Goble,+Suzanne+Elizabeth+-+Reflection

1. Now that you’ve had this professional development experience, how are you defining “new literacies?” How do you think your definition has changed or evolved this week?

Prior to the New Literacies Institute, I had not given much thought to a definition of “new literacies”. In addition to my previous understanding, literacy has always applied to reading. With that in mind, I now understand that new literacies include all content areas.

2. Describe some new literacies that you learned about this week? What did you know about these topics before the week began and how has your experience this week contributed to your understanding of these new literacies?

Even though I have used Google Docs, I was not aware of Google Forms. I now understand wikis better because of the Institute. Even though I was familiar with many of the tools presented, I now have a better connection to my content area.

3. In what ways are the new literacies prompted by technology? How do they affect one another? Technology provides the means by which students will be able to complete Project-Based Inquiry lessons. As we have been preparing for the New Common Core, PBI has been mentioned several times. As a result of the New Literacies Institute, I now have a better understanding of the process and will be able to utilize it in my lessons.

4. How do new literacies affect the way we think about #|academic content? Describe an examples of how some specific academic content is affected by changes in the ways we reading write and thinking (i.e. new literacies). With the New Common Core for math, students will be required to use higher thinking skills in order to be successful in their math classes. This goes beyond the drill and practice that has been a major focus on in my classes, specifically. In order to use these higher order-thinking skills, students will need to be exposed to a variety of methods to approaching a problem. Students will need to apply their prior knowledge to what they already know in order to analyze and evaluate problems presented to them.

5. How do new literacies affect the way we think about our teaching practices? How do they affect the development of new teaching practices or approaches to teaching? New literacies will cause me to put more thought into how I am presenting lesson topics and how I assess students. I know that teaching practices are not the best but now that I have more exposure to how to utilize Web 2.0 tools to engage my students, I am hopeful that my class will be more relevant to the students that I teach. In order to develop lessons for the new Common Core, it will be necessary that I spend more time in creating lessons that incorporates some of the great ideas that I witnessed this week.

6. During the week, you learning about several conceptual / theoretical frameworks for understanding the new literacies including, project-based inquiry, TPACK, Bloom’s revised cognitive theory, online identity, and #|global literacies (i.e. cultural competence, cultural awareness, cosmopolitanism). Describe your personal perspective on new literacies as it is informed by these conceptual and theoretical ideas. We are well informed that our students are being prepared for careers that have not been created as of yet as well as preparing them for issues that we as adults have never experienced. Our students need relevant real-world connections in the things that we present to them. From my perspective, students want to be successful, but they also want to know how what they are learning will benefit them when they get older. Activities and lessons created using project-based inquiry, Blooms revised cognitive theory, and TPACK will hopefully help students make that real-world connection.

7. How does the design process you learned about in your design studio work and the video digging deeper session support your understanding of the creative process? From my standpoint, creating a compelling question and analyzing the information was the most challenging. Trying to create a question that was broad and yet narrow enough to cover what we hoped students could complete was a challenge for me. From that point, we were able to move along at a better pace. In our lesson, we gave students options for several activities. I hope that those choices will spark their interest in order to be more creative in their final product.

8. You learned this week about how to manage, and in some cases create, your online identity. What action steps will you take (are you taking) to manage and further extend your online identity? When I searched for my name, I find myself in several online communities. I am aware of the fact that I have those accounts but I do not see the need to keep the world up to date with my activities. I feel that my life is not that exciting to need to know some things. I am not sure of how I want to extend my online identity. Nevertheless, I do plan to stick to the following ideas that I have playing in the back of my head:
 * From my former principal: “Do not post anything that you would be ashamed to read as the headline on our local newspaper.”
 * The sage advice of Thumper’s dad in the movie //Bambi//: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”
 * From my Mom (even though she had it posted all around my brother’s room): the first line of the poem “//Your Name//” by Edgar Guest – “//You got it from your father, t’was the best he had to give.”//

9. If you had one more day in the Institute, what would you like to learn more about and why?

I would like more time to create another lesson in my subject area for the New Common Core. I would also like to work more with common content and grade level teachers.