the environment, we must be able to record what we see (make observations), research the topic in many different ways, and make a decision. In order to make an observation you must write down what you see about something. In order to research a topic, you cant just read one book and call it a day. It is important to read from many different resources. From books, journals, articles, online sources, data tables, etc. Then you must be able to comprehend this information and think about how it relates to what we do each day that helps/hurts the environment. Making these connections between information and facts is what is key in enviromental literacy so that students can gain understanding of the consequences of their actions on the environment. Understanding a new digital literacty informed by thinking because I realized I had to take time to explore before I could master the program. Kelli and I spent time before we even began the project, just exploring the Prezi program. Finding out what buttons did what, and what the options were for presentations. This helped us to gain a background knowledge on what Prezi offered, so we could make a decision on how to use it most effectively. Using the digital literacy was different that a traditional literacy becuase we had to explore before we could understand and be literate at it. For example, a book is just page after page, if you can turn the page, read left to right and top to bottom, you can read the whole book. Digital literacies are not always so simple. It takes more practice, exploration, and time to understand a new literacy like this. 

2. Classroom Implications
I think that in order to provide effective literacy instruction to diverse learners you must expose them to many different types of literacy. This will help them to be literate in many aspects and understand how to navigate many different programs and texts. It is important to provide students with many different digital literacies because they may like one over the other at it fits their learning style best. Using different types of literacy instruction will help your students to be diverse learners. It will also help students who learn differently and are diverse to experience many ways of presenting information. When doing my literacy lesson at my placement I had students make connections based on text features between different genres of text. They had to practice strategies of navegating different types of text. The students in 4th grade are expected to be able to navagate these different texts and be able to understand that they are saying. 

Digital Literacy: In order for students to be able to develop a digital literacy using prezi they would need to having typing and basic computer skills. The website can be a little tricky, so I think it would be important to model how to create/navigate throug ha prezi. Just like anything else you teach students, they must have some prior knowledge along with scaffolding in order to be successful. In order to provide this support for my students, I would have students watch me give Prezi's, put the prezi up on the projector, and also have students do a scavenger hunt to get to knwo the Prezi website so they can learn how to use it. I can also watch tutortial videos on youtube, etc. 

New Literacy: Students need to know and be able to do many things in order to be enivornmental literate. They need to know about environmental science and our planet. They need to know that Earth is special and we can not live without many of the things on it, but we have to be careful because the Earth does not have unlimited supplies. Since the Earth has limited supplies, we must be careful to use less and to save as much as we can. Students must also have to make connections between their use of products and the decline of the environment. They must understand that it is important that the environment is clean so it is safe for us to live in. Students will have to be able to make important decisions, recognize how they can change to save the environment, and be able to decode graphs and texts in order to develop their environmental literacy. In order for students to do this they must recognize the things they are doing that hurt the environment and understand why the environment is changing. I would do this by showing them many exampels, experiments, and models of the world that pertain to the environment. They can also research about the problems with the Earths environment and come up with ways that they themselves can do so lesson the problem.