Language and Literacy Media Post

The things that I've noticed since starting teachers college was that classrooms are finally integrating technology into their classrooms and letting children practice what they see in the media 24/7. 

Trying to learn all the ways that technology is being infused in so many subjects such as math, french or even language and literacy makes my heads spin at times because there are so many resources to help students succeed. 

Retrieved October 17th, 2016 from http://bit.ly/2ehAtDg

According to the Ontario Curriculum for Language and Literacy, on page 14 it says that students "should have opportunities to view, analyse, and discuss a wide variety of media texts and relate them to their own experience. They should also have opportunities to use available technologies to create media texts of different types (e.g., computer graphics, cartoons, graphic designs and layouts, radio plays, short videos, web pages).

Why is this important?

Students cant always be expected to write essays or reports on a piece of literacy or a media post of their thoughts or opinions. Children should have the ability to discuss their opinion through many lenses; one of them specifically being technology. There are so many apps and websites to help children create different types of media texts such as movie trailers, newspaper ads or even blogs like we have been exposed to already in many of our classes!

San José Library. (2008, August 9). Children using the library computers. [Online Image].  Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sanjoselibrary/2839927173/

Children learn in so many different ways so its very important we as educators take everything we are learning and use it in our classrooms to help children reach their full learning potential! 

What are some examples?

Recently in my own tech glass we have been creating our Genius Hour projects which highlights a movement to promote children's creativity in the class room. Instead of our teacher having us write an essay on the importance of technology and how it impacts a classroom, he gave us the tools and let us practice the technologies and better understand them so we can provide our future students with the best information possible.

There is one website I used that I thought would be useful to share to teachers who might be considering using technology to create different types of media texts. 

The resource is called Animoto and you can find the link here. This site helped create movie trailers for my Genius Hour Project which you can watch if you're interested.



 This website would be so useful for students doing a novel study or reading an important text and creating a trailer highlighting how they interpreted it and discussing their opinions in the form of technology.

Imagine how much more motivated a student with a visual/artistic intelligence would be if they had this as an option instead of writing a report. There are so many possibilities to accommodating every learner.