Thursday, March 15, 2012

Blog #3- New Literacies Project



            My new literacy project is creating a website using Weebly about emotional literacy with Cristyn.  As I began working with my partner on our Weebly website, I discover that we needed to go through many different layouts and designs before we could move on to the actual content.  Finding a layout to fit the topics we wanted to cover took some time, but we were able to find a format where the information was easily accessible.  As soon as we found a fitting lay out, we needed to do research and find out exactly what we wanted to talk about in our website.  We went and read in-depth the various readings given to us on the wiki about emotional literacy.  We found a great amount of information that would aid us in to finding the definitions of literacy and emotional literacy.  When dealing with emotional literacy, I found many definitions that had many components. 
            From what I read on many websites, I found that in the simplest terms possible, emotional literacy is being able to recognize, monitor, and express one’s emotions while being able to empathize with other’s emotions.  As I began reading deeper, I kept thinking of different issues I could talk about in the website.  Questions kept popping in my head through the various readings, such as:
            
            How do children deal with literature that is emotional?
            When do children get exposed to emotional literacy?
            As teachers, what should we include in the classroom to get students to understand the concept of emotional literacy?
           
            We decided to split these types of questions into more general subjects, so we could include as much information about each topic as possible.  Our subjects (tabs) that we have included on our website are the definitions and different aspects of emotional literacy and literacy, how emotional literacy can be used in the classroom, the importance of emotional literacy, emotional intelligence, resources, and a pop quiz for people who have read our web site and want to test what they know about emotional literacy.  We briefly began looking for material for each topic and discovered that we were going to need to be really detailed in each section on our website.  In order to do so, we have planned to use scholarly articles, YouTube videos, websites, and other sources in order to be as successful as we possibly can be on this website.
            Thus far, reading and writing have been our main sources of ways we have explored this kind of new technology.  Figuring out what types of information and topics to include on our web site is going to be a challenge, because we do not want people to get lost in the information nor do we want people not to have enough to read about.  Watching movies for information has been a new skill that I have not really used and appreciated in the past.  While watching videos online, I noticed that I have been paying more attention to exactly what the speaker may be saying in order to be as accurate as possible with this project as possible.  I really enjoy discovering a new technology and being able to research a new topic.  While learning about both of these different topics, I thought including this kind of activity in the classroom would be very beneficial to students.   If we worked on a web site as a class, I think students would be able to learn how to use an online tool, while also discover methods for researching a certain topic.  Both of these topics are very important to the growth of students and each student could benefit to a great extent through this type of activity.   

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