Welcome to the 21st-Century!
Many people believe that the word "literacy" is simply defined as a person that can read and write.
However, "the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possesses a wide range of abilities
and competencies, many literacies" (NCTE, 2008). So what are these competencies? In addition to the CCS, we also have the ISTE standards, which declares that students should be able to:
Some people may be asking, what does all of this mean? We cannot teach our students these things if we do not understand it for ourselves. Information fluency refers to the ability to conduct research in an effective way such as: knowing where to get information, knowing if websites are reliable, and knowing how to ethically use the information you find. By visiting the website of digital citizenship, you can explore the nine variations of this and see for yourself why this is important to stress in classrooms. Even if you do not have technology available in the school you work out, there are many other ways to foster these important concepts for your students.
This new concept of literacy is very important to integrate into the classroom because in addition to novels in the classroom, we need to teach the world as a text.. As a lover of print literacies (e.g. novels, magazines, newspapers, etcetera), I understand how hard it may be to embrace this non-print literacy, but it is a necessity and I firmly believe it has made me a more critically aware participant in the world.
The way children are brought up nowadays is different than they were years ago. Therefore, we need to
embrace the fact that children play video games, watch television, come into contact with advertisements,
and other visuals hundreds of times in one day. This is another example of why we need to incorporate visual literacies into our classrooms. We need to help our students become aware of what they are viewing on a day to day basis and be able to make educated decisions on their own. Students have literacies before they walk into our classrooms, it is our job to find them and turn them into academic literacies. As you may see from my teaching strategies tab, technology tab and this page, I believe that multimodality is essential to the 21st-Century classroom.
However, "the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possesses a wide range of abilities
and competencies, many literacies" (NCTE, 2008). So what are these competencies? In addition to the CCS, we also have the ISTE standards, which declares that students should be able to:
- Research and possess information Fluency
- Be creative and innovative
- Collaborate & communicate amongst others
- Follow digital citizenship
- Understand how to use technology operations & concepts
- Use effective critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making
Some people may be asking, what does all of this mean? We cannot teach our students these things if we do not understand it for ourselves. Information fluency refers to the ability to conduct research in an effective way such as: knowing where to get information, knowing if websites are reliable, and knowing how to ethically use the information you find. By visiting the website of digital citizenship, you can explore the nine variations of this and see for yourself why this is important to stress in classrooms. Even if you do not have technology available in the school you work out, there are many other ways to foster these important concepts for your students.
This new concept of literacy is very important to integrate into the classroom because in addition to novels in the classroom, we need to teach the world as a text.. As a lover of print literacies (e.g. novels, magazines, newspapers, etcetera), I understand how hard it may be to embrace this non-print literacy, but it is a necessity and I firmly believe it has made me a more critically aware participant in the world.
The way children are brought up nowadays is different than they were years ago. Therefore, we need to
embrace the fact that children play video games, watch television, come into contact with advertisements,
and other visuals hundreds of times in one day. This is another example of why we need to incorporate visual literacies into our classrooms. We need to help our students become aware of what they are viewing on a day to day basis and be able to make educated decisions on their own. Students have literacies before they walk into our classrooms, it is our job to find them and turn them into academic literacies. As you may see from my teaching strategies tab, technology tab and this page, I believe that multimodality is essential to the 21st-Century classroom.