New Literacies Project

For our New Literacies Project, Marie and I are investigating the Voicethread technology and Emotional Literacy. At first I was really not looking forward to learning about Emotional Literacy. It did not sound very interesting to me and did not sound very important. However, Marie and I both did not know very much about it and as future teachers thought it would be important to learn more about it. As we have done research on it I have seen how it is VERY important to teach emotional literacy in the classroom. Today children have become obsessed with technology. Technology IS useful but hinders children from learning about their emotions and other’s emotions. When talking to others they are behind a computer screen or cell phone a lot and not face-to-face. This does not allow the child to show their emotions and work through them or read other people’s emotions. We have learned that not knowing about emotional literacy can be very dangerous to the student and has caused a lot of children to go into depression because they do not know how to deal with their emotions in a proper way. I have learned that emotional literacy is important to all of the other literacies children us on a daily basis. For example, understanding a cultural literacy is to grasp the social cues, literal cues of one’s culture that apply to reading and writing. Reading, writing, listening, viewing and speaking all play a vital role in becoming emotionally literate. Although, speaking, viewing and listening are especially important in order to effectively display your emotions, while understanding and cooperating with their emotions. Reading and writing are important when teaching this literacy through Voice Thread, but we see it as a potential problem when students are learning social and cultural cues, which play a huge role in being emotionally literate. I think that emotional literacy is important to teach starting right off in pre-school because children need to know their emotions all throughout school.

Voicethread has been very interesting to learn about as well. I see that it can be very useful and gets children away from worksheets and their daily routine and let’s them explore a new way of learning. I do not think that this is a technology that would be useful in my kindergarten classroom unless they were guided through the steps of how to use it. My kindergartners are not very tech-savvy yet. This program was easy to figure out once you searched around a bit but I am a lot more tech-savvy than my kindergarteners. The students must have some concepts of print that are not only applied to traditional writings and literature mediums(i.e. reading left to right, top to bottom, starting with a capital letter and ending with a period), but they must be able to understand the different concepts of print associated with Internet, technology, etc. (See Tompkins). Internet and computer use is a vital key that should be integrated into student learning. We live in a time where the use of technology is exponential and it seems that more and more young children have a greater understanding of how to use technology. As a teacher, it is important for us to point out the different concepts of print so students have a better understanding of the variety in text fonts, colors, orientation, etc. In Voicethread children are using reading, writing, viewing, listening and speaking all in different ways. They are watching videos or voice overs and then can comment by writing, speaking, texting or calling in. Overall I have really enjoyed learning about both Emotional Literacy and Voicethread and can see the importance of both in a classroom