Journal #2

Technology is an ever-changing topic; it seems new things come out every month: phones, laptops, E-readers, etc. Now that we are in the 21^st century, I believe technology has become fully ingrained with literacy, and we as educators must embrace that. I know that for many students in my school, they would rather sit in front of a computer than a textbook. When they do class work on a computer, many of them are using their digital literacy skills, and many of them know exactly what to do. This comes from using this technology almost every day. But does this make them more knowledgeable? Is this really a form of learning/reading? I believe that in this constantly changing world, anything used to further a student’s education should be considered as a part of literacy learning.

The article does a good job of showing positive and negative aspects of digital literacy, but I believe the author was leaning towards the latter. I think what is important to realize is that as we read this piece in 2015, it was published over seven years ago, in 2008. Many things have changed in that span. Mr. Motoko did not mention the Amazon Kindle that had just come out 6 months prior. This was a watershed moment in digital literacy, even if it was a little too expensive for students’. Two years after this article, Amazon lowered their prices of a Kindle to 140 dollars, and it came with Wi-Fi (Wagner, 2011). By 2010, an Amazon Kindle had become relatively cheap enough for any aged student to buy one. I had a Kindle, and I still use it. In 2014, the price of a Kindle was 80 dollars. I see students using their Kindle’s in class (usually when I don’t want them to), and almost 90% of the time, a student is using it to read.

Overall, I think new technologies will help where it is needed, and in the end, should be used in moderation. As the article states "One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades"(Mokoto, 2008). I believe using this technology to increase literacy where it is needed most will be the most effective, and best way we can use digital literacy to our students advantage.

Bibliography:

Rich, M. (2008, July 26). Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? Retrieved September 24, 2015.

Wagner, K. (2011, September 28). The History of Amazon's Kindle So Far. Retrieved September 24, 2015.

Journal #1

"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).

As a high school teacher, this quote speaks volumes to me. There is a large schism in the high school setting; many teachers still implement textbooks, and traditional ways of literacy, while many students cannot find a way to connect to that. The ways of communication and literacy are changing rapidly; it seems every few years a new technology emerges that can help students learn, and teachers educate. As Gunther Kress notes “the current period writing is being affected by four factors: 1) Texts are…ever-increasingly appearing with writing, and, in many domains of communication, displacing writing where it had previously been dominant. 2) Screens are replacing the page and the book as the dominant media…3) Social structures and social relations are undergoing fundamental changes…4) Constellations of mode and medium are being transformed” (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p.6)

Over the summer, my high school received a NYS Technology Grant, which meant updating technologies in the classroom to better reach students in a changing world. In almost all the classrooms, a SmartBoard was installed, as well as newer computers. This will have a profound experience on how a student learns, but there is an issue. Many of the teachers do not understand this new technology, and do not understand how it can affect their classroom. I believe that students will not be able to effectively learn with this new technology until their teachers fully comprehend it. Some teachers are very open to this change, and have embraced it, while others are far more stubborn in seem to be stuck in their ways. One teacher has had students use iPads and different apps on their phones to do homework, while another teacher gives the same homework out of a textbook. It’s no surprise when 90% of the one class does their homework, and less than half do theirs in the other class. Dana Wilber perfectly summed up Grushka & Donnelly’s work “Digital technologies and performative pedagogies: Repositioning the visual”, saying “this work draws upon the transformative potential of new literacies…they argue for the necessity for teachers to learn, as a part of a new literacies framework, visual literacy and critical pedagogy, in order to engage students to better understand their world and construct learning” (Wilber, 2010).

I believe that when all teachers can be on the same digital literacy level as their students, that is when real effective learning can be done, when students and teachers can use their technologies together to learn from one another.

Bibliography:

Gillen, J., & Barton, D. (2010). Digital Literacies: A Research Briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. London.

Wilber, D. (2010, May 31). Special themed issue: Beyond 'new' literacies - Digital Culture & Education. Retrieved September 15, 2015.