Honestly, I learned numerous techniques this semester that I look forward to using in my classroom to enrich my students' learning. The subject that we covered that I think will have the biggest impact on my teaching is digital literacy. I absolutely loved the day that we had to just play around with various websites. It introduced me to sources that I never knew were out there. I had no idea you could create your own comic or make your own animated movie. Before this class when I thought about using technology in the classroom I thought of using projectors, movies, and music. Now my view of digital literacy in the classroom has expanded greatly. I have learned that there are many resources out there. I have also learned that technology should only be used when it enriches your lesson and not as a nice little add-on. I plan to use technology in large variety of ways in my classroom for everything from book reports to writing assignments.
Another important thing I learned from this course are the variety of vocabulary and comprehension strategies that we learned. Throughout most of my education vocabulary involved reading the definitions from textbooks and dictionaries. I always knew that there were other types of vocabulary strategies but I never really knew what they were. As an English teacher, the strategies we learned in class will be immensely helpful in helping my students understand the technical terms of my subject. The same thing goes for the comprehension strategies that we discussed. Most my teachers have simply given me a book or story and told me to read. As a good reader, this wasn't much of a struggle for me. However, I could see that this was difficult for students who didn't enjoy reading or struggled with. Now that I have learned about specific comprehension strategies I plan to use them frequently in my own classroom. Every reading assignment will have a variety of before,during, and after strategies to build students comprehension and reach out to diverse learners.
Overall, I learned a lot from this class that will make me a better teacher than I would have been without it. I plan to use a large number of the strategies and subjects that we discussed this semester in my classroom.
Hi Chelsie...I posted this comment on Sara's blog, too, but at the Literacy Research Association this year, the theme of the conference was "new literacies, digital literacies, and multimodal literacies." They weren't even accepting submissions on the reading of printed texts anymore. This, to me, is a testament of how much the field of "literacy" is changing. I will always and forever be a fan of a good book, but I am glad that you are thinking of ways to integrate many different digital literacies into your instruction. That will make your instruction much more relevant and engaging to your students. :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for your posting!