New Media & New Literacies

  This tool allows us to contact home in a more efficient and professional way. Parents may not have access to their email or they do not check their email often. Also, many teachers may not feel comfortable giving away their private phone number to try to contact home. This platform ensures that both parties are protected and respected.  Case Study 1: Parent Square Overview ParentSquare is a communication tool that can be used to interact with individuals or a mass amount of people. I am able to contact students or parents individually about behavior or grades. I can also contact the entire class/class parents about upcoming deadlines and important information.  User Engagement: Students, Teachers, and Parents communicate and respond to each other about extracurricular, in-class needs and important information.  Influence on Communication: This allows students to reach out for help if they are too shy to ask in front of the class or find themselves too shy to ask in...

 For most of my life, we focused on the primary method of writing, everything was on paper. Not until high school did teachers start applying the movies that were based on the book as well. Just about everyone has seen the Romeo and Juliet movie in their English class, it is hard for the students to relate to that because it is dated and the language is still Shakespearean. However, some of my English teachers have noticed that and have begun to modernize the curriculum to keep up with the changing generations.  Michael Hernandez takes the quote, "Pictures often say far more than words that describe them, especially metaphor, but they can sometimes bring a historical or cultural context into the discussion of writers and poets".  Students have a hard time trying to picture life from long ago, even if it truly wasn't that far back. I tend to find that they forget how modern life was and that they were not that far off from how we live today. Reading can only be interpreted...

 While I do not work with ELL students anymore, I found the interaction of an audio blog interesting and I plan on creating something for my general education students. I would like to use it as a means of planning out our writing assignments. Most of my students do not plan out their writing or have a fluid thought while writing, they "idea jump". However, the use of audio blogs could help them and each other hear what they plan on writing. Rather than write it down once and not think about the organization or grammar of the writing assignment. But the audio blogs just like all of their school work, require communication between the teacher and students. One of the quotes that stuck with me was when Hsu said, "The 'e-generation' is strongly motivated by the integration of technology". When educators think of our students as the "e-generation" we have the ability to do great things. We cannot teach the future generations based on past examples, we ...

 We need to reevaluate our views of literacy, Sang goes on to say "In conventional literacy education, students are taught to embrace and adapt to the official and standard forms of the target language, their diverse personalities, cultures, and language backgrounds are not relevant" (Sang 2017, 18). Our education system is meant to adapt to our students. Our diversity is an important part of our lives and we must embrace that as well as we can.  This is something that my school district struggles with, the majority of my district is white. The lack of diversity shows itself more when the students are being taught the varying cultures from around the world. As a Global 9 teacher, I have to cover the entire world except the United States, and this tends to cause many questions or have the students "weirded out" by the customs found in other countries. They often bring their own biases into the discussion which can be hard to combat. However, one major reason for thei...

    The world around us is ever changing, every day we are surrounded by technology and are constantly trying to expand our reach. There is no escaping literacy, from newspapers to books, to magazines, the "old literacy" is still around. But even when we don't surround ourselves with those types of literacy, the majority of Americans will have a form of technology that makes it impossible to escape literacy. Literacy is more than just reading and writing. "If we see literacy as  'simply reading and writing'...we cannot make sense of our literacy experience"  (Lankshear 2006, 2). Our curriculum is meant to prepare students for a life outside of the classroom. Which means that the students must work with information and resources that they will actually find out of school. This is where we need to incorporate multiliteracies into our lesson planning. Multiliteracies include the use of modes like "visual,  audio, spatial, behavioral, and gestural"...