Tuesday, October 28, 2008
New Literacies
I really enjoyed making my digital literacy project. I learned a lot during this process too. The new technology I used was digital storytelling. I had never seen it before but the program was very user friendly. It broke the project down into steps, one for importing pictures, one for adding text to the pictures, adding a voice recording, and adding music. I just followed the instructions step by step. I had never used a computer program for a picture slideshow before to teach a lesson. One difficulty I had was adding music to my project. I learned that the program only accepts certain music filenames. I had to change my music to mp3 format because it was all saved as something else in my iTunes. Another difficulty I had was hooking up a microphone but once I found one it was easy to configure. Overall the program was easy to use and I definitely want to use it with a class one day. I think this technology would be pretty easy for the students to use. As long as we have cameras available for the students then importing pictures would be easy. Adding text is pretty self explanatory within the program. It shows the text being added to the screen as you type it. Also the students can easily rearrange their pictures once they are imported. If the projects are going to incorporate music I would have to make sure the computers they are using have a variety of file types for stored music. I think that using a technology like this will fit in with effective literacy instruction. The students will need to incorporate text into their projects and the students reading one another’s projects will need to be able to read. My project especially fits with literacy because it teaches about another culture and incorporate vocabulary lessons. People reading/watching it will be able to learn the words for certain Spanish things, what those words mean, and how to correctly pronounce those words. This is definitely tied to literacy. This type of a lesson would be good for any class that has a minority group of students in it. One could use it to teach the majority group some of the common words found in the minority group’s language. It is a good project to bring a diverse class together. Overall I think this project was very successful and I learned a lot that I will use in the future.
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Hey Katie:)
Your project was really interesting and very well put together. I thought it was great that you were able to incorporate a real life experience into this project and it really helped to show your background on the topic. You were saying in your blog that you think this kind of project would be great for a classroom containing many diversities but aren't all classrooms like that in a way? In my blog on the New Literacies Project I mentioned this project that I had for my 5th grade class where I had to research the background of my mother or father and write a 2 page paper on it and then do a pretty lengthy presentation on it. I did mine on Ireland because my mom's family is pretty much completely 100% Irish. It was a really fun project to do I had my whole family to help me out, kind of like you had the ability to use your trip to Spain.
Anyways, I realized after doing the New Literacies that my fifth grade project was a great example of learning to be culturally literate in the classroom.
The idea of cultual literacy is so dynamic that every individual can bring something to the table whether it be something like food, tradition, clothing, language, etc.
The fun thing about a culture is that its not just limited to ethnicity and home countries. I envision a culture to be a group of people who all share the same ideas, customs, and ways of life. What do you think? If people think about it we are all actually part of many cultures.
Have a great weekend:)
See you in class:)
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