My New Literacy Project Notes

My definition of literacy was the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential. To become culturally literate person, one should understand the culture and accept and understand the differences in that culture to be able to use printed and written information in function in a certain society/culture. The reason is that different culture value different things and understand differently depends on their belief, morals, laws and custom etc. I personally believe speaking, listening and viewing play more important role to become culturally literate compare to reading and writing. When I learned Chinese, I acquired listening and speaking skills first and slowly learned to read and write some Chinese words. My speaking and listening skills are stronger than other skills and just with speaking and listening skills I could still understand the Chinese culture and I did not feel necessary to read and write Chinese to just learn their culture because through oral communication I could still learn Chinese culture. However, to understand better, I eventually needed to learn how to read and write Chinese language. As I become more familiar with this literacy, I learned that culture is 100% learned from other human being and because culture is exists only in our minds that it is constantly changing and easily lost. Before I was exploring this new literacy, I thought that every culture is different from each other but actually all cultures share universal traits such as using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen) and raising children in some sort of family setting etc.
In my field placement, I think that my students are already somewhat culturally literate because they are learning Chinese language and also learning Chinese culture while they are learning the language. For example, my students have celebrated Chinese New Year and did some activities that Chinese do during their New Year. Also, students learned Chinese nursery rhymes and songs which is part of Chinese culture as well.
I am planning to use PowerPoint to present my new literacy project because even though I have used PowerPoint before but I am not sure how to use more effectively and I thought I could learn more features to present better via PowerPoint. However, by looking at some examples on the wiki, I am not sure if I still want to use PowerPoint because I saw some better technologies that I can use. To be honest I have not explore much more about other technologies so I am not sure which one to change but most likely I think I am going to use website called “scrapblog”. It looks very nice and awesome tool to present information and looks like it has space for me to write on as well. However, I am not a technology person so I have to study a lot more to use this new technology.