Learning with New Literacies

Why is learning with new literacies essential for students?

New literacies are ways of thinking about how reading and writing and using language, including visually, have changed as a result of new technologies. Basically, "new literacies" are ways of reading and writing that are new because of new tools (like email, texting, twitter, web pages, etc) and new practices (texting, blogging, creating digital video). These practices are new because they let us do things that are different than we could do before. (patersonschools.pbworks.com)

Chapter 2 of Content Area Reading (Vacca and Vacca) helps us to expand the definition of literacy. Literacy is not solely having the ability to read and write on paper, but is expanding to multi sources of media. Think about how many things we read on a daily basis; text messages, emails, websites, etc. We need to teach our students to be literate in all of these.  It is essential for our students that we link in-school and out-of-school literacies. We should be using new literacies to help teach  our content standards. 

How can I use new literacies in my future Spanish classroom?

• Thinking and learning in multimodal environments 
• Hypertexts and Hypermedia
• Learn how to evaluate websites
• teach students how to evaluate which websites have accurate information - show them how to maneuver websites
• Use Blogs, Wikis, and Nings - use this for reflective writing
• Learn with the internet - allow students to use the internet as a resource for
• Motivation
• Information
• Communication

The internet has so many opportunities for learning in a Spanish classroom. The idea that I am most excited about is connecting with a class from abroad (native Spanish speakers). I plan to have am internet pal for each of my students, and we can plan a time to go online and have them instant message each other. After a certain amount of time messaging each other, we can have them virtually meet through Skype. How exciting!

New technology is constantly developing, and I hate to say it but our students know how to use much of this technology more than we do. Using this technology as a learning tool will help our students to be engaged and motivated which will lead to a deeper understanding and fewer behavior problems :)

Below is a link to a website (the same website I quoted above) that offers more links to help us explore new literacies in different ways.

http://patersonschools.pbworks.com/w/page/24236781/New%20Literacies%20in%20the%20Classroom

Public Writing and Writing for Tests and Assessments

Chapter 5 of Content Area Reading (Vacca and Vacca) teaches us about public writing in our content areas.

Public writing differs from Writing to Learn activities in that students need to focus on grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. to make sure that it is ready for an audience to read. Much like public speaking, public writing takes practice. It is important that we give our students the a belt full of tools so that they feel ready and confident to produce writing meant for the public.

When we encourage our students to partake in Write to Learn Activities, we tell them not to worry too much about grammar and spelling, just to let their thoughts out. For this and other reasons it is important that we provide examples of public writing that relates to the assignment we give. We should also provide very clear rubrics so that our students know what we expect of their writing.

This website below shows good examples of public and professional writing.
http://www.pitt.edu/~ppw/examples.html





There are many limitations for students' writing in the tests and assessments that are administered today. Chapter 10 of Content Area Writing (Daniels, Zemelmen, and Steinke) tells us that tests only look at one moment in time. There is no way to see how a student has progressed through the unit we are testing on. The answer to the essay could either be what the student learned throughout the unit, or it could be prior knowledge that they already had.

Another limitation is the way we have taught students to write, strictly for a grade. We need to be teaching students to write with the purpose of persuading or inspiring. Working in a middle school I have noticed some transitioning into writing persuasive essays, but this is strictly for assignments and not for tests. I would like to see this taken to the next level and shifted into our assessments. This would cause students to think deeper and would help teachers assess what the students have learned.

Students are often only given one chance to write their answer, and there is generally a time frame. This could cause anxiety on students and get in the way of them showing their best work. It also causes them to only do the bare minimum and hinders elaboration.

Below are some ideas given in our text as to how we as educators can offer writing assessments that will prove to be more beneficial for both our students and ourselves.

1. Offer choices
2. Allow more time - perhaps allow students to take essays home to do
3. Allow more than one chance - allow students to make corrections and re-do. This will prove to be a great learning opportunity
4. Create rubrics that are clear, yet non-constricting - leave room for students to be creative
5. Make writing prompts that are more open ended
6. Have themes and prompts be relevant to your students

There is much to think about when it comes to creating writing based assessments. Below is a link to a website that may be useful in helping you to find prompts for student writing

http://educationnorthwest.org/resource/514

Developing Vocabulary and Concepts in my Content Area

         Chapter 8 of Content Area Reading helps us gain understanding as to why the language of an academic discipline should be taught within the context of concept development, and how we as teachers can activate what students know about words and help them to make connections among related words. The parts that I found most useful and interesting in this chapter are the use of graphic organizers, activating what students know about words, and reinforcing and extending vocabulary knowledge and concepts.

         This chapter gives us tips to effectively using graphic organizers in the classroom. We should evaluate the organizer, introduce students to the learning task by showing them the scheme, relate new information to the organizer where it seems appropriate. It is important to be consistent when implementing graphic organizers, and use them to coherently depict relationships among concepts. In my future Spanish classroom, I plan to use graphic organizers as a tool to help connect different stages of my lessons/units. 

O      Our text also offers many strategies to activate what students already know about words, which will help them to understand new concepts and connections that we are trying to introduce. We can use word exploration, brainstorming, word sorts, knowledge rating, and list-group-label/ list-group-label-write. It also gives us tools to help our students reinforce and extend vocabulary knowledge and concepts. We can use semantic feature analysis, characterization activities, concept circles, and context-and definition- related activities for this. 

         Developing vocabulary and concepts is essential for student learning. Before we can introduce new topics and ideas, we must ensure that all of our students fully understand the vocabulary that is involved. I plan to use many of the strategies from our text to ensure that my future students are ready to dive into our lessons.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching

How can understanding students from different backgrounds help us to grow as educators?

Chapter 3 of Content Area Reading by Vacca and Vacca helps us to understand how it feels to be different in a traditional classroom setting, develop strategies to teach in a diverse student population, and to look to student difference as a resource and learn how individuals in a diverse classroom can benefit the instruction of ALL students.

Through this chapter of our text we are give four different multicultural instructional approaches:

Contributions Approach - Reflects the surface level of culture (celebrating holidays etc). This approach is not very in-depth and does not touch on more profound cultural elements.

Additive Approach -  In this approach the curriculum remains mainly unchanged. When investigating a topic, this approach investigates multiple perspectives such as looking at a historical even from a different cultural viewpoint.

Transformative Approach -  Examining cultural differences drives instruction. Understanding concepts, events, issues, and perspectives is key to learning the content.

Decision-Making/Social Action Approach - This approach is designed to engage students in an activity or project that encourages and promotes students to learn more about multicultural issues and evaluate. It also encourages students to take action on conclusions in the interest of social justice.

Upon reading this chapter, I am determined to make every effort to incorporate both the transformative and Decision-Making/Social Action Approach in my future classroom. The final approach I mentioned will promote a deeper thinking while encouraging them to be active citizens.

Some of the tools that I took learned from this chapter that will help me to create a culturally responsive classroom include but are not limited to:

• Setting appropriately high expectations for all students
• Building positive relationships with families and community
• Employing active teaching methods capable of involving ALL students
• Transitioning of teacher to facilitator of learning
• Turning over control of portions of the lessons to students
• Revolving instruction around students working in groups and pairs

The district that I work in has a mission statement that emphasizes the overall success of ALL students. 

"To inspire and prepare ALL students with the confidence, courage, and competence to achieve their dreams; contribute to community; and engage in a lifetime of learning.

None of this would be possible without creating a culturally responsive classroom and school environment. 

Mini-Lesson Demonstration Reflection

The Write to Learn Activity that I demonstrated was Admit/Exit slips. In preparation for this demonstration I chose a learning objective that I knew I would easily be able to teach and assess student learning. The learning objective that I selected was 

"I can listen to commands in Spanish and perform the commands correctly".

In order to acquire a deeper understanding of both Admit and Exit slips, I chose to demonstrate both. I created a half sheet (in bright green of course ) that promoted activation of prior knowledge and helped me to determine if the class was ready to move on or not. I focused on different vocabulary words that students would need to know in order to take it to the next level and listen to them in a command. On one side of the half sheet I created a matching activity where students were asked to draw a line from the Spanish vocabulary to the correct definition in English. On the other half side of the Admit half sheet I wrote three prompts for students to finish. 

1.) Some of the vocabulary words that I struggles with are .......

2.) Some of the vocabulary words I feel very good about are .....

3.) One way that I could study my vocabulary words to better understand them is .... 

I also created an Exit Slip. This was a full bright yellow sheet of paper that I made to have students fill out during the last 5 minutes of class. This Exit Slip began with stating the learning objective for the day so that students would be reminded of what they were trying to accomplish in this day's lesson, and would be able to self-assess their learning. Below the learning objective were two questions for the students to answer:

1.) ?Que hiciste hoy? (List what you learned, did, had trouble with, or enjoyed today?

2.) How could you use today's lesson/learning in real life?

I used the first question for me to understand where each individual student was at and which students may be need a little extra support. This information could also help me to create groups/partners. The second question was written to help students create relevance to real-life situations, which we know builds upon engagement. 

I thought the Admit slip went well. I had the class fill it out and then compare with a partner. After that we all went over the answers as a group. The class seemed excited to have known the correct translation for the different vocabulary. This was also a good way for the group to have a take-away item. Going through the answers as a whole group also gave me an idea of where the class was at with the vocabulary, and whether or not we needed to review before moving on to commands. The mini demonstration also went well because I had students actually act out the commands which catered to a variety of learning styles. 

My classmates took away an example of both an Admit and an Exit slip. They also gained knowledge of one way that they could use these in their future classrooms. Before beginning my demonstration I explained a couple of different ways to use Admit slips. For example, some teachers assign them the day before and do not allow students in the class until they have completed them. This slip is like an ticket into their class. 

If given the opportunity to do this demonstration again, I would find ways to model the activities better for my students. I feel that I kind of breezed through the explanation part of it, and may find that 9th grade students may struggle with the activities with the way that I modeled it.