My ideas of literacy have changed considerably since the beginning of the semester. I think when literacy is taught it is in the sense of learning to read and write. I began to grow when I started to research emotional literacy for our new literacies project. Emotional and social literacy, for example, are not usually included when teaching literacy to future educators. These forms are literacy have been proven to be important concepts to foster in children in the school years. I learned this mainly when exploring emotional literacy. There are strong links to learning this literacy and future social success and relationships. These forms of literacy are important for all types of students to learn. All students need to learn these literacies as well as new technologies. Students excel at different things. One way to discover a student’s strengths is to have them explore a new technology, master it, and teach how to use it to other students.
I think that it is important to allow students to explore new technologies. We live in an age where technology is wherever you go, exposing students multiple times a day. If I had students teach their classmates about emotional literacy using technology I would have them choose the technology just like we did in class. I think that it was important for me to learn how to use this technology on my own and because I chose it I was more excited to work on the project because I genuinely wanted to learn how to use the technology.
If I had all of my students use Prezi to teach emotional literacy, they would need to have many skills. They would have to know how to read, in general, and follow directions both for the assignment but also when viewing the tutorial for Prezi. Students have to read the icons on the desktop on a computer to know what program to open. Once they open an internet browser, they would have to know how to comprehend what they are seeing on the page in order to find the search bar. They then would need to know how to summarize the information on the page and rephrase it to put on their Prezi. Something that they might need help with is sequencing. This comes mainly when learning how to use Prezi. There is a certain order to entering information and creating the pathway. Students would need to understand the steps to creating this presentation. Many students, especially younger ones, might need help with this process.
In my classroom I would teach emotional literacy. I would choose a book that talked about different friendships or posed a situation where friends did something bad and they are in a fight. As we read the book we will talk about the friendship, more specifically addressing their feelings at certain parts of the story. When the lesson finished we would talk about the different emotions we feel and when we feel them. We would talk about how to go about expressing feelings when in a fight with someone. This is when we would use an “I feel” chart and maybe even have faces showing different emotions where students can share how they are feeling.
I agree that it is SO important to teach and have emotional and social literacy in the classroom. It is not something we as educators immediately think about even though it affects our lives every day. I think that it is important to use technology in relation to these types of literacy. What types of technologies do you think would be appropriate for special education or younger students? I agree that the Prezi would be good for older grades. How effective would it be to implement social networking sites into the classroom to help teach social and emotional literacy? I think that it is also very important to use conventional ways of teaching emotional literacy with books, especially with the younger grades. I also think that with many students, it would be good to have something tangible that they can manipulate while they are learning about social or emotional literacy, such as a feelings chart (or something similar in order to express their emotions in the classroom).
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