Weekly Reading #2

How the Multigenre & Mulitmodal assignment related to each of the readings:

• Writing Outside of School - I used digital media.  This helped make me aware of my audience and how my story would be perceived.  
• Literacy Learning in the 21st Century - 21st century writers need to be able to: create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media. I created a story based on my analysis of different types of literature. 
• Reading and Writing Differently - "Visual culture and the proliferation of multimedia texts have changed literacy practices both inside and outside the classroom."  Writing has changed.  Creating digital stories is a literacy practice that is very accepted among the visual culture of today.
• Writing Now - We write differently now.  I practiced a new form of writing and expressing myself with my digital story.  
• Adolescent Literacy - The reality is that "Literacy encompasses reading, writing, and a variety of social and intellectual practices that call upon the voice as well as the eye and hand. It also extends to new media—including non-digitized multimedia, digitized  multimedia, and hypertext or hypermedia."  I could have written a paper about my favorites quotation, but people really "get" what I feel and think of with a digital story.  Literacy is beyond the print and "just reading and writing." 

Three ways the readings changed or reinforced my thinking about the role of digital technologies/media in teaching children adolescents to read and write:

1. It reinforced something that I know, but often forget.  Literacy goes way beyond how well a person can read and write. Sometimes we think of an illiterate person to be one that can't read or write, but people can be illiterate in other 21st century areas.
2. Reading and writing has changed!  The skills my grandmother was taught in school are different than the skills taught now.  This doesn't mean we haven't turned into some illiterate society.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.  We need to be literate in more areas than ever before.
3. Building on extracurricular writing and connecting school and home is very important! Research shows that learning about writing in students’ home cultures leads to significant improvements in schoolbased writing instruction. Teachers benefit from learning about the purposes, types, and languages of the writing their students do and observe outside the classroom.

Digital Technologies that support Reading in Writing in Math:

PBL

In this PBL, students are planning their Dream Vacation.  In the process, they use the internet to research distance and gas prices.  They will also research attractions, restaurants, etc.  They also become familiar with Excel.  The student will report all costs of the trip in an Excel Spreadsheet.

Sources:
National Council of Teachers of English. (2009). Writing Outside of School.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2009). Literacy Learning in the 21st Century.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2008). Reading and Writing Differently.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2008). Writing Now.

National Council of Teachers of English (2007). Adolescent Literacy.

Underwood, D. (2008). Dream vacation. Retrieved from http://wveis.k12.wv.us/teach21/public/project/Guide.cfm?upid=3326&tsele1=2&tsele2=108