Looking back at some of the readings and assignments we’ve done, I have had so much fun and learned a lot from this course, which is pretty much the best type of class to have: fun and informative. It seems too good to be true, but it really happened. I enrolled in the best class on campus with the best teacher…EVER! She even has a fancy award to prove it :) I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever had so much learning about a topic as much as I did in this class. This is one of those classes that I’ll be able to look back on years from now and remember the activities we did, why we did them, and what I learned from them. How often can you say that about a class? I’ll be able to use many of the techniques I learned in my future classes.

So, getting back to the main point of what I’m supposed to discuss, I have learned a lot about literacy in general. I’ll be honest that I was one of those people who defined literacy as the ability to read and write, but I now know so much more about literacy and the other aspects related to it. There are multiple layers that I hadn’t even considered as literacy before. Literacy is more than just reading and writing, it’s doing. As we have learned throughout the semester and the group presentations we had, there are so many ways to do literacy and be involved with it: from texting to social media, from hacking to game playing, literacy is a whole world of involvement and learning.

Looking back at some of my older posts, I was able to see that I was able to think of literacy in different ways based on some of the articles we read, such as Szved, and got the chance to see how much literacy has changed after doing the interview with my grandpa and mother. Another source that helped me expand my thoughts on literacy was Keri’s post discussing twitter and the importance of sponsors. In fact, I liked this quote I said in blog #4 “The text books (and professors) are the agents, and we are the vehicle that retains the information we are learning and applying where needed. Sponsors are all around us, without us even realizing it”. We not only learn from getting involved with new ideas, concepts, social media outlets, etc, but we also learn a lot from each other. Sharing information, videos, blogs, etc. helps us learn and expand out minds better than learning from one source that we may end up coming across. Learning from each other is important and helpful. I almost forgot about the great videos we watched, the spelling bee one and that L.A. teacher who was awesome with his students. Teachers should be more like that guy, getting students to DO instead of just being there, following a boring routine. That is one of the important aspects I got from this class, it’s about DOING, not just being.

Being involved with my internship with Christina Fisher was the best experience. She allowed me to get involved with the students, helping them out a little bit, when I could, with their group presentations they were working on. She is a fantastic teacher and I, honestly, look up to her as a role model as to what I strive to be for my future students. Christina would give me advice on what’s good/bad to do in a classroom, such as too much talking/lecturing, and be honest about how the world of teaching works: it’s tough keeping up with grading, balancing your schedule/topics to teach, having enough personal time to go the bathroom or eat lunch sometimes, which get’s you “teacher’s bladder” (apparently that’s a  real thing), and, some days, providing an equal amount of energy to each class. While it may seem like she was being harsh and telling me all the bad stuff, I didn’t feel that way. I thought it was nice of her to warn me of some of the difficulties that will be encountered during my teaching. It was meant to be more of a “heads up” than a scare tactic. As she said, the credential program will paint teaching as nothing but positive, but the reality, it’s difficult at times, especially the first 3 years, to find how you are most comfortable with your students and figuring out how your schedule will work. Some people have the dull experience of doing nothing but observing their entire 45 hours, but Christina got me involved as much as she could: I helped grade papers, input grades, read papers and provide commentary, and even got to do a mini teach session during my last week. It was awesome! This experience gave me an idea as to what it will be like to have my own class and be in front of them everyday. I loved interning with Christina and wish I could have had an entire year with her. She really did make my interning experience helpful and memorable. Thank you for recommending me to her.

Well, I guess I can’t ramble on for too long, so I will finally conclude. Thank you for a great semester that was fun, informative, memorable, and low stress. I learned a lot about literacy and was able to think outside the box that we are taught in middle school, or whenever it is we learned about literacy. I look forward to taking 431 with you in the Spring 2015 session. I hope you have a wonderful summer! Thanks again for everything you have shared with us.

 

“The State of Things”

The article I chose to read was called “The State of Things”. It discussed digital pedagogy and how, like literacy, is constantly evolving to keep up with the pace of technology and kind of has to if it expects to continue to excel and keep up with the rate of technology. Much like literacy, as we have learned, technology and pedagogy/literacy go hand-in-hand. One quote I thought summed up this article was “all pedagogy is always only as valuable as the voices that contribute to it”. This relates so well to what we have been learning in this class about literacy as well. Pedagogy and literacy seemed to have a lot in common, according to what I gathered from this article and what we have learned throughout the first half of the semester. It mentions in the article that they are having an online/streaming twitter conversation about digital pedagogy and educating those who may not know anything about it. They are willing to answer any questions presented and already had a few questions that have been presented and will be discussed. If you are interested, the event will be taking place on April 4 at noon. There are more details in the article if you want more information on the subject.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very long article, so it basically set up the grounds of what digital pedagogy is and discussed the event on April 4th. This related a lot to what we have learned in class though. Not only are they utilizing digital pedagogy through their online forum and event, but many of the things they said about pedagogy related to what we have discussed about literacy in class. It was also easy to see the relation because the two are fairly similar concepts and are constantly evolving to keep with with the rate of technology. Interesting information and easily relatable to our class discussions.

When looking up the definition of “literacy”, it provides the basic definition of “the ability to read and write”, but goes on to elaborate on the forms of literacy. 2 concepts discussed in the definition that I felt entirely define what we watched in the Hobart and Spellbound videos were semantics (word meaning) and orthography (spelling patterns). The orthography applies to the Hobart video because the teacher of that class was teaching them words and concepts those kids had never seen, heard, experienced before. By having them read Shakespeare and taking them on trips to the Grand Canyon and WA D.C., he was opening up their experience, comprehension, and vocabulary skills; therefore, increasing the full understanding of specific semantics. For example, having them read Shakespeare taught them lots of words they had likely not come across in basic 5th grade reading. They learned about concepts, such as death and Hamlet, and the meaning of Hamlet’s feelings/emotions and the whole dark aspect of that story (This might be kind of a stretch with my example, but I hope you understand the point I’m getting at with the semantics + kids = literacy).

The other form of literacy, orthography, is clearly evident with the Spellbound video. These kids were not only entertaining and brilliant, but used visual and reading literacy to get to the orthography part. They studied words through school assignments, reading from dictionaries, creating games (such as Angela did with the cross word puzzle), and competing with others to further their knowledge and advance as far as they did in the National Spelling Bee. They each represent a true love and appreciation of literacy in many forms and used/applied them to their daily lives and education.

I think the authors we have read from in this course would be just as impressed as I was with all of the kids in each of the videos, and the teacher from the 1st video. That teacher really gets the students involved in what they’re learning, rather than just lecturing and doing the same ‘ol routine of work sheets, reading, and listening to the teacher talk. His level of student involvement is quite impressive and there should be more teachers like him. The other students from the Spellbound video would impress the authors also because of the way they learn content and study. They also use active engagement in their learning process and use resources around them to aid them. That’s kind of what literacy has become, using what’s around us, such as the always evolving technology, to aid us in our path of learning. The students and teacher in the videos are not only actively engaged in literacy in different ways, but using what’s around them and changing with the literacy changes as well. Keeping up with literacy and utilizing it in different ways is important.

 

I read “Reading in a Participatory Culture”. Our group decided to split up the reading by each person reading 2-3 designated chapters, so I read chapters 10 and 11. The premise of our book was how incorporating Moby Dick  into modern day is helpful to students and the way the author went about incorporating the reading in an interesting way to get students excited about reading such a complex and, at times, dry story. The author chose to have the students watch a remixed play of the story, have conversations about it, and kind of find out back ground information first before diving into the reading (no pun intended). The chapters I read were about the remixing process and how to remix without plagiarizing.

For anyone who doesn’t know about re-mixing and sampling, the 2 main terms covered in my chapter,sampling is about the borrowing of materials whereas remixing is referring to a new work created through the sampling process of appropriation and recombination; it combines the borrowed and original materials. For example, the remixed play I mentioned the teacher had his students watch before reading the book was a remixed story, using the same characters and similar story line, but creating new elements to add to the story so that it wasn’t plagiarizing the original material directly. So, it’s all about borrowing stuff from an original source and merging it with new material/concepts. It kind of dances on the line of plagiarism, so you have to be careful about the remixing and borrowing process.

What I liked about this book was that it introduced ways for teachers to incorporate books in the class room in new and exciting ways so that the student actually wants to read the book after building up to it with watching a play, for example, and doing some background work on the story instead of jumping into it without having any knowledge prior to it. It gives students an idea as to what they are reading and makes them want to read the story after doing “research” on it. Reading this book and the experiences the students went through even made me and a few group members want to read Moby Dick. Our group felt inspired to not only read it, but gave us ideas as to how to approach complex books in our future classrooms.

(This is exactly how I feel with transcribing poetry)

I guess I hadn’t really thought about digital literacy being a sponsor, but it makes sense how it can be one after reading Keri’s post. Thinking back to the days when I started using MySpace and eventually Facebook, I had to learn what the norm for each of those social media sites was as well. While the format for each of those sounds much simpler than Twitter, learning how to blend in with the rest of a social media crowd is definitely a learning experience. I’m just glad my learning of each site wasn’t as complicated as learning the Twitter lingo and symbols.

Learning from others examples, asking questions, checking out different/associated links to a new literacy site is a sponsor, which I wouldn’t have thought if I had just been told that, but Keri’s post helped me realize that it is. As we learned from Brandt’s first article we read “Sponsors…are any agents…who enable, support, teach, model as well as recruit…or withhold literacy —and gain advantage by it in some way”. Her story is a great representation of that definition; she used an agent, Twitter and Thomas, who both supported her to branch out and open her opportunities, they both taught her how to utilize tools/symbols to blend in with the group, and she gained an advantage by not only joining a new online society, but helped her spread the word and get in touch with other colleagues of hers to share important information she needed. If her story doesn’t inspire the idea that digital literacy can be a sponsor, than I don’t know what else would.

This is a very similar form of print-based sponsors. Looking at the definition of sponsors, I can see how both print and digital literacy can fit in the same category. A great example that comes to mind for print-based sponsors is text books. As all students are aware, text books contain LOTS of information that are teaching us concepts to utilize in whatever subject we are learning. For example, chemistry books are going to teach you what chemicals to use to create certain compounds (or whatever they teach you in those books, I’ve never taken Chem.); Math books are going to teach you how to work through difficult equations, etc. The text books (and professors) are the agents, and we are the vehicle that retains the information we are learning and applying where needed. Sponsors are all around us, without us even realizing it.