Illuminated Text Assignment

 

 

 Please click the link below to view my video:

 My Interpretation of the Poem "Watch"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week 2 Reading Assignment ~ NCTE Policy Briefs

Explain how the Multigenre & Mulitmodal assignment related to each of the readings.

Each of the following articles describes how literacy goes beyond the ability to read and write.  It includes interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, the ability to adapt to reading/writing genres proficiently and effectively, as well as to present ideas using various means and formats.

• Adolescent Literacy ~ Literacy involves more than just reading and writing.  It includes social and intellectual practices as well as new media (non-digitized multimedia, digitized multimedia, hypertext, etc).  To expand literacy skills, students must be permitted to draw from various discourse communities and be given real-world opportunities in which they can use their knowledge.  In other words, students must be exposed to all kinds of text (books, blogs, podcasts, websites, texting, social media sites, etc.) and be able to utilize these tools as they demonstrate their literacy abilities.

• Literacy Learning in the 21^st Century ~ Today’s workplace requires workers to be proficient in increasingly complex literary activities. Workers must be able create, critique, analyze, and evaluate literary text of various formats (e-mail, texts, digital media presentations, etc.). 

• Reading and Writing Differently ~ The ability to multitask has become a required skill in school and the workplace.  Literacy rarely occurs as an independent activity.  Even traditional reading is often completed while watching T.V., emailing, or web surfing.  Teachers must bridge connections between school and extracurricular reading and writing genres for students to become competent evaluators and producers of multimodal texts.

• Writing Now ~ The writing skills students have today require students to present information in multimodal formats.  Technological advances have changed workplace expectations and, thus, are changing the way we approach literacy instruction in the classroom.  Different writing tasks require different writing techniques and grammar standards.  Students need to be aware of the genre they are working with and format their writing accordingly. 

• Writing Outside of School ~ Writing papers are only one type of writing format.  Students build writing skills when they post on Twitter, text a friend, or write a movie review.  By knowing what types of writing students participate in outside of school, teachers can help their students build on the writing skills they already have and, as a result, better help students transition into more formal types of writing.  Teachers may also be able to better assess students’ abilities and increase student motivation by allowing students to perform tasks on online and digital media.

Describe three ways the readings changed or reinforced your thinking about the role of digital technologies/media in teaching children adolescents to read and write.

1. Students must be provided oppotunities to experience and practice the sharing of information using multiple formats including digital media.
2. In order for students to become competent, reflective, and critical literacy consumers, digital media instruction must be explicit and scaffolded to each student’s ability.
3. Using digital technology in the classroom increases student motivation and performance. (In my own classroom, reluctant students BEG me to write book summaries and conduct research if I allow them to use slideshows, graphics, or video media to present their information).

Find an example (i.e lesson plan or students work sample) of how other teachers are using digital technologies/media to support reading and writing in a content area like Math, Science, Social studies, Art, Music, Health, Family and Consumer Science

My example is a link to the video "Hula to High Tech: Hawaiian Students Re-Create History."  Within this 7 minute video, several teachers use digital technologies/media to support reading and writing in the classoom.

1. Kindergarten through sixth grade students use computers, audio, video editing programs, digital cameras, and word processing programs to create broadcasts for their school news channel (multisubject areas).
2. Computers are used to track the whereabouts of an adopted sea turtle (science).
3. Fourth grade students create a mutlimedia version of their family history (social studies).

Hula to High Tech: Hawaiian Students Re-Create History:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkIYArDbuCg&feature=share&list=EC1A80AFF51CE8015F

 

Resources:

National Council of Teachers of English. (2007).  Adolescent literacy.  Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEfiles/Resources/Magazine/Chron0907AdLitBrief.pdf

National Council of Teachers of English. (2009).  Literacy leaning in the 21^st century.  Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Magazine/CC0183_Brief_Literacy.pdf

National Council of Teachers of English. (2008).  Reading and writing differently.  Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CC/0182-nov08/CC0182Reading.pdf

 

National Council of Teachers of English. (2008).  Writing now.  Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Magazine/Chron0908Policy_Writing_Now.pdf

National Council of Teachers of English. (2009).  Writing outside of school.  Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CC/0191-sep09/Chron0191BriefWriting.pdf

 

My Multigenre and Multimodal Textual Lineage Video

 

Classroom Extention Activity

     I enjoyed this assignment so much, I tried it with my 2nd grade students today!  Each student summarized a picture book using five sentences.  They drew a cover and a picture for each sentence.  We uploaded the pictures into photostory and then they added their summaries.  This is an example of one child's work.

Digital Media Effects on Conventional Reading and Writing Practices

Does Digital Media Make Us Bad Writers?

I was surprised when I read Karp’s (2010) statement, “But maybe the most surprising thing to the gotcha gang is that while the type of error changed, the ratio of errors to words has held steady for more than 100 years” (para. 3).  I have been under the assumption that grammatical errors in writing have increased since the development of texting and social media sites.  In my own classroom, I have seen an increase of abbreviations (b/c, lol, bff, k, etc.) and misspellings in my students’ formal writings.  However, I had not taken into consideration that maybe grammatical errors haven’t increased but merely changed as stated in this article.

 

Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

It is very difficult for me to stay objective on this topic because I am such an avid reader.  Unlike television, I agree that “spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even brittneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text” (Rich, 2008, para. 8).  Some reading is better than no reading at all.  However, I believe reading novels is the best way to build reading comprehension and written language skills. 

 

Web Evangelist or Traditionalist?

• I believe I fall somewhere in the middle of the Web Evangelist and Traditionalist continuum.  While I strongly endorse the reading of novels, I do realize that education (as well as literacy) is transforming into something completely new.  By 2020, the research firm, CompTIA, projects that the total number of IT jobs in the United States will jump by 22 percent (Sampson, 2013).  Digital literacy, the ability to use technology, communication tools or networks, to locate, evaluate, use, and create information (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008), will be an essential skill our students need.  However, I do not believe it should come in expense to deep, reflective reading skills developed by novel reading. 

• The article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” supports my belief that reading novels is still an important reading skill.  In this article, Nicolas Carr states that his mind is changing.  He use to find reading books or lengthy articles easy and would spend many hours thinking about the writing style.  Now after reading only a few pages, he can no longer concentrate.  He contributes this to the availability of instant research through digital means.  While he acknowledges that this instant flow of information has its advantages, Carr believes it has also come at a price.  Rather than delving into information, the internet has encouraged “skimming” techniques.  Digital media offers a different kind of reading and therefore requires a different type of thinking.  With digital media, “Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged” (Carr, 2008, para. 8).   This is why I believe I fall into the middle spectrum of the Web Evangelist-Traditionalist debate.  I think we should take a balanced approach to teaching literacy.  Our students need the best of both worlds in order to succeed in the new digital world.

• Is Google Making Us Stupid?

References

Carr, N. (2008, July 1). Is google making us stupid? [Blog]. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Karp, J. (2010, Jan. 26). Does digital media make us bad writers? [Blog]. Retrieved from http://spotlight.macfound.org/featured-stories/entry/does-digital-media-make-us-bad-writers

Rich, M. (2008). Literacy debate: Online, r u really reading? New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Sampson, T. (2013). Software developers expected to see the highest IT job growth come 2020. [Blog]. Retrieved from http://www.infoworld.com/t/it-jobs/software-developers-expected-see-the-highest-it-job-growth-come-2020-212709

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (2008). What is digital literacy? Retrieved from http://www.library.illinois.edu/diglit/definition.html

Introduction

About Me

My name is Kasondra Gorman and I teach 2^nd grade in Upshur County.  In this class, I hope to learn practical ways to incorporate digital media into my 2^nd grade classroom.

Literacy Video

21st Century Literacy

Comic

Citations

jjkeigher29, . 21st Century Literacy. 2012. Video. YouTube, United States. Web. 20 May 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGTl-OdkVIE>.

Welsh, Amy. The DetRiotGirl interviews The Social Networks!. 2011. Graphic. detriotgirl.com, New York. Web. 20 May 2013. <http://detriotgirl.com/wp/?cat=83>.