Visualizing Social Literacy

What does social literacy look like both inside the classroom and outside the classroom?

In my experience in the public school setting, I seem to get a push from administrators on engaging students in technology both inside the classroom and outside the classroom. With this push, I made a goal for myself for this school year to find new ways to have my students use technology both during classroom activities and at home

This project has offered me the opportunity to work on my professional goal of researching technologies to help enhance social literacy into my classroom lessons.

WHAT CAN I DO TO INCORPORATE SOCIAL LITERACY INTO MY CLASSROOM ROUTINE!?

Social literacy offers the opportunity for our students to work together and enhance their interpersonal skills, cognitive development and expand their social circles. Not only does it touch on the basics skills our students need to become active citizens, it also aids our students in becoming familiar with a variety of cultural customs. In my particular job setting, I work with many students who struggle with being socially literate due to their disability. In order to work on this, I must not only teach social literacy explicitly, but I must incorporate social literacy into every lesson that I present to them.

Inside my daily math lessons, I challenge students to constantly work in collaborative groups. When students work in these collaborative groups, they are given a rubric on how they will be graded. To help the students with disabilities, I first model what interacting in a collaborative group looks like, but I also leave guiding questions and conversation components that they can refer to help enhance their social literacy when working in an educational setting.

As I reflect on how I use social literacy in my classroom, I pose myself the question....How do I take collaborative grouping to the next level?!?

What does social literacy look like through the eyes of technology?

As I am preparing the digital literacy project, I am presenting it to you with the idea of social literacy in mind. Our students today are always on social media interacting with their peers about their social lives, so why can't we use it to embrace their educational growth!? Some ideas that I found to incorporate into my classroom to enhance social literacy are of course blogs, Wiki, Moodle, e-pals and a virtual museum.