Post for April 1-Vocabulary

While reading pages 237-240 in Tompkins (chapter 7) I was trying to think of ways that the students that I work with discussed/reviewed different vocabulary words as a class and I realized they rarely do! Last week was actually the first time I saw the students work in a group to go over and discuss words that were challenging from a book the teacher was reading aloud. They used a white board with a line down the middle, one side was the words beginning with "Sh" and the other side were the words beginning with "Ch". They were working on differentiating between the two starting letters/sounds. I could tell by observing them that they were enjoying the activity as they were able to write the words out on the whiteboard and work together. This was fun to see.

I also got to thinking about the reading program that their Internship Teacher (Ms. Showerman) and I do with the students. This program is designed to help the lowest leveled readers of our class. There are 7 students who are still at a first grade reading level so we work with them in 2 groups (be level), once a day, for a 1/2 hour in order to help them improve. During this time we read a short book alone, then together, and then we go through and review the vocabulary words we struggled with on at each page. While they are reading, I will have a white board in front of me and I will write down the words that they struggle with to remember which ones we for sure need to go over.
A lot of the time I notice the students struggle with the ending words such as "ing" or "ed", however when we break them apart and read them in different pieces, they do just fine. I think they have the mindset while reading that if the word looks longer, it is harder, so they struggle with words that have ending words. I have also noticed this program we've been doing with the students is helping them a lot. We have given them ways to recognize different sounds, like pinching your arm and saying "OUch" for "o" vowels, and we've taught them how to cover up the ending words in order to help them sound out each word, and overall they have grasped onto these quickly. I am excited to see how much they will progress by the end of the year! :)

I plan to use vocab for one of my reading instruction lessons, however I have not yet discussed with my mentor teacher what to do just yet.

New Literacies Project-Birnkrant

Originally, I thought the term literacy meant “being able to read and write" or "versed in literature or creative writing and having knowledge or competence.”  However, over the past few weeks and from our new literacy projects I realized that there are many different definitions of the word literacy.  For instance, cultural literacy refers to being able to understand different cultures.  Someone might be culturally literate if he or she can speak or translate a culture’s language or distinguish similarities and differences between certain cultures.  I think it is vital that teachers educate students on how everyone comes from a unique background and culture and that each culture is special in its own way.  Teachers can have discussions, read books that cover different cultures or learn and celebrate certain holidays or rituals from different cultures in the classroom. 

This project also helped me explore a new type of technology that I can envision myself using when I begin my teaching career.  The website that my group used was storybird.com, which allows students or teachers to create digital stories that can be viewed by anyone online.  The website also lets you record your voice telling the story if you choose to do so.  This technology is an easy and engaging way to teach certain lessons to students and it can also be used to test students’ knowledge about material learned in the classroom or make reflections in the form of stories. 

An important thing that teachers should consider is that classrooms tend to be made up of many diverse students and it is important that teachers cater to each of these students and their needs.  I think that trial and error is key when beginning to teach students from diverse backgrounds so that the teacher can determine what methods of teaching work best for his or her students overall.  Teachers should be familiar with various resources and means of technology to aid them in their lessons and effectively teach literacy to students. 

According to one of the Common Core Standards for third grade students should be able to “Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text” (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.2).  One way that students can use digital literacy to reach this goal is to be given class time to research the history of a story, fable, folktale or myth and then recount the story by making their own mini stories on the storybird website.  They could be told to incorporate a page that includes facts about the culture that they found on the Internet.  The teacher would have to make sure that the students first know how to use the Internet and how to search for different information on it.  They would have to understand the format of the website that they use and how to read it from left to right among other simple tasks.  By giving a brief discussion and/or review prior to having students use computers and the Internet would most likely be helpful for the students.  This project was really beneficial, because I now better understand what the word literacy means and can define it in different contexts.  I also now know how to use the website Storybird and look forward to using it in the future! 

(Sorry I originally posted this on the main New Literacies website so it is a little late on here)

New Literacies Project -Peel

Before beginning this project on Visual Literacy, I honestly was not aware of how important this concept of literacy is. When I first begin looking over my options to explore, visual literacy is what caught my interest and was something I knew I wanted to look farther into. However when exploring definitions of literacy, like the one I posted on February 11th, I was shocked to see how rarely the definitions included visual literacy. Because of this, I knew I wanted to explore this concept of Visual Literacy, to get a better understanding of how this topic fits into the definition of literacy. 
Visual learning is something we do from the day we are born as we watch those around us and learn from their actions. As time goes on we learn to recognize symbols, images, and objects, and we begin to understand their meanings and soon can recognize that they go hand-in-hand with communication. I now will know as a teacher, that if my students do not understand the meaning of what they see, then they will not be able to express their emotions or feelings through writing. I also learned the importance of having and using visuals all throughout the classroom and classwork. When students are taught both visually and verbally, they are much more likely to remember it. For instance, using graphs and charts allows students to show relationships between concepts and data, while also allowing them to make informed decision based on the material presented to them on the graph or chart. It's proven that most students need to see the information in order to learn it and as teachers this is important for us to know because now days we tend to stick to the text-book way of teaching and expect our students to read the information by themselves and then to understand everything.

After learning how important this topic of literacy is, it is important for me as a teacher to also remember and incorporate all the other concepts that go along with literacy into my planning, to provide 'effective literacy instruction'. When doing so, because of this project we had to do for TE402, I am now aware of several ways to complete these instructions using several of the technology examples provided by my classmates.

The cool thing about this project is that we were able to visually present our information on the topic of Visual Literacy using sliderocket. This is an intriguing way to capture the audiences attention, as they learn new information. Sliderocket also allowed us to incorporate a video into the project. This video is full of images that trigger our mind with thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, stories, etc. as we "read" the pictures full of symbols and objects. We also used pictures to represent what was being said through text in the project. For example, on slide 5 we placed a guy with a bright light bulb above his head. This can represent a new idea or can be a representation of the guy understanding whats being communicated to him. (An "ah-ha" moment!)

If the students in my placement were to be presented this information with this digital technology I used, they would first have to understand how to read the text given on the slides. They would also have to see a connection between the photos and that text given. Understanding that the information is presented in a "slide show" meaning they have to click the mouse to continue onto the next page to receive more information is also important according to their digital literacy skills. This idea of it being in a slide show is good for the students because the information that is presented is done so on their time, meaning they decide when they understand what is being presented and can go onto the next slide at their own pace. This gives the students time. The images presented on the last slide are set up in a way that tells a small story with the use of arrows between each image. With this being said, the students will need to use their visual literacy knowledge to comprehend the story these images are telling.
Along with the idea of digital literacy, in order for my students to develop visual literacy they will need to understand that they are visually learning all the time. When they see something, they communicate the message it's saying in their mind. For instance, a Starbucks symbol will relate to coffee, while a person facial expression can represent a feeling; sad, happy, angry, etc. To provide this support, it's important that a lot of visual are present in the classroom. This can range from classroom instructions, to flags, or to images of different cultures and places around the world. It's important that these images teach the students something.

March 18 New Lit Post-Kassab

My Understanding of literacy has changed since the beginning of the class because I did not realize that there are so many different types of literacy that need to be covered. All of them are so important to implement into your curriculum as a teacher because they affect a lot of apects inside and outside of the classroom that are significant to the student as a whole. The research on the new literacy and digital literacy informs my thinking because it makes you think openly about literacy and there are so many options and ways to incorporate it into your classroom. I learned a lot about different technologies that I previously didn’t know like aspects of certain websites or even learning completely new technologies that I have never even heard of. It is important to be able to recognize these different types of technologies because how advanced classrooms are becoming in the upcoming generations. Technology is a large part of it, and I was not well informed about a lot of these unique websites before that I would now consider using in my own classroom. My growth of what I understood and literacy and what I understand it as now has been significant. I normally thought of literacy as straight forward but there are so many levels and types of literacy that need to be taught and learned. They are also so important to ESL students to understand too. I see this as incorporating all of the literacies into one big idea of discussions. It seemed like a pretty common theme throughout and now I can see the importance of a good effective discussion.

Providing effective literacy instruction to diverse learners means to cover all areas of literacy, from reading, phonology, writing, encoding and decoding as well as comprehension. I think it is so important to provide a wide variety of literacy instruction so it is unique to all students because not one student is alike. I now know there is so much more to cover than in traditional literacies since we have the option of all types of technologies to help us provide students with. The skills expected for my students at my field placement grade level they should be able to: demonstrate and understand key details in text, recount stories from diverse cultures to determine a central theme, describe structure of a story, acknowledge different points of view from different characters, and overall by the end of the year read and comprehend literature as well as write opinions, informative/ explanatory texts, write narratives, revise and edit, use a variety of different digital tools to write and publish, and research and writing projects. There are so many different things that students need to be able to do in order to develop their digital literacy, for example just for starting knowing how to properly use a computer or a technology as well as the given program to get the full advantage from the technology. The support they need is proper instruction. Making sure the students are able to follow along and keep up with the given technology is important. For my new literacy of emotional literacy students need to know and understand what emotions are and which types go with what types of feelings. I think it is pretty straight forward, but students need to know how to properly describe and deal with the types of feelings they are having. The support they need would be to know that certain feelings are okay to have. There is no right or wrong feeling and students need to know this because sometimes they feel like it isn’t right to feel something like sadness. To provide this support I think that there are many different lessons and activities that could be done to show certain emotions and know how to properly express those feelings.

March 11th post

Noelle and I are working on Visual Literacy and we've decided to use SlideRocket to present the information we learn about! Until this project, I had honestly never explored or even heard of this type of digital technology. It's very similar to a powerpoint style, however it has a much different layout and thus far seems more interesting to use. This is a good source to use for teaching because it's not the standard textbook way, rather it's fun and enjoyable and can include images/videos/fun effects and designs. Sliderocket could be used as a good guide when presenting material. Meaning we could show each page and use the text provided as notes and include more information on the topic verbally.
On our topic of visual literacy I personally have learned a lot of new things. Besides realizing how important this concept is in literacy, I've learned ways to incorporate it into my classroom. Such as several visuals; charts, graphs, posters, pictures, text, font, etc. I also have learned that if students do not understand the meaning of what they see, then they are unable to write down their feelings and thoughts (visual literacy).

March 11th Post

My groups new literacy is emotional literacy. To show this type of new literacy our new technology is Prezi. It is some what like powerpoint but much more interactive. I really like this idea of new technology for the classroom because it is unique to anything I have seen before, and I can realistically see my students now in my second grade placement enjoying this. It is a very accessible tool and one of the easiest sights to use. I am not very technology savvy so this website is pretty awesome and the fact that I can manage it and work with it is very useful for me and my future classrooms. I am sure to find out more about my new literacy as we go on.