New Media & New Literacies

 My original goal was to find a game that I had played when in school, but my memory is bad and I couldn't think of one or find any. I do remember, vaguely, playing the Oregon Trail game in middle school. But I decided to go a different route and find a new game that I could potentially utilize in my science room. It is a space astronaut game from National Geographic Kids. The levels are the different planets in our solar system. After getting enough tickets the player can unlock the next planet. After each level, students can learn facts about the different planets. The player has to maneuver the astronaut around various obstacles and collect stars and hearts/life. Some of the levels did get hard as the obstacles started to move. According to Gee (2013), "a good game feels highly challenging, but ultimately 'doable'" (pp. 316). This means that the student should be able to experience success and failure during the game. Gee refers to this as "pleasurable fru...

I had the opportunity to interview my 12-year-old cousin, we will call her Z. Although she gave me brief responses to some of my questions, I was still surprised by some of her responses. I began by asking her what technology she uses on a regular basis. She said she uses her phone, school Chromebook, Nintendo switch, and watches tv. Z enjoys using technology in school to help her learn and helps her get better grades on tests. She mentioned that technology helps her learn by using Kahoot. Since I have never heard of this website before, I needed to do a little research on it. This is a website that uses games to help enhance learning. The user can create their own game or quiz and share it with others (Kahoot!, 2023). Z had a lot to say about social media. Her favorite social media app to use is Instagram so she can watch videos of guinea pigs and find recipe videos. Z likes social medica because she can find videos to help her with whatever she needs help with and can contact others ...

Concerning new media, I personally don't like using technology or seeing schools increase their technology use. After completing my student teaching in a public school and seeing how much students use technology, this was an issue for me. I personally prefer instruction over new media being pushed onto kids. Is there such a thing as using too much technology in school? As you can tell, I am against using more media in classrooms. The topic for my project is regarding the impact technology has on student learning. Here are some questions I hope to answer during my research:  What are the benefits or challenges of incorporating technology? How can teachers use technology in the classroom? Do students learn when using technology? What is the impact of using technology in the classroom? After completing this annotated bibliography, I need to find more articles that include negative impacts technology can have and find articles that will answer my other questions from above. 1.  Ce...

A topic I found interesting was multimodal play. I found this interesting because it is very similar to my jobs view on education. It is the idea that we can combine literacy, play, and what children are interested in. According to Lankshear & Knobel (2013), a challenge with this pedagogy for educators is that they need to be flexible and quick thinking when it comes to their curriculum. The interests of young adults are always changing as well as the digital media that is being used. Another challenge is that it is not a typical style of curriculum for schools to increase the use of digital media in classrooms, such as phones. Thus, it can be hard for school administrators to stand behind the concept of letting adolescents use their phones and computers more during school.  I enjoyed reading the different ways educators incorporated multimodal play into classrooms of older students. I only work with preschool-4th grade students, so it is very different how the lower grades and...

  “What counts as literacy, how literacy changes in response to the new media landscape, and what value we should ascribe to the new forms of communication that continue to emerge and evolve online (Jenkins, 2009)." I thought this was a great article to read. I passed it on to my boss and co-workers at my job. This article really makes you rethink what we should consider as literacy. I personally feel that schools should still being utilizing print-based medias and incorporate aspects of digital media as needed to practice skills or help struggling students. I don't think the literacy curriculum should solely be focused on having the Internet can teach our kids. Technology in schools is not going to be going away anytime soon. Hopefully, as educators research and start to find new ways of using digital media in the classroom, test scores will be increasing and students will be more confident in their literacy skills. What counts as literacy depends on your own personal views. ...

  "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p. 9). This quote makes me think of the different ways literacy is used. For example, blogs or websites can use their words to spread information or opinions to many people. Then, people are able to comment and share their own thoughts. When I think of literacy it makes me think of print media such as books, magazines, and the newspaper. But literacy is everywhere. Literacy is a part of our everyday lives in other ways: tv, video games, cereal boxes, going to the grocery store, and reading road signs while driving. I enjoy reading and it feels really good to be able to hold a book and flip through the pages. When it comes to college textbooks, I always select the print optio...