Arianna Spiezio: New Media and New Literacies Blog

Case Study 1: Nearpod https://nearpod.com/library/ Image 1                                                                                                                                                                                       Overview     Nearpod is a useful site that allows teachers to present live to students. Students are able to access their own copy of a presentation/lesson where there are interactive components to encourage communication amongst peers as well as fo...

The final project for this course gives us as students, space to research something that is interesting and relevant to each of us as individuals. As new media and new literacies become a more prominent topic in our every day education lives, and lives in general, I found myself going back and forth regarding many topics. With my love for math, I settled on the use of educational games in the classroom. We have briefly learning about how various literacies are created and or used in the gaming world that may not be in a traditional classroom, yet are still vital to learning. I am eager to learn more about supporting students who may be passionate about "gaming literacies" by incorporating these types of literacies in the classroom to an extent that benefits learners. There is undoubtedly a fine line of helping and hurting in terms of the use of games in an educational space, but it is a matter that needs to be researched in order to not cross this line.  Gamification has the ...

I want to preface this blog post by saying that the following response was created with the hope I would be able to use a similar lesson in a future math classroom. As we read for this module, digital literacy is by no means isolated to the language arts classroom and I am compelled to extend the concept in my future math space.  The prompt for the given assignment asked us to, "give an example of an activity or project that you have or could assign in your teaching context/discipline that could leverage analog and digital learning experiences toward a complex learning goal." With that being said, I immediately thought of how to incorporate coding into an algebra curriculum and further, expanding beyond the screen with a (brief due to the frustrating tension of state testing) lesson regarding hackers and the social impacts hacking may have in our digitized world.  Ideally, the lesson would begin with an introduction on coding and how at first glance the language may look extr...

    New literacies are providing teachers and students with authentic experiences with diverse ways of learning in a world that is almost intimidated by diversity. These new forms of literacy are crucial in order to ensure our students are active participants in the digital age. Digital ways of communicating are the way of life and are going to be for the foreseeable future; with that being said, to participate in this communication, we must continue to learn and develop new literacies to promote academic growth, critical thinking, and a justice-seeking citizen.      Over the course of this module, I have developed a strong grasp on what "new literacy" means and why it is easily one of the most important contemporary issues in education. As Sang expressed, the language skills necessary to understand the world are changing and in order to maintain an understanding of the world around us, we must learn and teach these ideas (Sang, 2017). The National Council of Te...

     In the modern age we currently exist in, technology is a part of personal and professional life on a daily  basis. By technology, I mean the way we "generate, communicate, and negotiate meaningful content" (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 24), which also so happens to be the definition of literacy, according to Knobel and Lankshear (2007). The authors say new literacies are, "socially recognized ways of generating, communicating, and negotiating meaningful content through the medium of encoded texts within contexts of participation in Discourses." (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007, p. 24). New literacy has been designed, debated, redesigned, and interpreted to stray away from this stereotypical and outdated way of viewing literacy as simply the practice of reading and writing in formal English. Historically, American schools used traditional English as the foundation for education. However, we have learned over time that this simply does not work. In doing that, w...