New Literacies

Our world is no longer confined to print, to ink on paper bound in textbooks. Our world is very much electronic with the takeover of technology. And this change in our world prompts a change in our schools. We cannot ignore the technology shift. We cannot force students to flip through pages in a textbook and get angry when they cannot learn that way. We cannot expect to lecture for forty five minutes and have the students take copious notes. Our world is changing. Our means of education need to change.

 

Chapter Two of Content Area Reading focuses on this idea of “new literacies” and how we as teachers can implement these new forms in our classrooms to ensure the most learning opportunities. The writers claim that these new literacies are changing the ways in which students read and write.

 

We cannot rely solely on print based literacy anymore. We need to incorporate screen based literacy. Our classrooms need to still include print but also become multimodal: video, audio, graphic design, etc. If we can understand these modes of learning, then we can use them in the best possible ways in order to advance the learning of our students.

 

(But what about those pesky State Standards? How will these new literacies fit in with those? Well you might be surprised to learn that these new literacies are already embedded in the standards under terms like media literacy and technological information resources.)

 

So now that we know that we need to change and use these new literacies as well as the State Standards actually want us to use these new literacies – what does that classroom look like. Here are a few characteristics:

1. They feature daily work in multiple forms of representation
2. They discuss the benefits of using these new literacies They have the teachers model how to use these new literacies
3. They combine individual work with collaborative work with using these new literacies
4. They work towards that “flow” state for students of optimal learning

 

Moving forward we will learn about helping students think and learn in a multimodal environment and how to use these new literacies in our classroom.

 

To help students think about a multimodal environment it is important you model what that looks like. You do your own multimodal search of some topic and show the kids how you do it: jumping from page to page, using audio visuals, reading articles, etc. The Internet is very nonlinear and it is important to help students learn to navigate from page to page and that there are many ways in which they can move to different pages. This gets the students using something called hypermedia which is built on hypertexts. Hypertexts are webpages that have a nonlinear structure. These are important for instruction because it includes built in scaffolding for your students. You can select one page for them to start at and all of your students can learn at their own pace from it. A great exercise to get students more involved with hypermedia is to have them use it in their writing. For example, if they are writing a literary analysis of a poem they can learn to use hyperlinks in their writing to link to descriptions of terms without having to include them in their actual writing piece.

 

However, this can be a slippery slope. If we let the students use the Internet we need to teach them how to evaluate the websites they are looking at. Teaching them these steps will help them gauge the quality of the website:

1. Examine the bias of the site
2. Determine the reliability of the site
3. Determine the accuracy of the site
4. Synthesize the information presented on the site in a meaningful way

 

Encourage your students to look at all sources on the Internet (keeping those evaluative steps in mind of course) including blogs, wikis, and nings. You could even have the class create their own in order to synthesize information collaboratively online.

 

Do not be afraid to use the Internet and incorporate those multimodal literacies in your classroom! They can really improve the learning experience for your students and you might find that the students could teach you a thing or two as well with how fast they absorb new technology. If we stick with the print literacy only system we will miss out on really reaching the students and helping them learn in today’s world.