Post #1

Hi everyone!

My name is Shelby, and I think I should begin this post by explaining that I'm in a rather unique situation as a student of this course. You see, I'm not actually a K-12 teacher, and I didn't get my undergraduate degree in teaching. Instead, I am in the Children's Literature program and I'm taking this as an elective course.

This does not, however, mean that I don't teach! I'm a graduate assistant here at EMU and teach introductory writing courses to freshmen. My career goal is to continue teaching at the college level, and I'm hoping to translate the information and experience I gain from this course into my own classroom despite not being in the K-12 sphere. Due to my relative inexperience, I'm so excited to learn more from your blogs about your teaching experiences and knowledge.

In my classroom, I find the use of "new literacies" to be integral in teaching research and rhetoric. This is most evident when my students need to make use of EMU's library database and the internet in finding sources to cite. As digital natives, my students already know to go online (in fact, going so far as to physically step into the library building seems a rarity) but not exactly how to use the internet as a resource. The most common research method students are prone to use, a Google search, rarely digs deeply enough and often leads to possible sources that are... sketchy, to say the least. For that reason, I try to spend a lot of time showing students how to validate websites, as well as how to effectively search EMU's library database and Google Scholar for peer reviewed articles.

I've also been attempting to integrate digital literacy into my classroom by assigning my students an "online portfolio", in which they create a blog for sharing their favorite pieces of writing from the semester. My hopes when I assign this are to familiarize my students with both the process of sharing work on the internet and the work of creating a site or blog, since many in my class are only familiar with sharing content in the form of brief tweets and statuses. In the future, I'm also going to attempt to integrate Google Docs and Google Drive for the sake of easier homework submission and group work (although I'd have to admit that decision is mostly for the sake of convenience).

The biggest problem I face in the use of digital literacies in my classroom is that of distraction. Because college students often prefer to bring in their own devices rather than use the department's small stock of classroom Chromebooks, there's no way for me to tell what the folks in my classroom are really working on when I allow for online in-class work of any sort. I can walk around and check, but it's too easy for a student to tab out of the game they were playing or website they were browsing for even that to be effective. Once, for instance, I walked around the classroom as my students were doing an online group assignment, and caught two students playing a game of virtual pool when they thought I wasn't looking. Another, stranger example I like to cite: When I was assisting in a large lecture class, a student a few rows in front of me began to yell when the anime he had been watching with a pair of headphones on stopped loading.

One of my biggest goals in taking this class is learning how to encourage the use of new technologies in class without leaving students so open to abuse that privilege. I can already tell, however, that it's going to be a difficult balance to strike!