New Media & New Literacies

Google Meets & Kami   ________________________________________________________________ Google Meets Overview: Google Meets and other video conference call technologies have become much more prevalent in schools around the country and around the world in response to the recent pandemic. Google products such as google meets are the platforms primarily used by the districts in which I have been employed. It is difficult to narrowly define the primary function of Google Meets within school because the applications of this product are so vast. All uses of Google Meets fall under the broader category of communication, and this technology can often be substituted for in person/face-to-face interactions.  User Engagement/Influence On Communication/Information Consumption: The use of Google Meets by students began during the school shut downs that resulted from the Covid pandemic. In these early uses of Google Meets, students were able to join their classes virtually to receive i...

     As has been a theme throughout this New Media and New Literacies endeavor, technology is important and unavoidable in the modern world but our lessons should not be driven by technology alone (Aguilera 2017). The way that I have come to think about it is that technology should be a means to facilitate literacy skills in a new format. If we as teachers are not careful, we could easily fall into a habit of making technology the focus of our lessons, interfering with literacy acquisition rather than fostering it. In using these digital mediums to teach literacy skills, student’s must examine the context and impact of digital sources (Aguilera 2017). In much the same way that students have been taught in the past through more classical mediums, students must evaluate these new media/technology sources for author/creator meaning, credibility, purpose, and bias. We as teachers can engage students in meaningful conversations about new literacies and help them to become comf...

The two additional readings that I selected were Improving Digital Practices for Literacy, Learning, and Justice: More Than Just Tools (ILA, 2018) and Digital Literacy (Vanek, 2019). I found both of these readings expanded on areas of New Media and New Literacies that I had not yet considered.   Improving Digital Practices for Literacy, Learning, and Justice: More Than Just Tools (ILA, 2018) I found many parts of this text interesting, and thought provoking. One of the biggest takeaways that I had from this resource was the emphasis that the author placed on the need for literacy learning to be driven by good lessons and the development of literacy skills, no matter the medium being used. Within the text, it states “the digital tools are secondary to the teacher’s literacy and learning goals”(ILA, 2018) The reason that I found this to be so thought provoking was that it served as a necessary reminder that even though New Media and New Literacies involve new technologies, the techno...

At its core, literacy skills are fundamental to our understanding and functioning in the world we live in. The years that we spend in school as students are supposed to provide us with the knowledge and skills we need to meet the demands of the world in our adult lives. The development of our literacy skills in school should facilitate that ability to interpret and understand information presented in all areas of our lives. Because we live in a world where there are always new and improving technologies to disseminate information, our  schools must evolve and adapt to include the teaching of literacy through these new modalities. As stated by Sang in Expanded Territories of “Literacy”: New Literacies and Multiliteracies, “ New Literacies and Multiliteracies both suggest that literacy practices are no longer restricted to reading and writing printed and written texts in one official and standard form” (Sang, 2017) . While the old standard literacy skills through printed and written ...