Saturday, March 9, 2013

week 9: literacy blog post



Literacy is one’s ability to use written and printed information to function in a society where they are able to accomplish their goals and learn.  I think social literacy and literacy are very similar. Social literacy is a person’s ability to communicate with their family members, citizens, workers, and life long learners. When needed to communicate and mediate between different people and settings, one needs to be able to communicate their thoughts and express with others information. One often uses oral language to communicate with others however in todays world, facebook, twitter, and txting are becoming the main way to communicate to a wide range of people, one needs to be able to communicate their thoughts and opinions through written text.  
One activity that we did last semester in history was the fish bowl discussion. the video How to teach math, as a social activity from edutopia, also used a fish bowl method for a math lesson. The students discussed with one another the different ways they solved the problem. The teacher made it clear that before he was able to have the students take part in the fishbowl activity they needed to establish rules and guidelines as to which the students thought of. This provided the students to take ownership in what they value is important and have some responsibility when choosing the rules. After the students were taught how to speak and disagree politely, ask questions, and communicate appropriately the class was able to take part in fishbowl discusion. This allowed the students to be able to learn from other students instead the teacher having to be the one teaching always.  For fishbowl or other group discussion or team activities my students would definitely need to review and set up some rules in place for the classroom. The students talk over top of one another and do not listen to each other’s ideas. Also, the students need to learn how to disagree in a mature way and discuss why they disagree with one another. My students need to relearn the steps to have a successful conversation and how to successfully help other students that does not just have them copying answers.
Social literacy is any way that one communicates to other people. I never realized how much our world today is using social literacy in our every day occurrence. Students use social literacy through classroom discussions, however what is important though is that teachers prepare students and give them the foundation to become successful in social literacy. Even though in todays world social literacy is very common, there are different expectations and rules in the classroom verse the outside world. In the classroom it is important that teachers provide the expectations and rules so that student feel comfortable to express their feelings and thoughts. It is also important to try and provide all students with time to share their ideas and thoughts. Even though teachers are expected to cram in a lot of information throughout the day it is very important for all the students in the class to feel that they are able to share their thoughts and questions. By providing the correct expectations and a safe environment students will learn how to apply classroom expectations to the outside world and how to properly act on facebook, twitter or other resources where they are able to share their opinions and interact with others.
The technology device we are using is weebly, this is an Internet site where you can create a page and upload information to the internet site. This is great because it can be seen on any computer and anyone can see it as long as you make it public or just a couple of teaching friends that you would like to share the information, then you would just have to make it private. What is great is you can upload videos, pictures, text, and hyperlinks to other sites from your website. This allows yourself and other educators to see the important information that you are sharing.
Weebly is similar to writing a paper because you are allowed to type out text and write out information you would like to share. However, what makes this site more interactive for viewers is that pictures, animations and videos can be uploaded to the site to be viewed and receive additional information. One is able to create their website how ever they want it to look One can change the background colors, font, and really personalize it for themselves and their viewers. This is great if you have students that need special accommodations and struggle seeing specific colors or need a larger font size. Using Weebly one is able to create a site specific to the viewers needs. Teachers are allowed to create a site and then have students explore information on the site, by providing a couple directions and steps to advance students through the site. The students would easily be able to navigate through the website learning information through txt, videos, pictures and audio. 

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