New Literacy: My conceptual understanding and classroom implications

1) Your Conceptual Understanding:

When I first posted about literacy at the beginning of this semester I only had knowledge of what literacy was, not what literacy can be. Since the beginning of class I always thought literacy was just understanding print through books. I never once thought to include new literacies like visual or environmental, just to name a few. Our group had visual literacy for our project and through this projects I saw that visual literacy is very important in today's technology centered world. Learning like everything else is fast paced and using images for children's learning is both beneficial for them and for teachers.
Our group project has made me see that images, graphs, or just visuals in general or used in visual literacy and can be more of a learning experience for all, even more so that print literacy. Images are easier for students to understand and comprehend versus actual print literacy. I found through this project that visual literacy is very important for the fast pacing world of technology. By using visual literacy through technology in the classroom, the students are getting involved with technology as much as possible. Visual literacy in our project was a great way to showcase how you could do that. That is something I never would have thought doing before this class began.

2) Classroom Implications:

To provide effective literacy instruction to diverse learners we as teachers must make literacy informative as well as engaging. Through visual literacy comprehension can be increased for students. Adding visually literacy to any subject increases their engagement in the learning of any specific topic. Our project on kerpoof.com used technology to create your own story with images and text. This is a great way for any student of any thinking level to properly engage themselves in a fun project. Visual and digital literacies are very important for today's student. It lets teachers integrate technology in the classroom.