What are my next steps!?!?

The Next Steps!

As an educator, I know I want my students to be well-rounded in every aspect when they leave my classroom. At the beginning of the semester, before I delved into the research on social literacy, I thought that literacy just focused on reading and writing. I thought I was just supposed to have word walls and encourage my students to write within the math classroom.

This project has allowed me to really reflect on my literacy degree and my current teaching practices. Social Literacy has taught me in order to be socially literate, my students must successfully use interpersonal collaboration, cooperation and become familiar with cultural norms. When connecting thinking about social literacy within the math classroom, I discovered many tools that can benefit the students both inside the classroom and outside the classroom. A few tools I found helpful in enhance social literacy within my classroom are blogs, wiki classrooms and e-pals. Blogs offer the opportunity for my students to post their ideas, thoughts, questions and reflections on the mathematical content they are learning in the classroom. Students are able to make comments on each others posts to collaborate and help their peers clear up any misconceptions or concerns they may have about the content. In order place students in the driver seat of guiding the curriculum, wiki classrooms provide the opportunity for students to create curriculum materials and aids on a virtual website. Depending on how one implements this into their classroom, it can be set up for students to collaborate and work on the website together to post information and helpful tools for the material content they are learning within the classroom.

However, the most important tool I found to enhance social literacy within my classroom was the website e-pals. I found that this website offers students to opportunities to not only to collaborate and use their interpersonal skills with their peers, but it allows students to become familiar with different cultural customs. This website it a great tool for my students to be able to learn for another student who may be learning the same content, but may present it in a different manner based on their cultural norms.

Looking at this through the eyes as a special education teacher, it is crucial for me to keep in mind that this will require an immense amount of modeling for students with disabilities. When working on social literacy in conjunction with mathematical literacy, students will need visual aids to know what it may look like to be socially literate,  how they can use technology outside of the classroom to collaborate with peers to help them with the material they are learning in math class.

Of course with starting something new, I am still hesitant based on my students access to technology outside of the classroom walls, I feel that holding off based on my reserves may put a halt on my students socially literate growth. I think this year, my professional goal will be to start an blog within my classroom to see how it goes. Through this process, I plan on taking detailed notes about what works and what does not work so I can improve this aspect of my classroom for next school year.