Reading moves into the 21st century

Recently in class we have been talking about digital literacy and I have found it very interesting.  That is why for this blog post I wanted to talked about digital literacy.  The evolution of reading from yesterday to today.  I decided to wait for this subject because for the past 6 or 7 months I have been considering upgrading my phone to an iPhone.  I didn’t earlier buy it earlier because the situation wasn’t right.  But this isn’t a story about getting an iPhone but how I use it.

I love my iPhone.  It is a big improvement over my last phone.  Would I have been happy with any smartphone?  Probably.  I love having apps that allow me to stay up to date with my various interests.  It makes being a fan of the following teams really easy because I just check my app and it keeps me update for everything to deal with the Braves, Jazz, Ducks, Aggies Football and basketball, Ute Football, RSL and even the soccer team in St Petersburg Russia.  I also use my iPhone to play various games and stay connected socially with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.  It makes waiting to donate plasma a whole lot more enjoyable because I have something entertain me.  The fourth major thing that I use my iPhone is for reading.  There are a ton of books that are public domain and so you can just download them.  You just have to know where to look.  The most recent thing that I have really enjoyed with an iPhone is having connection to the internet and therefore also a connection to the things that I have stored in the cloud.  I use dropbox for a lot of my school assignments and since you can get dropbox on iPhones it allows me to see those files even when I don’t have my laptop.

I find that I am clued to a screen for a good portion of any given day.  Some times when I am not glued to a screen are when I am in any of my class and also if I am doing my math homework then I am not glued to a screen.  I am also not looking at a screen when I am doing tutoring.  Other than that, for the majority of the day I am looking at some sort of a screen.  Whether on my phone or laptop I am looking at a screen of some kind.  Being in college and without a tv in my apartment it makes it easy to avoid the tv screen.  But I think that that will be a temporary thing that will change once I move on out of this stage of life where I am “a poor, starving college student.”

Earlier I referenced using my phone to do some reading.  What exactly do I read?  I spend a good deal amount of time reading updates, reviews and commentaries on different sports.  After class, I think that this is a really good place for me to make judgments on the credibility of various sources.  I have my preferred app to get my information because I find it to be reliable and I also agree with the commentary that I read.  There were a couple apps that I tried but I didn’t like the reviews that they had or else I didn’t find the commentaries to be interesting and so I read from that app less and less.

Something that I could ask students to do in groups for a term project or something would be to make a prezi.  During class I found this really cool prezi during class.  There have been a couple times this semester where I have “nerded out.”  These are times when I realize that I am a math nerd and I am proud of it.  Here is the link to the Prezi.  I personally have not yet made one but it seems like it would be a lot of work to make one so this would be probably be a group project that the students would work on over a couple weeks.  In my mind this sort of representation could be used as an end of unit project that will show the similarities and differences between concepts from that unit.  For example: in a geometry class a group could share different conditions required to have congruent triangles.  Another group could share the different conditions required to have similar triangles.