Module 3, Blog Post

    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 comfortable and confident truth seekers by highlighting how easy it can be to become tricked by false information presented through these technologies. As stated in “ASSESSING NEWS LITERACY IN THE 21ST CENTURY”, “a survey of 1,000 millennials conducted earlier this year by MindEdge, an educational technology company, showed that 37% acknowledged that they had inadvertently shared information on social media that turned out to be false.” (Jacobson 2017) Sharing these facts with students highlights that those susceptible to the false information that can be found any number of places online are not just the technologically challenged oldest members of our society. Even younger technology users can fall victim to these pieces of fake news if they are not trained and practiced in interpreting sources and information in these new mediums. When we create these styles of activity for our students, more heavily based in technology, we must keep in mind the skills we are addressing and the limitations of these technologies in that they are no substitute for solid instruction from quality teachers. We must also remember that activities based in technology that we expect students to complete at home could pose a problem in terms of equity. Not all students have access to reliable internet and technology while outside of the school building. 

    An activity that I have recently implemented along with my co teacher for our Special Education English class has been the examination of literary devices such as symbolism and imagery through Pixar short films. These activities were spread across a couple of class days where students interpreted information from four Pixar shorts to complete graphic organizers about the use of symbolism and imagery. After the Pixar shorts symbolism and imagery activity we explored the use of symbolism and imagery through two short stories in traditional printed text format. We decided to start off with the Pixar examples to practice identifying symbolism and imagery through highly engaging examples that included visuals to make it easier to practice the skill more abstractly through typed text with no visuals. By the end of this set of activities, our students were able to identify symbolism and imagery with high success through more than one medium. Entirely by coincidence, this activity that my co teacher and I designed perfectly aligns with the text from this module’s assigned reading “Reframing the Medium” (Hernandez 2017). One obstacle that we found for this activity was how we would make it accessible to a visually impaired student in our class. This student is completely blind so the Pixar shorts with no dialog possessed a problem. We solved this by using an adaptive feature accessible through disney that allows you to enable auditory narration for Pixar shorts.  

References:

Aguilera, E. (2017). MORE THAN BITS AND BYTES. Literacy Today, 35(3), 12-13. https://sunyempire.idm.oclc.org/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Ftrade-journals%2Fmore-than-bits-bytes%2Fdocview%2F1966006470%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D8067

Hernandez, M. (2017). REFRAMING THE MEDIUM. Literacy Today, 35(3), 16-17. https://sunyempire.idm.oclc.org/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Ftrade-journals%2Freframing-medium%2Fdocview%2F1966007223%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D8067

Jacobson, L. (2017). ASSESSING NEWS LITERACY IN THE 21ST CENTURY. Literacy Today, 35(3), 18-22. https://sunyempire.idm.oclc.org/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Ftrade-journals%2Fassessing-news-literacy-21st-century%2Fdocview%2F1966007432%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D8067