Tuesday, February 19, 2013

#ETMOOC | Digital Literacies for EALs

Welcome to my blog!  This is my first post contributing to the #ETMOOC community.  I had meant to join in the fun earlier but life is busy and time has passed me by.  However, I saw the topic for the next couple of weeks and knew I had to jump in head first because the topic was perfect.  I wrote a paper for a Masters class a couple years ago on digital literacy for EAL (English as an Additional Language) students so this is an apt time to share what I researched and documented.

Here is the paper...I had hoped to revise and make it less academic and more reader-friendly but it wasn't happening so this is better than not participating at all:  Downloading Multiliteracies into the EAL Classroom

As a follow up, I haven't used Fan Fiction with my students.  I am not too worried about making it "uncool" by presenting it to students.  I am certainly a cool enough person to get them excited enough to participate.  In fact, I might give it a try this semester with the students in my higher level literacy class.  Up to this point, my struggle with trying something like Fan Fiction has been the students' lack of fluency in writing and in computer skills.  Attempting simple blog posts have literally taken a couple of class periods and constructing a written piece let alone typing it out on the computer is extremely time consuming for students new to the language.  As a result, I concluded that a reasonable amount of technological literacy was a pre-requisite to attempting such a task and have kept it in the back of mind as something that I would still like to try someday.

I realize there were some thought provoking questions to ponder on the #ETMOOC blog and I may get around to a couple of those yet but I've got a thesis to work on and it's calling my name...and that voice is becoming increasingly louder as each day passes.  Hence, I will contribute as I can to this community and you can be sure that no blog post from this day forward will be as thorough as today's. :-)  Enjoy.

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