Conclusion

=Conclusion -=

My thinking about second language acquisition and digital literacy has evolved over the past three weeks in many significant ways. Firstly, I learned how to use new technologies that I haven't used in the past. Prior to this class I had never written a blog or tweeted my thinking. I also was unfamiliar with Webquests, Flikr, Seesmic, Disqus and Wikispaces. I have gained process knowledge related to the technological tools available to me and I have reflected deeply on how these tools can be affordances and constraints in my own classroom. I have thought very realistically about how I will carry these tools with me and use them in the future in my teaching.

One of the ways in which I felt I was pushed to develop a more clear understanding of second language acquisition and thinking in a community of practice was the fact that we were asked to write the lesson plan activities and the rationale at the same time. Hence, we had activities in rough draft form and had to justify the curricular design at the same time. This was different than what we had done last year where the rationale was written after the lessons were completed in their entirety. This interdisciplinary approach ended up being tremendous asset for me because I found myself constantly revising, reflecting and revisiting two separate projects simultaneously. The changes made in one project undoubtedly affected the other. For example, when I went back to revise my rationale and attempted to justify that my carefully planned activities did represent a community of thinkers, I ended up coming up blank. Therefore, I began to self-reflect more about the curricular design and the alignment of objectives, essential question and learning and evaluative activities. I found myself questioning and reforming my own perspective about what makes students think in my classroom and how they think together. The inspiration for my activities came from my attempts to justify them. I ended up coming up with a simple sequence that I used to frame my planning of the unit plan designed to investigate the essential question, "How do you express identity with silence and with voice?" The sequence I came up with was to base my lessons on three simple questions that I wanted the students to be able to grasp by the end of my unit on identity: //Who am I? Who are we as a community?//, and finally, //How do I relate to this community?// I then modified my lessons to include opportunities for visualizing the class community, through presentations, discussions, question and answer scavenger hunt activity and creating visual bar graphs that represent the class identity.

In addition I feel I have a clearer understanding of cutting edge research in the field and have developed new vocabulary. I know consider myself multi-literate, in that I can speak, read and write in three languages and now I can also consider myself digitally literate. I understand the value of Bahktin's, dialogic thinking, in which all language and thought is developed in reaction to others. I have applied the New London Pedalogical Framework to my own curricular design and reflected on how my activities fit into the categories of situated practice and overt instruction. I also have come to a better understanding of Gee's languacultural diagram and the design resources of identity, relationships, politics, signing, significance and ways of knowing. I am ending this summer program with a fresh perspective on teaching and learning in a community of thinkers which has transferred into a clearer sense of who I am in the MATSL community and who I am as a teacher of language.