A participatory culture, is the ability for people to circulate their ideas, where members believe their contributions matter. It is a new type of culture that still acknowledges traditional culture but does not focus on that. Clinton and Jenkins say “well designed curriculum will help students to develop both the literacy practices, but refusing to engage in new media out of a misplaced fear of change would be equally tragic” (2013). 

What I find interesting is that the article talks about a disadvantage, that some people are fluent in this new culture, while others are not. Those who are not, struggle to participate in the participatory culture. Another interesting thing is that in school, children are taught one way to do things sometimes. It should not be like that. Students should be given many ways to comprehend something. This is what the new culture allows. 

This relates to multimodality because it offers different ways to access reading and resources.

What stood out to me was that our teaching should now consider and incorporate how we will teach our students to acquire the “habits of mind” that they will need to interact with these new medias in a healthy and productive manner. Another concept that stood out to me was the idea of “remixing” the old with the new - then and now. As we update our libraries and search for more diversity and representation, it is a novel idea to hold on to those classics and connect to the now.

A participatory culture is one where people are actively engaged in sharing and receiving information through creative ways.  There is easier access to express feelings, beliefs, and knowledge. Students are able to collaborate with others from different communities all over the world. 

After reading this chapter, I thought that often on a social media platform there is some type of image, caption, emojis and hashtags all used by a user to express opinions and share knowledge. This gives the user many different ways to express themselves. There may be a picture, a drawing, or a digital diagram with pictures and words to communicate the user's thoughts. As for the reader, they are taking in many forms of information and gathering it through their strongest form.

What stood out to me was how important infusing lessons of these technologies is. The chapter mentions how students who are behind in this area don’t get an opportunity to learn how to successfully utilize technology. There are really so many ways you could introduce and use it in discussions about literature. I really found it interesting how the teachers were remixing literature. It sounds that it would resonate with students much more and they would have a clearer understanding of the purpose of the novel and could make much easier connections to the remixed version and then draw conclusions from how it is similar to the original version. 

I work in a school that goes up to 6th grade. Students at the school have a 1 to 1 device. I think it would be great to research appropriate platforms for teachers to use and encourage them to use it to facilitate class discussions about the novel they are reading. This would give students an opportunity to practice using this type of technology with the oversight of the teacher and be able to access a new space to be creative. Students would also be able to connect with each other and express their ideas in a way they felt comfortable and confident. 

This year I have mentioned in previous Blogs a few instances where I have made connections between students’ identities and brought them into the classroom. At the start of the year, we wrote letters of introduction -  I introduced myself to the students in a letter form, and students wrote back. We shared these at the beginning of the year. Other activities where the students pull in their identities were telling stories of how they got their names, how their families came to Cherry Hill, creating a Totem Pole that focused on each student’s family history, and having the students participate in Book Clubs providing for choice, and interest. We make time during Morning meetings to share activities from outside of school. During the day, we stop and write for 5 or 10 minutes about anything on our minds and share those. Also, we sent out videos on FlipGrid to a sick classmate that has been in the hospital for a couple of weeks.

After reading this chapter, I looked at a STEM activity we were doing in class and thought about making it more about the students. I took pictures of the students’ progress as they attempted the “Card Tower” activity and incorporated them into the next day’s Google Slide. We looked at the pictures and examined strategies that helped students be successful, and we planned again for a second attempt. 

Moving forward, I’m going to encourage students to have parents tweet out and link to the class Twitter to view these tweets on Monday morning. The school librarian does something similar every Friday where she puts together a short slide show of the “Twitter finds of the week” from the whole school. Unfortunately, I’m always negligent of tweeting out pictures of class activities during the week, so I have to get better at that.

A new platform that I learned about was Empatico. At my school we have a good amount of teachers that use Skype in the classroom. They had done many interesting things with all different types of people and places. I think using Empatico would one up the global experience. One thing that I really liked that was covered in the pro’s and con’s was that video and messaging was built in the site. I think this is incredibly helpful and nice that it would be all in one place. I do like the idea of one class connecting to another. This enables the class to connect and learn from each other, without having to focus on additional classes/locations.

One huge take away from this presentation is the reminder to review expectations. This is typically gone over quickly or it could even be taken for granted that students would know not to give their full name or personal information. But this may be a unique experience for them and they may be unaware because they are in their school environment. I think all of the handouts and visuals are key to getting started right. It allows students to know what is expected of them for the lesson because it is different from what they may be used to doing. Do you share these expectations with the parents? I think that it is a great way for parents to be empowered to have social media talk with their children about digital citizenship and safety. 

In contrast, in the 2020/2021 school year I was a virtual teacher. This experience lended itself to new literacies and multimodality. Student’s primary mode of learning was through the computer. Everything was typically infused with at least more than one digital component. If they were to read a passage, there would be a read to me option for them to listen to the auditory. There may have been a video to connect to the information that they were learning about. Many assessments were built with a variety of ways for them to respond. Whether it was typing, voice to text, drag and drop, copy and paste. I was certainly challenged to infuse new literacies without even knowing it!

If we are developing skills of the 21st century learner, it only makes sense to infuse these new literacy skills into our lessons as well. Teaching and assessing through modes that are most relevant to today’s world would be much more meaningful and students would find more value in it. Students having the opportunity to respond, express themselves, and relate to the assessment allows them to show their own identity in their work. As displayed many times in the chapter, when student identity is a portion of the assessment, students are more engaged and more invested in the lesson. On page 137, an example of fostering their identity makes for a more meaningful reading experience. The students were able to connect to the text because they were able to experience it outside of the classroom by reading with their family. 

Our assessments need to reflect the 21 century skills that students work hard daily to master. Every moment is a teachable/ learning experience, even an assessment. Students are used to dragging and dropping in computer games. They then are already experienced in manipulating parts of the game to demonstrate understanding. Gone are the days of “playing on the computer” at school. Teacher’s must make digital and multimodality a major component of their lessons and assessments allowing students to not only respond, participate, and collaborate in ways that they are comfortable and familiar with. So many jobs have a digital component to their description, teachers need to prepare students especially with standards that are to prepare them for college and career. 

The text discussed the idea of having e-portfolios where students self-selected assignments and artifacts that show proficiency in reading, writing, listening and speaking. I can see having my students set up a google site for themselves as an e-portfolio. I thought it was a great idea that students could provide assignments or artifacts that show their proficiency in different areas of literacy. Some ideas were students providing YouTube videos (links to Flipgrids or Screencastify can be used also), as well as power points (google slide also), and digital images. 

In previous years I have afforded students the opportunity to show their learning in different ways. We have completed research posters where certain information, images, and design are evaluated. These were completed instead of a standard research report. Also, students have completed google slide presentations. One of my favorite activities is a One-Pager. Students share their responses to reading a book on just one page. The page is a mixture of words and images that show the key takeaways of the text. Another activity we had to show learning was a "Read Box"  board. On it students redesigned the cover of a book, recorded a Screencastify with a book review and we attached the QR code to the cover so classmates and friends could view the videos. As a way to assess these types of multimodal work rubrics can be developed around the elements of design, readability, symbolism, etc.