Emotional Literacy using Glogster

            My conceptual understanding of literacy has changed through this project the most by simply expanding my definition of literacy to not ONLY include reading, writing, speaking and listening. I now know that it incorporates so much more that everyone needs to be aware of to help them to hopefully become a good citizen and learner in the future. Through creating and researching for my Glog of emotional literacy, I have learned that many of the “new literacies” can be easily incorporated into daily (or unit) lesson plans. These new literacies are important for students and teachers to know about because they can all help students to help the world around them. Through this project I learned that emotional literacy is a very integral part of a person’s everyday life. Emotional literacy helps people be able to better connect with the people they interact with.
           To have effective literacy instruction for diverse learners for this new literacy you would have to make appeals to students in multiple ways. As a teacher, you would have to present the literacy to students in a way that is both fun and understandable to students since it is sort of an intense subject. The use of a Glog could help make learning about emotional literacy more fun and understandable because of the ease of adding visual aids to the Glog. For this presentation students would need to know how to access a computer and log on to the internet, but other than that this would be an easy way for students to access and learn about a new literacy.
            To teach students about emotional literacy I would first tell my students that they will be learning about a new type of literacy. (I would have previously defined literacy to them in another lesson.) I would tell them that after this lesson they will both have learned about a new way of thinking and learned about how to use Glogster to share ideas and concepts with their peers. For this lesson I would need computer access for each student or group of students and some already researched materials for them to work off of. In this lesson students will…

• Have a whole class discussion about what the term “new literacy” means.
• Read through materials with students about what emotional literacy is and how it effects their everyday lives.
• Show students Glog about emotional literacy.
• Go back and walk through step by step with students how to log on to the computers and then access the Glogster website and how to create a new Glog.

           This would be the whole lesson and I think it would be easiest to assign making a Glog as homework or as an in-class project for the next lesson. This would allow students more time to think about what they want to learn about and present back to the class. The Glogs that the students make would be a good assessment to see if they actually learned about new literacies.