What Are New Literacies?The term "New Literacies" refers to a technology-driven paradigm shift in how we perceive literacy and approach literacy instruction. According to Vacca, Vacca, and Mraz (2014), "Being a literate person in today's society involves more than being able to construct meaning from a printed text. A literate person needs to be able to "read" and "write" and learn with texts that have multimodal elements such as print, graphic design, audio, video, gesture, and nonstop interaction." This reality has never been more true than it is for our digital native students, whose everyday literacy experiences revolve around "texts" rich in multimodal elements.
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Why Should New Literacies Matter to Me?As society becomes more reliant on technology for everyday tasks, our exposure to new forms of text-based, audio, and visual communications will necessitate reeducating ourselves and educating our students to engage and interact with these new forms of communication. Just as the switch from the card catalog (a centuries old technology) to the search engine (a technology that, itself, has evolved significantly in the last decade) represented a shift in how we access information, our students will inhabit an ever-evolving world in flux. How will the technological advancements of the next 50 years change the mediums through which we communicate? One thing is certain: given current trends, whatever changes do come about will make how we communicate and access information more interactive, not less.
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Am I Equipped to Teach New Literacies?We are as equipped to teach new literacies as we are to utilize them in our own lives, but that is what makes this new age all the more exciting. Now, more than ever, we can truly learn alongside our students, and what better way to learn than through experience? In many cases, our students are more expert at the technology that has ushered in a need to teach new literacies than we are. That is not to say, however, that they understand how this technology is changing the way we interact with information as readers and writers. Learning how to drive a car may grant a person newfound freedom to travel and explore, but knowing how to be a responsible driver, navigate highways, and fix a car when it inevitably breaks down are a whole different story. The same can be said for our students. They may know how to work their fancy devices and software better than most of us, but will they be responsible with the power these devices grant them? Will they know how to navigate the information super-highways of today? Will they know what to do when they encounter unforeseen challenges as readers and writers in the age of new literacies? That's where we come in.
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