The new literacy project has taught me a great deal about cultural literacy as well as scrapblogging. I took a course on diverse children's literature and completely fell in love with the topic. I never realized how important diverse lit was for students and I felt that more future teachers should realize this too. However, spreading this information was not as easy as I thought. this project allowed me to do this in a way I had never thought of before.
I decided to multicultural literature instead of focusing on just one specific culture. I find them all to be important and I could not chose just one. After looking at some other projects, I saw the importance of focusing on just one culture. I gave small amounts of information about many different cultures and I hope my peers will find the information helpful, but I was great to see other projects go so in depth about one specific culture. Hopefully my project will encourage people to learn more about different cultures.
Using a scrapblog was a lot of fun. Since I am rather technologically challenged, it took me some time to figure out how to use the scrapblog. I spent quite a deal of time experimenting with different functions of the technology and playing around with different applications. However, after looking at other scrapblogs, I realized that there are many functions that I did not know it had.
Although I struggled at first, it encouraged me to use my creative side and add my own flair to each page. I think this technology would be great for students to use; however, I would suggest it for older students (high school and up). While I already found the topic to be very interesting, I allowed me to present it in a way that was interesting to others. I was able to describe different cultures and also provide examples of books they could use in the classroom. I hope my peers have to opportunity to review some of the books I included in my project and think about using them in their classrooms one day.
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I agree with you that cultural literacy is very important to incorporate into your classroom and that it is very interesting. Although going more in-depth by focusing on one culture would have been beneficial, I think that covering the topic in general was a great idea as well. Going about your project in this way allowed you to give a more broad definition of what cultural literacy is for those who may have never heard of the term before.
ReplyDeleteI also really enjoyed the technology that you chose to use, Scrapblog. I think that it is a great tool to use to create a presentation without using the typical format of a powerpoint. It can also be a fun tool for students to use, but I agree with you that it would be the most appropriate for high school students.
I actually debated between cultural literacy and emotional literacy when we started this project. I completely agree that cultural literacy is very important to the classroom and the classroom community. There is so much that students and teachers can learn from each other when teachers encourage students to share their different experiences related to their cultures. Even if a classroom isn't as culturally diverse as others, it is still important to expose students to different cultures and ways of life.
ReplyDeleteI think that there are so many cool things that you can do with cultural literacy and technology, I don't know how you picked! But I do think you made a really good choice to go with the scrapblog. Especially with culture, pictures can say more than words and to be able to incorporate cultural pictures into a presentation like a scrapblog is really beneficial for students learning about the culture. Although I can see that some students may struggle with the technology, I think it could be incorporated into lower grades but it may require more teacher assistance. Either way, if students are just viewing or are creating a scrapblog it is a really effective tool for the classroom.