New Media and New Literacies

  M6 Blog Post 5 Google Classroom: Google ClassroomGoogle Siteshttps://sites.google.com › view › classroom-workspace Google Classroom is a learning platform developed by Google. The platform became popular at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when schools were forced to work remotely. The goal of the platform is to create, distribute, grade assignments, and share files between students and teachers. The main features of Google Classroom are streaming, classwork, and people. The people who have access to a particular classroom are teachers, students, and their guardians. All stakeholders can navigate the content like assignments, students’ work, announcements, grades, and feedback. Through Google Classroom, students can also use several apps of Google Workspace such as Meet, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Chat, etc. This allows communication between students, teachers, and guardians to constantly be engaged in learning progress. Google Classroom is relatively easy to navigate and offe...

  Artificial Intelligence in educational settings It has been a few years since ChatGPT became available to the public. This significant milestone in technology has started to impact many areas of our daily and professional lives including education. In the field of education, AI can offer many benefits. It includes personalized learning, efficient administrative tasks, convenient access to resources, language support, and many more. On the other hand, integrating AI in education presents several challenges, for instance, data privacy, bias and fairness of algorithms and outcomes, proper training to effectively use AI, ethical considerations, etc. Addressing these challenges and maximizing the use of AI requires a collaborative effort among educators, policymakers, technologists, and other stakeholders.  At this point, it is evident that AI is becoming an integral part of our lives and learning. It also contributes to the development of new literacies by shaping and extending ...

The idea of designing a classroom through spaces is to use different modes of engagement and create an environment that supports diverse learning needs.  The primary thing is to understand the concept of designing classroom activities across spaces. It means that we have to organize physical and virtual areas in a way that promotes engagement, collaboration, and interactions between students. By adopting such activities, we create spaces to respond to the diverse students' needs like multiple intelligences, different learning styles, neurotypical and neurodivergent populations, and students with various disabilities. According to Garcia, “As educators, we should be more apt to challenge the kinds of digital literacy practices expected in our classrooms and to consider how these practices can better mirror the world around us, engage our senses, and facilitate authentic learning.”(Garcia). I believe that creating a learning environment that integrates both the real and virtual world...

Digital literacy is the “ability to navigate, consume, create, and communicate online information appropriately in the digital world."  (“Digital literacy” NCTE 2019). In the last quarter of the century, we have moved from traditional literacy to new literacies based on technological development. Within these new literacies, we are developing a "multitude of proficiencies", such as digital problem-solving, media literacy, basic computer skills, network literacy, and information literacy. We must develop the skills that matter for digital literacy, like critical thinking, communication, processing and analyzing information, self-awareness, problem-solving, and navigating systems (“Digital literacy” NCTE 2019). These skills need to be developed by both students and educators. Looking back at the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a time when, within a few days, educators worldwide had to become professionals in online teaching and using digital tools to teach students how to nav...

New literacies extend beyond traditional literacies because they refer to the skills and strategies helping us effectively use and interpret information in the digital world. While traditional literacies focus on reading and writing text, new literacies integrate technology and multimodality. They emphasize interaction and collaboration, as well as critical and analytical skills. According to the Expanded Territories of “Literacy:" New Literacies and Multiliteracies (Sang, 2017) , there is “ a new belief (“mindset”) to see the world has changed fundamentally due to the utilization of new technologies, rather than using new tools to do the old work only in more “technologized ways” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007)”. Indeed, thinking of it, technology has affected not only literacy and the ways of transmitting information but it has changed our mindset because it started impacting us in many ways; personal, educational, professional and social.  New literacies became relevant to our p...