Use of New Literacies

Integration of "New Literacies" in Student Teaching

I am very fortunate to be able to develop and design my own unit of teaching in the school I am working. As many of the students in my cohort can attest, I love the use of technology. I have actually been teaching technology for the last three years and am excited to incorporate it within the Language Arts curriculum. For the classes I will be teaching, English 9 and English 11, I will be designing a wiki for both, having the students add and edit content as we go. In addition to the wiki, I have created a blog for Red Bagde of Courage, http://shs-english11.blogspot.com which has both the full text and audio of the text (compliments of audiobooks.com). Because the school is technology rich and has computers in every classroom, the accessibility of these tools is not an issue. I added the audio clips for struggling readers and those struggling with language and vocabulary. I will be adding open-ended questions to each chapter as a form of on-going assessment.

Another form of new literacy I will using is in the writing portion of the course. I will be having the students create a multigenre project, including both written parts and visual presentation. I will give the students a choice of 10 genres, 7 of which must be written. The other 3, however, can be made in the form of a podcast, an imovie / movie maker project, a scenery/building design in Google Sketchup, a cartoon on ComicStrip Creator, or a song created in GarageBand. I will also open this up to other ideas. For each of these programs, I will be giving a “mini” lesson (10-15 minutes) on how to find and use. In my past experience, many students will teach themselves once they are introduced to the technology.

The last “new literacy” I am hoping to use is E-pals, a site that connects schools across the world in different projects. I have posted a project to discuss the Red Badge of Courage and the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Linda Brent to e-pals and am hoping to get a reply from another school. Ultimately, it would be amazing to discuss the book from a southern point of view… and better yet, a southern black point of view.