New Media & New Literacies

Codingame.com Why Codingame.com? A couple of years ago, during a district reconfiguration that led to a potential shift in my teaching position, I stumbled upon codingame.com. It appeared to be an exciting platform for teaching coding in a gamified manner, perfect for engaging students in STEAM subjects. Though circumstances prevented me from implementing it in my classroom at the time, the recent topic inspired me to finally explore it on my own. With little prior knowledge about the platform, except for its gamified approach to coding education, I was eager to dive in and see what it had to offer. Initial Impressions Upon visiting codingame.com, I was pleased to discover that the platform was entirely browser-based. This meant that no downloads or installations were necessary, simplifying the process for both teachers and students who often face technical limitations within school environments. Upon logging in, I was greeted by an onboarding tutorial designed to familiarize users wit...

I am still honing in on my exact focus and I will likely have to see more where my research and writing takes me.The paper I'm Planning to write will revolve around the Ideas of social citizenship, computer-mediated communication , the effects of things like social media on our interpersonal relationships, the way our communication has changed and what effect it is having on our society. I will likely question the pros and cons as society moves ever-faster towards trends like working-from-home, remote-learning, online dating, etc. Annabell Halfmann , Diana Rieger, Permanently on Call: The Effects of Social Pressure on Smartphone Users’ Self-Control, Need Satisfaction, and Well-Being, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 24, Issue 4, July 2019, Pages 165–181, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz008     The article discusses how the ability to be permanently connected to others through mobile communication is both advantageous and challenging. While ...

Week 2- Chapter 1 & 2 Reflection        After I finished reading chapters one and two I found myself going back and re-reading the classroom studies in chapter one with a better grasp of the ways multimodal text can be used in conjunction with new media for the purpose of literacy. The example I liked best was Mr. Cardenas’ class which “employs the pedagogy of play,” (Lankshear et al., 2013, pg. 26) in his New Media Journalism class. Students Play the role of journalists complete with all the necessary props like cameras, notebooks and press passes which give them access to move throughout their school in order to create stories that they deliver in a variety of forms. Students learn how to use different digital software to make meaningful multimodal text be that in the form of a video podcast, or traditional print publication.               One of the techniques used in Mr. Cardenas’ class is teaching ways to compose ...

    "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).      The social approach to understanding literacy, as I am understanding it, focuses on the broader social and cultural aspects of literacy rather than reading as a technical skill. It emphasizes how people use literacy and text in their everyday lives. Our lives are full of what could be called “reading”. Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? by Motoko Rich makes what I think to be an accurate metaphor when it describes the way some characterize this type of modern literacy consumption as empty calories. The metaphor I immediately thought of was art. Art is all around us but it is only my proficiency with the principles of art and desi...