I began this assignment quite some time ago, after we had turned in our new literacies plan. When i turned in my plan, i said that I was going to create a wiki about social literacy. For many reasons, this changed. After attempting to do research about social literacy on more than one occasion, I not only realized that there was very little to find 'out there' about it, but what i did find, i thought to be quite dry and boring. At that point, i decided to take a different route. I started back at square one, re-reading the website about new literacies a few times, and then deciding on a new literacy: environmental literacy.
I decided environmental literacy would be a cool thing to do a project on, mostly because I really enjoy learning and teaching about the environment. Further, i have been trying to come up with ways to help students to learn to live more environmentally friendly lives.
After thinking about how I might do a wiki for this, i decided a wiki wouldn't be the best option for a project like this. This project is basically individuals working (non-collaboratively) to accomplish a goal of explanation. Wikis are best when used with numbers of people so that collaboration, explination and change can take place. To create a wiki by myself would probably end up being rather boring. Therefore, I decided to expand my e-portfolio a bit and create a website about Environmental Literacy. Because I have worked with NVU in the past, i decided to switch it up a bit, and attempt to use googlepages website creator. I wanted to see how accessible it was - specifically for students, and i found that it was quite accessible. It was much simpler than NVU to use, and didnt involve setting up a network on your computer, which msu.edu requires you to do when you use NVU. I can see myself using googlepages in the future with my students (i even left a page where I plan to put links to student projects on my site :-) )
I also ended up using Del.icio.us to tag some of the cool sites i found information on, which i think is cool. It helps to give credit to where I got my information, as well as keeps it all in one place for my students and peers.
I really did end up enjoying this project, despite the fact that i was off to a bit of a rough start.
This project helped me to analyze my own plans for the future, and really think about how I am going to incorporate something that i believe in into my classroom. I am excited to help my students to become more environmentally literate in the future.
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How did this help change your idea of literacy (or did it not change that)?
Before this, i had been skeptical of having students make their own pages. i wasn't sure if it may be too hard to do so using NVU or if there might be an easier program to use. I thought it was helpful to try out the google pagemaker. Further, this allows me to keep everything working with google (e-mail, RSS, webpage, calendar, etc.) which i am a fan of. further, it helped me to think about websites as a way for students to develop their writing skills, not just to research new things, but to develop their own sense of knowledge and sharing knowledge.
this also brings technology into literacy development, which a lot of schools are looking to do.
further, this helps students to develop a sense of ownership, which is huge.
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