New Literacy

My definition of literacy began by involving just reading and writing. However, after many classroom discussions and listening to other people's definitions of literacy I learned that literacy can involve reading, writing, speaking, listening, and seeing. I have seen the definition of literacy expand even further after this project. I never would have thought of expressing literacy in the form of technology before this project. It was interesting to choose a type of new literacy because I never would have classified a digital scrapbook as a way of delivering literacy. I also would have never thought of literacy being in a cultural form. For example, even though I knew that reading, writing, listening, seeing, and speaking can be found in different cultures I never really thought of them as aspects of literacy. I had a hard time thinking about what I was going to focus on in cultural literacy because I kept finding myself not thinking broadly enough about the definition of literacy. We learned in class that there are many different definitions of literacy and that literacy is such a broad term that can often be altered into personal definitions. Once I started to realize that I was thinking into the project too much, I began to look at what I wanted the big picture to be and the ideas began to flow.
I did a digital scrapbook on cultural literacy, specifically on Latin America. I am familiar with scrapbooks in paper form because I work on them as a hobby and for my historian position in my sorority. However, I was very amazed at how creative you can make the scrapbooks online. It also seemed less labor intensive. It takes me a long time to imagine and create scrapbook pages in paper form. Although the digital scrapbook took me a long time to create, the most time consuming part was introducing myself to the program and how to get started. You definitely need a lot of patience and time to get started and learn any new type of technology. I feel that once you get the hang of the program, it would not take that long to write a lesson. Also, if I make a mistake on a paper scrapbook, I have to throw the page away or start over. However, if I am not satisfied with my page or anything about it on digital scrapbooks, with the click of a button I can just delete what I do not like. I feel that it is important for teachers to explore many new forms of technology. We could make class much more interesting, comprehensive, and attention grabbing by using new technology and refraining from the use of plain chalkboards.
I feel that a digital scrapbook is a wonderful tool for teaching lessons to kindergarteners. I know from experience that kindergarteners are very visual learners. What is a better way to teach than with the use of pictures and colorful scrapbook pages? I know that my kindergarteners in my field placement would be amazed because my teacher seems to teach through oral lessons and the use of dry erase boards. There are many ways that you could incorporate the core subjects into digital scrapbooks. This technology form is very flexible and allows you to create a scrapbook on any topic you would like. Now that I am more open minded about literacy and the different ways to incorporate literacy into technology, I think it would be fun to use a digital scrapbook for my next kindergarten lesson.