Timothy Colon's Journal For SUNY Empire

     For my interview, I worked with a friend of mine who is a senior in high school though he does a combination of home-schooling and learning with other kids at a local Co-op. I asked this student questions regarding video games as a new digital media and their value as art. His perspective is one of being very experienced in video games and digital media so he holds a more positive opinion to these subjects. However, when discussing such subjects, I would much rather ask for the opinion of someone who's informed on these issues than someone who is giving a gut reaction and has never picked up a controller. Going back to my first Journal Post, different fields of study require different types of literacy to enter (or at least become a valued member).  Questions and Answers Has you ever learned anything from a video game? Anything small or profound? "Yes, from Sonic Adventure 2. Eggman's (the villain) grandfather never moved on from a loss and ended up destroying a...

For my final project, I was going to write about the benefits (and potential drawbacks) of showing films and documentaries in class, using digital media to present new information. As a Social Studies teacher, I often use videos that depict an event so that students can have a better understanding. However, I have since decided to write about the benefits of students making movies of their own. Today, students have easier access to video cameras and video-editing programs than ever before. Filmmaking is an art form that allows kids to demonstrate knowledge and to express themselves creatively. I enjoy filmmaking myself, and I had video projects of my own when I was in high school. Now I'm curious as to how this form of digital literacy can benefit students.  Annotated Bibliography Morgan, H. (2013). Creating Videos Can Lead To Many Academic Benefits. Technology in the  Classroom.  Retrieved from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00094056.2013.757534 scroll=top...

Before I begin, I would like to apologize for my absence from the previous two journal posts. I began by falling behind on my classroom planning and then I had to get a surgery done that left me incapacitated for over a week. I'm here now though and excited to contribute to the class.       One new digital literacy that I recently learned is a  program  called OBS Studio. This is a free recording software that can quickly be downloaded on a computer. OBS allows users to create a wide variety of digital media with minimal hassle. Anything on a computer can be screen recorded and saved as a video. Accessories such as cameras and microphones can be added as well and all edited together. Perhaps it is not the most advanced of its type, but I found it easily to set up, easy to use, and again is free.      Such a program has many practical uses in and out of the classroom. Focusing on its potential for classes, this is a tool that can be used to re...

     For this week's assignment, we had to provide our thoughts on the literacy debate explained in The New York Times article from 2008 "R U Really Reading" by the journalist Motoko Rich. In her writing she presented differing viewpoints on whether reading and communicating online actually counted as literacy. Webster's Dictionary  defines "literacy" as, "the quality or state of being literate". Searching for their definition of "literate" you'll find, "able to read and write". However, as I spoke about in my first journal post, how able someone is when it comes to reading and writing (literacy) can vary depending on the circumstance. One may be literate in the English language but not in another. One may be literate in one subject like physics so they can understand a physics paper, but then they may struggle understanding Shakespeare. Literacy is a tool. You need the right tool to do the job. The ability to read and write...

  "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9)  They way I see this text is that it explains literacy as a tool. It isn't simply one object that you obtain to use in one way. Instead, it's used in a wide variety of ways to for many purposes. Whatever anyone wants to achieve, they can use texts to further their own ambitions. Not all literacy is the same. For instance, reading a scientific journal is much different than how one would read a historic speech. Each new use of text requires (at least to some degree) a new skillset. If someone wants to be any sort of scientist, they would need to know the writing conventions of their medium. Knowing how to write a scientific paper however, does not qualify them to ...