Week 9 - McLean

1.     What am I learning about the NEW LITERACY I am researching?

        The definition of literacy that I thought originally includes the idea of communicating to others around you visually.  In this way, my new literacy of visual literacy is an extension of that definition.  Visual literacy is defined in many ways- one of them being the following: “visual literacy can be defined as the ‘ability to construct meaning from visual images’” (images.adobe.com).  I thought it was interesting to discover the implications of teaching with visual literacy and methods of teaching visual literacy.  Through learning about these, I also became more familiar with the content involved with visual literacy.  For example, I read that it is important to pose questions to students about images (implications), which can be done by analyzing environmental print from supermarket packaging (methods of teaching).  In this example, I have seen more about the content of visual literacies by learning that visual literacy includes environmental print.  I learned it also includes videos, analyzing images (pictures, photographs, magazines, book illustrations…), reading graphs and creating ones own images with meaning.  However, I also found that visual literacies also have traditional literacies integrated with the learning.  This can be seen because visual literacies are to be implemented in every subject area by using images and critical knowledge.  Therefore, this requires analyzing the image (viewing), but also having a discussion about the images (listening & speaking) and could include responding to the image or discussion (writing).  In this way, I was surprised to learn that visual literacy can include traditional literacies and be incorporated into different subject areas of teaching.  Finally, when thinking about my placement, I anticipate my kindergarteners would do well responding to visual literacy by using several hands-on, discussion oriented, and written tasks.  For kindergartener’s, there would be a different type of analyzing that is occurring, but I think there are techniques that can scaffold this learning to allow children in kindergarten to learn about visual literacy.  In the same way, this can be taught to children in all grades because it is necessary, at every stage, to understand how to interpret and respond to the visual world around us.

 

2.     What am I learning about how my DIGITAL LITERACY is developing as I use a new technology to create my product?

The digital literacy that I am researching, Glogster, is a new digital literacy to me.  However, I can immediately see the benefits as a future teacher.  It is even directly stated on their webpage, “How to use Glogster EDU…” and they provide numerous options for teachers on how to use Glogster in their classroom.  They also allow specific controls that are useful for teachers, such as a school wiki, an embedded code, sharing, sending to email, etc.  In this way, there are ideas and supports made available for teachers to use this technology in the classroom.  In addition, it allows for interaction with the students.  By using Glogster, there are several different multimedia elements that can be included in the page, which makes this online poster very engaging for students to use.  Although this is a huge benefit, it can also be seen as downfall because all these graphics and medias incorporated into one webpage can be overwhelming for children and cause children to lose the overall idea of the lesson.  This could be a potential challenge for a teacher and something to consider strongly when using Glogster to create a webpage.  Despite this, Glogster helps to communicate ideas by having a two-way communication (drawing, writing a response, recording a video response, clicking a link…) and helps communicate the teacher’s ideas (written text, photographs, links, videos, etc).  Due to this, it is clear that students are using reading, writing, speaking, and listening/viewing in new ways by using Glogster (see examples above).  As a result of all these things, I think students in my placement would find a Glogster very fun and engaging.  They may even be able to explore the webpage on their own (if given specific guidelines on how to do so).  They may find the different visual pieces to be somewhat overwhelming, but by constructing a page with more order and sequencing, I believe the students in my classroom would benefit from this technology.  In addition, as a teacher, by creating a Glogster, it is an effective teaching tool where a lot of information (that will be used for teaching) is in one spot, rather than wasting time clicking around online to find video clips, etc.  The same techniques can be applied and scaffolded for older children, and as a result, teachers for children of all ages can use this technology to benefit their learning and support their teacher instruction.