*Our Digital Literacy Project*

TOWARD NEW MEDIA TEXTS!!!!!!

This article was about facing the challenges with visual literacy. The reason media literacy is not use is because it lacks the familiarity with a range of new media texts that they consider appropriate for study in composition classrooms. Most classroom teachers remain book readers. Some of the teachers may feel like they lack the skills they need to conduct serious stud of these text.
Some of the literal terms he used was, the visual which refered broadly to a focus on visual elements and materials of communication. He also used the term composer/designed to describe the complex set of activities involved in such a creative and strategic task. Other terms he uses is reder/viewer and reading/viewing.
Some of the provide approaches to visual texts is:
1. The assignments connect with is.
2. Most of the assignments deal at some level with a combination of both visual and alphabetic literacties.
3. And most of the assignments do not require teachers or students to use sophisticated computer environments as contexts for visual assignments
4. Importantly, I would add that most of the assignments involve teachers and students as co-learners in the project of paying increased attention to visual texts.

Conley's Chapter 11

One of the most important sentences, is the first sentences Conley stated oin Pg. 305 of his book. "Writing is one of the most important ways to learn and demonstrate learning in content areas." It is in tuned with our everyday experiences, that occur after school. Writing is composed by its context, the purposes for writing, and the audience.
Demands for writing:
>High school and College Writing: Writing five paragraphs in high schools, and writing research papers in college.
> Workplace Writing: The types of writing for your particular job.
Guiding students to write to learn:
> We as teachers should teach our students how to plan their writing. This plan consist of goals and ways of achieveing our goals.
>We should teach them about quick-writes. This help students put ideas and emotions down on paper.
>We should also have them brainstorm and set goals. The purpose of this part is to make wirting much more informed and goal-directed from the beginning of the writing process.
The guided writing prcedure is used to activate prior knowledge and for the students to think about a topic befor they write.
A stop list, WOW! I have never heard of this in the writing process. It was created to teach students with learning disabilities how to analyze writing assignments and how to plan and organize their responses. I think this is a great way to include all of the students. Conley was thinking of the students with disabilities. Yah!!!
Ways of writing:
>Journals
>Learning Logs
>Dialogue Journals
>Double-Entry Journals
>Writing Reports
>Writing Stories
>Writing Persuasive Essays
>I-Search Writing to Inquire and Research
Teaching the students to revise, should be modeled by the teacher, and remind the students to use these strategies with their own writing.

Conley's Chapter 8

Building Vocabulary Knowledge and Strategies

Vocabulary knowledge play an important role in comprehension across the content areas. Knowing the meaning of words gives students confidence to engage in the content area knowledge and learning.
Ways of achieving vocabulary meanings:

• Studying word lists
• Memorization
• Looking up definitions
• Writing words in isolated sentences

Even though these are ways to fulfilling vocabulary definitions, these activities are shallow, short-lived, and lacking in meaningful connections.

This was new to me. I did not know vocab. words had dimensions!

• Well-established words- words that the students know well enough to use them regularly an appropriately in their daily oral and written language.
• Just-acquatined words- The studednt know just the basic meanings of these words.
• Unknown words (A.K.A. technical words)- the students have little or no experience with these words.

Ways to incorporate vocabulary into our instruction:

• List the key words that are important to understanding the BIG IDEA.
• Check-off the words that are unfamiliar to students.
• Check off the words that appear frequently in curriculum.

Teachers are to connect what the students already know by the use of list-group labels, semantic mapping, and graphic organizers to get them thinking about the new vocabulary that is about to be introduced.

Conely's Chapter 7

In Chapter 7, I found some very interesting facts. Conely was discussed activating prior knowledge and increasing motivation while teaching. We as teachers should connect prior knowledge and motivation to the student's family, community, and school experiences.
He discussed reasons why he thought students were not motivated. Some of those reasons are: motivation and priot experiences with success and failure, motivation and differences between home and school values, and motivation and teacher expectations. I found these very important to take under consideration when I am teaching.

• Motivation and Prior Experience with Success and Failure: Motivation can be connected to student's success and failures. Students who try to learn without the proper ways of learning(learning strategies) spend a great amount of time struggling during their school years. When it is time for them to reinforce these learning strategies, they become unsuccessful because of the many years of trying and not being able to accomplish their goals. Conely notes," Years of feeling unsuccessful in certain subjets or even throughout a school career can take a heavy toll."
• Motivation and Differences between Home and School Values: The reason why many teachers can not motivate their students is because of dilemmas with different values with education at home and at school. Conley notes, " For example, families living in proverty might actually fear education as a way of losing thie relationship with their children." This is extremely true. Not only losing the relationship, some families do not proverty families do not value education at all. They only send their children to school because it is a law. Therefore the children feel the same way, which makes it hard for the teacher when they are teaching them.
• Motivation and Teacher Expectations: We as teachers sometimes makes the students feel like failures. We give students expectations and may communicate them in the wrong way. Some teachers pay less attention to those who are low achievers than high achievers when it should be the opposite. This makes the low achieving students feel like the teacher is not paying attention so why try. Question: Why pay attention to the high achieving students when they are already achieving above average. Why not try to get the low achieving students to try to reach for a higher goal?

Ways to activate prior knowledge:

• Anticipation Guides
• Prep(Pre Reading Plan)
• K-W-L (My favorite, especially for younger students)

******Let's increase activation prior knowledge and motivation. The students need it, and it will make us more successful as teachers. It will make our lessons go much easier and much smoother!!!!******

Lesson Plan 1

5th Grade Social Studies
Curriculum Standard:
3. Analyze spatial and ecological relationships between people, places, and environments utilizing social studies tools(e.g. timelines, mental and physical maps, globes, resources, graphs, a compass rose, political cartoons, charts, primary and secondary sources, technology, and other geographical representations).
f. Evaluate land use with a variety of maps (e.g. farming, industrial, recreation, housing, etc.)

Big Idea: Land Usage

Prerequisites:
The students should know:
That our land is used for many resources

• Be able to use a map to locate various areas where land is used for farming, industrial, recreation, housing, etc.
  

Preparation:

• Introduce land usage
• Ask the students to elaborate on the various ways the land can be used in groups.
• Demonstrate ways the land can be used by planting a live plant in soil, water, and place in sunlight.
• Discuss the different way the land can be used.
• Discuss the importance of land usage.

Guidance:

• Students brainstorm about the various ways the land can be used.
• Students will explore in depth the various ways land can be used in groups, and discuss ways they will show land usage in the United States.
• The teacher will walk around providing help and feedback when needed.

Application:

• Introduce the concept of land usage
• Examine the different ways the students elaborate on how the land can be used.

Assessment:

The teacher will formally assess the students on the way(s) they show how land is used in the United States. The teacher will also informally assess the students by their participation in group collaboration.

****Here is a great resources I would use with this lesson. Of course it is from brainpop!!!****
http://www.brainpop.com/socialstudies/ushistory/industrialrevolution/preview.weml
http://www.brainpop.com/science/ourfragileenvironment/humansandtheenvironment/preview.weml
http://www.brainpop.com/science/earthsystem/landbiomes/preview.weml

Conley's Chapter 5

In Chapter 5, the most important thing I read was using different text while teaching our students. Not only confiding ourselves just to text that comes form the textbooks, but also, web pages, trade books, music, movies, and other media, magazines, and newspapers. Incorporating these things into our lessons leads the students to a better understanding in the content areas. We are to also use the text to motivate the students to overcome problems they are currently facing in life.
The different types of text Conley elaborated on are: informational, narrative, and digital text.

• Informational text are our textbooks which can appear on billboards, lists, graphics, and logos on food packages, and traffic and road signs. One other type of informational text is documents, which include forms, schedules, indexes, tables, charts, checks, deposit slips, labels, music transcriptions. They are consistent and their message is purposeful.
  
• Narrative text represent varied worlds, cultures, values, and beliefs. This type of text invite students to compare their experiences with characters and situations reflected in the text. When the students reflect, they gain knowledge about themselves and the people and world around them.
  
• Digital text this was my favorite, and most interesting. I includes photographs, the media(television, electronic newspapers, and cartoons), movies, and Internet images. All of the digital text has its own creative language. It allows the students to encounter experiences with literacy.

Before we as teacher are about to choose text for our students. We are to find out the student learning needs. The text offered creating a BIG IDEA chart, which I thought would be very useful. Creating this chart gives the students their options of what they can learn due to their knowledge and practices.
By doing these we are able to see what the students need to learn and from there we are able to select the appropriate literature to incorporate into our lessons by using useful strategies.