EDUC 6816 Weekly Reading #9

"Although trends to make usage of Web 2.0 applications in schools are reported, the tools are still being used in a 1.0 or consumerist manner."

I chose this quote because, after doing my interview of a young person, I have found just how accurate this quote is.  When I asked my young person about her technology use in school I was surprised by how little it was being used.  The only things her class used computers for was to either take benchmark tests or look up information for reports.  Even in her computer class ( a specialist class she has once a week) they are usually doing keyboarding exercises, typing in word, or making Power Points.  She is going into seventh grade; these are skills she has been able to do since her early elementary years.  So why are they still teaching them?  Why are teachers not taking advantage of the new literacy skills they could be teaching?

I chose the image below because I thought it went well with the reading (and is also cute).  Our students come to school equipped with knowledge and skills pertaining to Web 2.0.  And yet we are not embracing it.  We should strive to include things like social media and multimodal learning into our curriculum to better prepare our students for the future.

Image by JR Mora.  (2013).  Retrieved from http://www.seobuscadores.com/actualidad/web-1-0-web-2-0-web-3-0-y-su-evolucion

 

1. What makes a literacy practice a new literacy?

 

When it encourages participation, collaboration, collective intelligence, sharing, innovation, and evolution over individual intelligence and ownership.  New literacy is a result of people working together and learning and sharing with each other.

 

2. How might Citizen Journalism support the development of new literacies?

 

For my Citizen Journalism project my students are interviewing members of the community.  This supports participation of the interviewer and the community members, and also collaboration.  At the end of the project the students will share their information with others.

 

3. What is critical literacy and how does your Citizen Journalism project encourage critical literacy?  How might you change your project to encourage critical literacy?

 

Critical literacy is looking at information through a "political, social, and economic lens."  For my Citizen Journalism project my students are taking the question of whether prayer should be allowed in school and looking at it from multiple points of view; themselves as students, teachers, principals, religious leaders, and members of the community.  They are also taking a look at the history of the subject and how it has changed legally over the years.  If I were to change my project I would like to add one more question to students to think about and to ask in their interviews:  If prayer were legally allowed in public schools, how would that effect their community?  Would anything change?

 

4. What problems may arise when students use Web 2.0 tools for learning in school and how might teachers capitalize on those opportunities to promote information literacy?

 

One problem that may arise is that the tool would be used just for the sake of using the tool.  For example, a teacher may have students post on a blog, but really all their doing is the same as writing it out on paper.  Instead, teachers can capitalize on this tool by encouraging sharing and collaboration by having the students read and comment on each others' posts.  Also, they can encourage multimodal learning by asking the students to incorporate images, videos, and audio into their postings.

 

Source

 

Asselin, M. & Moayeri, M. (2011). Practical Strategies: The Participatory Classroom: Web 2.0 in the Classroom. Literacy Learning: The Middle Years 19(2).