New Literacy Reflection-Cultural Literacy

When we first started this experiment I felt that literacy was many things but my definition did not include any of the new literacy’s we were to learn about. I knew that culture played a role in instruction of Literacy however it was not on my sheet. I feel that after this project I have a greater understanding for what Cultural Literacy is, how it could potentially affect my teaching, and how detrimental it would be to a student if you did not understand/ know about Cultural Literacy. I gained his understanding by researching Cultural Literacy for the New Literacies experiment, and also by so of the readings/ discussion we have done in class. We have read a few articles on ELL students and their classroom experience involving literacy and the classroom discussions we had on those articles really helped me to think about what I would like to do to teach ELL students in my classroom, and this is how I came up with what I was going to do for the New Literacies Project.
For my project I decided to make a web page for future teachers that explains what Cultural Literacy is, how it may affect your classroom, and what some cultural norms of specific cultural groups are. The thought I do this is that future teachers will then understand what cultural literacy is and beginning thinking about how they would set up their classroom community/ teaching to respect the cultural norms of all students. I choose to create a web page because I thought I could be a useful tool for teachers everywhere to be able to access this information.
This Technology was new to me I had never before made a web page. However, I found the Google page creator to be a very helpful tool. It was very easy to pick the layout and background and then just add my information to the site. If you are using this site you need to have a google email address and password, which I already have, but to get one you just go to gmail.com and set one up. This email address becomes the beginning of the URL or link to your page once you publish your page. I was very worried that when I got done the site would not look professional and to “homemade” Looking. However, I was very happy with how it turned out it looks professional it is helpful. I really liked this project because it made me use a tool I had not yet used.
In thinking about how I could use this technology in my classroom I thought back to experiences my 1st grade students have had. I remembered them going to the library computer lab at the school and the librarian used a smart board to help them walk through the process of signing on finding their page and using it to go to reading games. I thought this was very interesting because I had never seen such young kids using the Internet. To use this technology I believe students need to have at least an Idea of how to do it (i.e. having watched someone do it). I also believe that students need to already have some computer knowledge such as some keyboarding and using a mouse for scrolling, clicking, double clicking and just simple navigation around the screen with it. It would also be very helpful to a student to be able to read so that they can follow the prompts given by the computer (i.e. Type user name and password then click enter). In creating a page a student would also need to be able to type/ write, therefore needing an understanding of keyboarding, spelling, and grammar. I don’t think that in first grade students would be able to find and view web pages on their own let alone build their own without help. I do think that allowing students in older grades to do this would be lots of fun. We talked a lot about book clubs and how cool would it be fore different groups to read different books and think about their roles while reading then make a web page about the book discussing the plot, vocab, characters, questions that occurred while reading all of the roles that hey had while reading and then to share them with each other and the class. I think that a lesson like this would be very helpful to students today who use the internet so often because it would allow them to see how web sites are made make there own and see what web sites can be used for. Very powerful stuff and very important to our technology age.