New Literacy Reflection

Jennifer Horton
The new technology I explored for my new literacies project was the MacBook progam iMovie. This program takes video clips and pictures and helps you convert them into movies or slideshows by adding sound, text, and transitions. Using the technology the way I did with only pictures is similar to digital story telling, but with movies it is much more unique. I had previously made slideshows in powerpoint but this program made the slideshow as a whole instead of step-by-step as powerpoint does. This was also different for me as I learned how to apply music to the whole slide show as oppose to each slide, and I also learned how to record my own voice over the music so I could narrate the show.
At the beginning of class my understanding of literacy was focused around
reading, writing, and comprehension. From review in class and Tompkins I recalled that literacy involves vocabulary, fluency, phonics, phonemic awareness, and comprehension. From further reading and our class web assignment my understanding of literacy grew even more to include cultural literacy, emotional literacy, and digital literacy which all tie together and interconnect around print literacy. I now believe that because of the growing and connecting world we live in today, to be a truly literate person, you must have knowledge in all of these literacies and not just print. Exploring my MacBook and the imovie feature of it helped me learn about myself as a literacy learner. It made me realize that I was not as technology savvy as I previously believed and that I can easily become frustrated and experience “overload” by working with a technology I’ve received no previous instruction on how to use.
As my knowledge about literacy continues to grow, I begin to get a deeper understanding of how literacy in language arts should be taught. Creating the concept map, reading Tompkins chapters 2,7, and 8, discussing them in class through sharing personal experiences, and creating the graphic organizer helped get me to where I am now with understanding literacy. These experiences showed me that you will have all types of literacy learners who are stronger in some aspects of literacy and need more work in other aspects of literacy. It is important to address all types and all concepts of literacy to build students who are strong in all aspects of literacy.
To provide “effective literacy instruction” to diverse learners is to provide instruction on all aspects of literacy: vocab, fluency, phonics, phonemic awareness, and comprehension. The important part however, is to provide instruction of these aspects in a wide variety of literacies: print, cultural, emotional, and digital and help students explore how those literacies all relate to each other and build upon each other.
This new technology required a lot of commitment from me to download the pictures and music into the program, organize the text, time the texts with the slides, and figure out how much time to keep each picture on the screen and how to time the text to match up with each picture. I also had to get help from the technology experts at MSU which took extra time. I needed to understand my computer’s microphone and recording capabilities, and how to navigate through the program to add each feature. Although I did not use this technology for actually making a video, I believe students who work well with powerpoint could be successful in using the program to make a skit or presentation for the class. However if the students were simply making a slideshow of pictures with text, I would recommend using powerpoint because I believe it produces similar results with less complications. I also believe developing a strong understanding from powerpoint can help K-8 students be more successful in high school and college as powerpoint is frequently used for presentations where iMovie is used much less often.
Exploring this new literacy helped me develop a deeper understanding of literacy instruction. However, exploring a new technology that I had no background knowledge about was frustrating and at times I wanted to switch to a more simple technology I was already familiar with. This taught me that when encouraging my students to explore new things I need to give them a sufficient amount of background information to reach the goals I set for them without making their stress levels so high that they want to give up.