New Literacies Project Reflection

When we first got the New Literacy’s project, I was very overwhelmed. Though as I worked on it I realized that it wasn’t so bad and was actually really fun to find information and put to work the ideas and concepts I have learned through my Environmental Science classes. I chose to use scrapblog as my technology because I love to scrapbook and I wanted to figure out a new way I can use scrapbooking, such as online. I chose Environmental Literacy as my focus, because Environmental Science is one of my minors and I thought it would be neat to use some of my information from classes and see how it relates to Environmental Literacy.

There were so many different ways I could go with Environmental Literacy because there are many different areas of Environmental Science. So, I chose to focus on Environmental Stewardship and what it takes to become a good steward. I felt like this is an area that often gets overlooked because parents, teachers and adults tell children they should recycle, turn oft water when brushing teeth, but they never say why, they never really “teach” them. Stewardship does just that, it informs people about their environment and their effects on the land and then gets them involved in the process. Therefore, I focused my project to help inform teachers, parents, and adults to realize that they need to explain and inform their students about the word and get them involved.

One of my classes last semester focused on Environmental Education and Stewardship, though it is built into many of my classes, so I was able to pull information from my classes. I was also able to pull ideas from where I work: Fenner Nature Center, and on campus with my professor in the Community Agriculture Recreation and Resource Services Department (CARRS). At the Nature Center all of our programs include stewardship ideas and ways to treat the nature respectfully, and my work in the CARRS department is on a few projects involving stewardship: Project FISH put on my MSU Extension and Michigan Conservation Stewards Program put on by MDNR and MSU Extension. This was a major starting point for me in my project.

I had many difficulties with the technology part of this project. Some of the problems included, the link button, the timer (how much time was spent on each slide), uploading pictures, and changing the font color. I could not get the “link” button to work so I could make it easily accessible for people to take my quiz or look at my resources. Also, the timer was too fast on the scrapblog, even when slowed down to the tortoise, which made it hard to read each slide in the amount of time given. I had a really tough time uploading pictures into the project, even though they try to make it easy, I would download pictures online and add them to my photos and the photos would not show up when I tried to pull them in using the site. I almost turned in my project without outside photos, until a friend told me that photobucket was really easy. So I set up an account and away I went. I also tried many times to change the color of my font from black and was unsuccessful. Some of these glitches I came across were really frustrating and made me want to stop the project all together, but I got over it.

Even though I have had many experiences with Environmental Stewardship, doing this project helped me reflect on myself as an environmental steward and see ways I could use this in my future classroom. I can see the scrapblog as a new way to use technology in the classroom. I would most likely use this as an end of the year assignment, by working the students towards this project. I would do this by having them write short informative essays first, then have them make their own books on various topics, followed by doing a PowerPoint and a PhotoStory getting them used to technology. Then, finally graduate them to scrapblog since it is more detailed and involved.