Back to Blogging....I probably shouldn't of stopped. During the next eight weeks I will be exploring digital literacy, hopefully, taking away some great ideas for me to use with my first graders come August. Throughout this next eight weeks I expect to learn from motivated educators who put students needs in learning first. After all, our students need us to use technology in our classrooms to support the curriculum they are learning. Making learning engaging and relevant.
With my experiences in education coming in primarily first and second grade I will be relating what I am learning about digital literacy in this blog to fit my needs. My students need to know the basics of literacy: reading, writing, speaking, and LISTENING. This extends to what they are doing online and I will be incorporating this into my lessons. Modeling and letting them explore the digital world helping them become responsible digital citizens.
While reading this week I realized that students still need the basics of literacy. Whether students are blogging, Facebooking, Tweeting, or doing anything else online they still need to know how to read, write, and communicate clearly. In addition to these basic skills students need to know what is fiction and nonfiction. So my job as a first grade teacher is to expose my students to blending literacy and Digital literacy together while learning. At the end of the year I really enjoyed using Tumblebooks to compare and contrast two different texts. They loved the stories and were able to make deep connections between them.
I found an interesting blog relating Digital Literacy to the common core as well and wanted to share it.
I very much agree that although literacy has grown to include "digital literacy," we must still focus on the basics of literacy--reading, writing, communicating. I often deal with students who lack many of the skills associated with the basics, and I believe this is due, in part, to the fact that too much time and focus is given to the digital world. Finding a way to integrate the digital skills while still heavily hitting the basics is extremely important. Hopefully we will gain a lot of ideas in this course!
ReplyDeleteYou do need the literacy basics before accessing the technology available in the digital world. I have used Tumblebooks to compare two texts also. It worked well. Our 2nd Grade ELA team spent a lot of time on genres last year. Some really struggled so we had to use a lot of strategies. I hope to gain some more resources for this. I enjoyed reading the blog you suggested at the end of your post. It was very informative. I like how the the blog author divided digital literacy into the three components of reading digital text, writing digital text, and developing the technical skills necessary to consume and produce these texts. Just as literacy basics are important, so are the technology basics. It will require a lot of teacher modeling and a lot of student practice, but will be very much worth it.
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