New Literacy Project – Reflection

When the New Literacy Project was introduced to us in the classroom, numerous questions arose in my mind concerning the types of new literacies and new technologies. There were various programs we could use in presenting our new literacy in which lots of exploring were needed to be done. Furthermore, this project was a chance to get familiarized using new technology and learning new literacy.

I chose scrapblog to present my New Literacy Project after exploring and listening to peers’ opinions on the ease of its usage. I experienced the simple and easy ways in creating a scrapblog including short steps and basic ways of uploading pictures. Moreover, there are available free themes already designed for not so creative scrapbloggers like myself. However, if more decorative stickers, backgrounds, and frames are desired, it is not too expensive to purchase them. Scrapblog is a perfect technology to use in creating a memorable presentation for the classroom to create as a whole and observe after completing them.

My reasons for choosing scrapblog are my all time interest in making scrapbooks. I have always been creating scrapbooks for special occasions and it always took a long time to create as to all the cutting, decorating, and putting them together. I have never heard about scrapblog until it was introduced in the class to us for this project and I’m glad it did since now, it made my scrapbooking time a lot shorter and more productive. I can share so much with the students through this program and the time consumption is a lot less than scrapbook. It is a great source to create and share with the students in the classroom as well as in keeping and creating one for yourself apart from school.

For my New Literacy Project, I chose emotional literacy as the new literacy I wanted to explore and learn. My placement in the kindergarten classroom, I observe numerous emotional struggles and conflicts within peers in which some of the students have difficult times controlling angers in which they burst out crying for not getting what they want. Further with emotional literacy, I chose a specific part of emotional literacy, motivation. I wanted to emphasize the importance in students’ motivation to do work and accomplishing assignments and be engaged in doing assigned tasks for internal learning.

Other than all the positive aspects of this project, I had some struggles in doing the New Literacy Project. When creating a scrapblog, the site did not have a full description on how to start a scrapblog in which I had to ask a friend (Heather) who already had experiences with scrapblog. She instructed me on what I should click to find free scrapblog creator and the steps I needed to follow in completing one. However, the scrapblog itself is not difficult to complete once you know where the links are listed since it directs you back to the scrapblog you were creating when logged into your account. In addition to some of the struggles in creating a scrapblog, I was not sure on the specifics of emotional literacy as I was never introduced to the topic. Therefore, I had to do some research in understanding the purpose of teaching emotional literacy towards the students. Overall, the New Literacy Project supported me in introducing me to a new method of how I can incorporate technology into teaching literacy to the students, and I am for sure planning to use scrapblog to enhance students’ learning in a classroom someday.