Relationship between Digital media literacy and traditional literacy

I think a key is to engage the students in learning, the more they are interested in something the more they will learn. Traditional literacy could be very dull and uninteresting to a student unless the teacher had a creative way to make it interesting. Teaching digital media literacy has a distinct advantage in that kids love to be on the computer and they know they will be directly using these tools every single day. Critical thinking is also a huge part to digital media literacy and is something that is not quite stressed as much in traditional literacy. Educators are always going to have to adapt to the world around them to effectively reach their students at an optimal level. So english teachers and general education teachers will have to embrace the teaching of digital media literacy or risk having their students unprepared for advancement and learning at a lower level.

Digital Story or Research Paper?

I want to start out by saying both, obviously, are very useful for an educational setting. The main question is can a digital story substitute for a 15 page research paper. I feel like you could meet a lot of the standards by writing a digital story instead of a research paper, but both have their drawbacks. I think with a digital story you have the advantage of being more collaborative and being able to share and have your story viewed by more people. I definitely think I would use both as a teacher, but I just love the advantages of digital media. I love that others can contribute and share ideas. You won't have the problem of the paper ever getting lost or torn up. Also, I think students are more interested and more inclined to do a better job if they know others will see their work and they know it is going to be posted online. Digital stories are a great way to have students brought out of the monotony of everyday class and assignments.

Texting doesn't affect spelling

Here is a link to the article if you would like to check it out
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/19/AR2009101902878.html

Simply put, I don't agree with this article at all. It is based on a study of only 40 students and concludes that texting and instant messaging doesn't affect students spelling. It claims that students know when to use text lingo and spelling and when to use proper English language and spelling. Obviously, though if students are constantly communicating through texting, talking, and instant messaging, they aren't seeing the written English language very much and will have trouble with spelling. It is proven that a lot of us are visual learners and without seeing the language written correctly very often, we are bound to become worse at spelling some words.

Here are other links for literacy videos as well......

Are Digital Media Changing Language?

Here is a link to the article if you would like to check it out......
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/Are-Digital-Media-Changing-Language%C2%A2.aspx

I would be more concerned about students over reliance on text messaging and digital media. I dont feel that it takes away any or that much from there vocabulary or knowledge, if anything I feel like it probably hurts their social skills and creates a lot of wasted time where they could be learning through experiences and real world conversations. I just hope the reliance of digital media would be put into perspective, it is definitely something I enjoy and find useful but I am careful to make sure I do not spend too much time using it.

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The Joy of Blogging

Here is a link if you would like to check out this article.....
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar09/vol66/num06/The-Joy-of-Blogging.aspx

I found this article very interesting and thought it was a great idea to have students start a blog at a young age. I think the collaboaration aspect of blogging and receiving comments really accelerates their learning. Having retired teachers and university students comment on these blogs and posts really made it meaningful in my opinion. Most learning is going to be done through another sources' knowledge and experience so I thought it was really cool that these 5th graders were learning from teachers and students all over the world. My only concern would be students relying too much on technology to relate to the world, we already have major social and fitness problems in this country with kids and its no coincidence that their abundant use of myspace, facebook, blogs, etc. contributes to these problems. A key thing I would do as a teacher is to encourage them to only use these social networks in moderation.

My survey

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEk1aUJjU3dfV1YwQnlQNjdsdVowdnc6MQ

My resume