Susan - Post - 2/9

I took the quiz, but I didn't have a definitive answer either way. I knew all the terms except for mobbing and smart mob. I guess that makes me a digital native.. partial immigrant. For this blog I want to focus more on the question of "What are “new literacies” and what literacies are students likely to bring to the classroom?" Students bring to the classroom knowledge about types of writing they see in their homes. These tend to be newspapers, fliers, and maybe a few books. Children (most) don't know about the multiple genres that are available to write in. I like the approach that is discussed in Scaffolding (60-61). There are four stages listed.. these include finding out how much the students know about a topic, modelling the formate several times, and then moving to indepentant writing. ELLs, especially, would have a difficult time of jumping right into a new genre without much practice first. Gibbons discusses on page 54 that even English is written differently by different cultures; so explaination of the "rules" we use in the United States is needed to clarify. However, teachers need to understand that these differences exsist and work with the students. One should never assume that a student is blatanly refusing to comply with written norms.