Thoughts on Digital Literacy

Today's August Reading Institute mentioned a popular website called Goodreads which is used by a great number of young students and adults today. I had a trial on the website and found many students use it to keep track of their own readings and let their friends on the site to monitor their readings. They also comment on and rate books and post book-related videos. I was told that some schools use the Goodreads as a collaborative online book club for students, parents, and teachers to leave comments to books they read or have been reading.

Students can limit their group discussion to their friends. One interesting thing happened recently was about a book named The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. A group of students were discussing the book on the site and opened the access to their classmates, teachers, and the author. One day, they surprisingly found the author left a passionate comment to a student who wrote a poem for the book...

Digital Literacy Project Design

This online book club drove me to think further about my potential digital story telling project with a class of 5^th graders in P.S. 199 in the fall. The classroom teacher has given me great flexibility in co-creating and co-working on this digital story telling project. Our original idea was about teaching children basic movie editing skills and guiding them to convert photos and pictures into a video story/book with different texts inserted. So students will, based on the books they will be reading in the fall, make reflective video works or create books in their interested topics. They will in the process additionally learn design skills and 21^st-century media skills. However, this original idea has potential uncontrolled challenges: (1) potential difficulties of managing Windows Movie Maker as 5^th graders; (2) limited space and time to show texts within a video story/book; and (3) a potential website to house these digital stories.

Goodreads is a great “online book club” to share, monitor, and keep track of books. But how can I connect it to the digital storytelling project? How many students in the class have internet access at home? Is the website allowed within the school? Since videos can be uploaded to personal profiles, how many videos can be uploaded for each individual and what is the upper limit?

Idea Two is, instead of trying a fancy video project, to let students publish their works/reflections and make comments to others’ entries through a classroom blog. Small-scale videos, images, and mind maps can be posted on the blog.

Idea Three is about Twitter. Twitter is a place we can use for collaborative writing and also individual publishing.

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Before making a final decision, I need to think more about the classroom facilities, students’ internet access, and the main publishing activities students will be involved in the fall.