Sarah's New Literacies Entry

I thought that the new types of technology we talked about in class were really interesting.  In particular I thought the I/O brush seemed really cool.  Who would of though we would be able to "paint" with blinking eyes or the colors of fruit or patterns on a shirt.  Painting with the moving images really caught my attention.  I liked how they had the ladybug move across the screen and the eye of a child blinking.  It was also neat how you could go back and use your fingers to smear the "paint."  Imagine all the possibilities for using a tool like this in the classroom.  It would be very cool to paint things students collected on a nature walk, or to paint with text when doing literacy activities.  

For my New Literacies project I am going to focus on visual literacy and I am going to use the technology of interactive maps to help demonstrate this literacy.  Visual literacy includes things like art, magazines, videos, films, photo graphs, and so on. Visuals can communicate meaning and  can often be used to convey a stronger message than text can.  In our society it is crucial for people to be able to interpret visuals as well as text.  I think that interactive maps really tie into visual literacy because interactive maps can be used to focus on being able to read and understand the images the information that is visually displayed on the maps.