I know that many would say that social media is taking over our world and making us stupid and I think that’s all bs. Technology is always advancing and social media and digital sponsors of literacy are going to continue to grow and impact more lives for the great good. Twitter for example allows us to express our own ideas and gets responses from people all over the world. Sure, you can have a journal to documents your ideas but those are only seen by yourself. These sponsors of literacy allow us to interact with many different people in the world and give us unlimited access to research whatever we desire. Ending paragraph, “I encourage all of us to write in a new genre and revisit those feelings of new writers. Digital tools provide the perfect opportunity to write in new ways. Find a genre you feel uncomfortable with—it may be Twitter or something else. Find support from a more experienced peer. Read widely in that genre. Write for a larger audience. Most important, write so you make mistakes. Be open to sharing those mistakes. Experience the feelings that come with those beginning moments and experience the feelings of success. Share that with students”, explains it all and gives the encouragement to branch out and try new things. Everything I do sponsors my literacy from going to the bank, grocery store, shopping, ect.

What are you asked to do with reading and writing at this point in your lives?

I still enjoy reading and writing. Thanks to my daughter in law I have a kindle where I can read whatever books I want to.  My fingers and hands are not as strong as they used to be so it helps me so I can hold the kindle and not have to worry about dropping the book because of how thick they are. Writing, I am not able to write as much as I used to. You know me. I love writing and I have always been the one to write stories and sign all your greeting cards. People used to always compliment my handwriting. In school I was taught to write with the Palmer method. I loved that method and kept it.

First off, I do have to compliment my grandmother for being 83 years old and is still has the ability to work with modern technology. I helped her to start her kindle and when she began to use it all the time she loves it and she even plays Angry Birds when she’s bored. We were having a discussion in class about the pros and cons of the current requirement for young children to learn cursive and my grandmother and myself also talked about how she would never write anything that was not in cursive. She has beautiful cursive writing because she had to learn it through the Palmer method. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with this method, but it looks beautiful and its amazing to see that this particular method was taught back then to young who were able to successfully succeed in properly learning this method. When I was learning cursive I remember doing well at it and when I went to middle school they told us not to write in cursive. The only reason I still am able to properly write in cursive is because my grandma wouldn’t allow me to write her letters unless it was in cursive. She lived in France for a while and they only way she wanted us to communicate was in letters. When I’m bored or need to write myself reminders they are always in cursive as well, it’s a habit I can’t stop.

Choose a place in the Scribner article and try to make sense of it. It could be a passage or sentence that is confusing or an idea that resonates with your own literacy experiences. The idea here is to use the blog post as a way to clarify ideas in the reading for yourself and the class.

“The one undisputed fact about illiteracy in America is its concentration among poor, black, elderly, and minority-language groups — groups without effective participation in our country-s economic and educational institutions”

Why are we not doing anything to help? My thoughts are that we have many resources that some take advantage of and many others who do not. This unlimited amount of knowledge and resources we have can be given to those who don’t have these connections. They are only considered illiterate because they don’t have the means they need to help them. I know reading some of the class notes that their are some who believe that they just need to go out and ask for help and it’s all up to them to go and get what they need, but for many getting these tools to help are not in reaching sight and its a lot more difficult to obtain than their privileged peers.