New Literacies Project, Notes on Learning

For my new literacies project, I chose to concentrate on social literacy. One general definition of social literacy is the ability for an individual to successfully and deliberately mediate their world of family members, workers, citizens, which contributes to one’s lifelong learning. So, more simply put, social literacy is a person’s ability to interact, maintain and build relationships with other people. People with poor social literacy skills display behaviors, such as lack of eye contact, deal with confrontation unsuccessfully, and do not know how to distinguish between anger and fear. In the world we live in today, many things are relying more and more on technology, so social literacy is what links us to the emerging digital world. Some tools of digital literacy are Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, Skype, and other instant messaging programs (Gchat, Facetime, Meebo, AIM, etc.).

Since we are relying more and more on technology, and it is a large part of our daily lives, this “tech savvyness” is making us interact with humans, less and less. However, when students begin how to use social literacy in their daily lives, they are learning how to express themselves appropriately, in digital ways. As students learn how to express themselves digitally, they can gradually begin to learn how to present themselves and display correct behaviors that identify with social literacy.

When I think about students in my placement displaying behaviors of social literacy, I would think that they wouldn’t be very familiar with it. My students use computers sometimes in the classroom, but they only play games on the computer.  I think that if I were to teach social literacy to my students, that some aspects of it would be over their heads. I know that most of my students know how to text and know about facebook, but since they are only in first grade, and are still learning to read, they would not be able to use many of the tools of social literacy to their potential.  However, my students could benefit from learning communication skills and how to interact with each other. Many of my students start confrontation with other students in the class, and this could be avoided if students knew how to solve problems on their own. Even though most aspects of social literacy would be too challenging for my students, they could start by learning communication skills and getting the support from communicating effectively.

I thought that social literacy would be an interesting thing to research because I have always wondered how social networking tools, such as Facebook or Twitter, could be used effectively in the classroom. To present my findings, I chose to use a program called Snapz, along with iMovie. Snapz is a video screenshot program that allows me to take a video of what I am doing on my computer screen and then import it into iMovie to make my final product. I have not done too much with the program yet, since it is a 60 dollar program and I am using the free trial for this project, but I can see that one major challenge for me is going to be figuring out how to use the program, since I have not used it before. Another challenge could be that I may have trouble putting my screenshot video into iMovie, but I am sure that after trial and error, I can figure it out. However, since we live in a technological world, I am sure that with my tech savvy, I will be able to get through these challenges easily.