Literacy Exploration Project: Emotional Literacy & Website Technology

I feel like my conceptual understanding of literacy has changed since the beginning of TE 402. In the beginning of the semester I use to think that literacy just had to deal with writing, reading or expressing oneself on paper. Later, I realized that I was wrong. Throughout the semester I learned about book talks, classroom discussions, making connections, building upon prior knowledge, picture walks, comprehension strategies and choral reading. By reading chapters in Tompkins I learned the importance of incorporating reading, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, literature, content-area study, oral language, writing and spelling into children’s literacy instruction in the classroom. After having the opportunity to work on a new literacy’s project for this class I have learned even more about literacy. I have learned that there are so many different types of literacy’s such as emotional, cultural, environmental, print, digital, visual, social and numeracy. Without having emotional literacy people would not be able to detect others feelings or know the proper way of expressing feelings to others. It is so important that teachers include these types of literacy’s in their classroom in order for students to become exposed and to live a healthier life.

When I first started the project, I needed to take a digital natives quiz. After taking the quiz I noticed that I was a digital immigrant and needed to force myself to learn about new technologies. The only technologies I knew about were blogs, emails, instant messenger and the use of the Internet. I decided to learn how to create a webpage as my new technology. I have always wanted to learn how to make one but previously thought it was too difficult and never tried until this assignment. It took me a while to finally figure out how to design the webpage but towards the end I felt like I had mastered it. After creating my webpage about emotional literacy I realized how important and useful a webpage could be for teachers. If teachers had their students create webpages in the classroom they would be able to share them with other students throughout the building while having fun using the computer. Technology is extremely important to integrate into the curriculum. Technology will affect the way I will teach literacy in my future classroom. It opened my eyes to using webpages, blogs, wiki, digital storytelling, powerpoints and many other literacy technologies that I can use in my classroom. If I create a classroom webpage in the future it will allow the students parents to easily become connected to literacy in the classroom.

It is so critical to provide effective literacy instruction as a teacher to a group of diverse learners in a classroom. This is important for students who all learn differently. Using multiple types of technology can introduce students to different types of literacy’s. If I were to introduce webpage designing to the second grade classroom at Elliott I am sure they would be extremely excited. They could create a class website and have each student create their own page on the website. On their own page they could post their stories that they have been working on for the past few weeks and write personal stories that are informal. This would be beneficial because all of the students in the class would be able to read everyone’s stories. This is part of the GLCE’s where student will be able to explore and use language to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes (S.CN.02.03). In order to be successful the students would need to be patient because creating their own webpage can be tricky. They would also have to edit and finalize their stories before they would be able to post them on the website. Overall, this would allow student’s to create their own stories, read their peers stories and explore a new technology!