New Lit Reflection

Nicole Lendo

I believe that my understanding of literacy has grown exponentially. I feel that now I am aware of so many literacies (in depth) that are just as important as reading and writing literacy, but are often overlooked. I feel like I started this class believing that one could be literate in reading and writing (kind of) and then these literacies had components such as various concepts and comprehension (see concept map). As the class continued, I realized that there are more literacies than just reading and writing, such as cultural literacy, social literacy, economic literacy, environmental literacy, historical literacy, etc. I think that learning about these new literacies has changed my view on language arts because it has made the spectrum of language arts so much broader, encompassing so many other things aside from books and journals. I feel like you can still complete the language arts benchmarks and standards while incorporating all of these other types of literacies on top of reading and writing. After completing this new literacies project and observing my peers’ projects as well, I have learned a number of new technologies that can be used to teach these various literacies.
At first I wanted to do social literacy, but cultural literacy was just as interesting, so I (along with my group members) decided to explore cultural literacy using interactive maps. We wanted to do something that would be beneficial for our peers, so we decided to create an interactive map of beginning teachers’ salaries and average teaching salaries from various places in the US. This technology could also be used though in all of elementary school, from K to 5. I believe that in early elementary school, the teacher could use this to create a map about herself, create maps about her students (where they are from, where the school is, etc.), or create maps to show students different parts of the world (the students could even pick the places and the teacher could map out where they are). I think in upper elementary, students will be able to create map on their own, as early as 3rd grade. They could create their own autobiographical map, create maps that they can use to study countries, cities, capitals, etc. for social studies, or create maps to map out the places they would like to go. Students could create a map as a class, mapping our different cities and then writing their favorite facts about their own designated city. By using these interactive maps, cultural literacy is achieved because you will build and see a connection between the cultural aspects of each location and where it is on the map. By using an interactive map, you can browse from place to place with ease, which enables quick comparisons among locations and cultures, as well as developing the classroom community by building on the cultural literacy among the students in the class.
I think that providing effective literacy instruction means that you are providing your students with a vast amount of literacies and showing them various ways (like the different technologies we researched) to explore these literacies. I think it is important for teachers to set up their students with the tools and knowledge that will make them successful, regarding all types of literacy and I think that the new technologies can aide them in doing so. I think that the only support learners would need, would be a brief introduction that described how to use interactive maps. Students need to know the basics of operating a computer as well as knowledge of the locations that they would like to map out. This process would also include describing how to click on the place you would like and note where the dialog box is, and that it about it.
Overall, I think that this technology is extremely easy to use so it will be beneficial for the teacher to use, the students to use, and for the class to observe while it is being used. I personally don’t like maps or directions or anything like that, because I am TERRIBLE at reading them- however, this technology was very easy for me to use and it was actually fun. I hope that the students will feel that same way, excited to use the interactive maps, regardless of how they feel about maps, directions, or Social Studies in general. Although this could be used and focused on in Social Studies, Language Arts would also be prevalent in every aspect of the map because as you pick your places on the map, you can include a write up of each place, write stories about the places, poems, or really anything.