"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9)

   The push for technology usage is on!  The way in which we think about accessing and processing information has changed drastically since I started school in the early 1980s.  I didn't even know what the internet was until I went to college in the fall of 1994.  My school district is trying to implement new ways of learning and communicating with our students and with our colleagues. but it is difficult.  We have those individuals nearing the ends of their careers, and they are very reticent to change their ways.  There are those who are in the middle of their careers (this is where I reside), willing to try to implement new technologies with district requests, albeit with some hesitation, and then there are those with whom I work who were seemingly born with a computer under there fingertips.  Even with the generation of students I teach, including my own children, I am amazed at how different, and oxymoronic their world is.  
      I say oxymoronic because I feel that even though the world is getting smaller in regards to communication with others from around the world, thanks in part to the burgeoning market of social media, the world is a very large unknown place for many outside of a screen.  I have very few students who ask about field trips anymore in middle school because they can visit the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre on a virtual tour.  While it's great that I don't have to explain the intricacies of large group travel to 13 year olds.  The literacy world is very small for many of my students to begin with. 
 " As with all such proposals and frameworks, there are no hard-and-fast rules or strict algorithms that make implementation and application either a simple or a straightforward matter. Teachers will always need to bring to bear their own professional expertise, their local knowledge, and their own programming skills, which is always therefore a matter of re-making personal-professional meaning of the model outlined here, so that it works for them" (Durrant & Green, 2000).

I find this especially where I work, not just because of my colleagues, but also because of the community that I am a part of.  It is an aging community nestled between the Adirondack mountains and Lake Champlain.  Many parts of my school district do not have access to the internet, so trying to help teach digital literacy is very difficult.  Even where one can access the internet regularly it is difficult for many families to afford the technology that would support it.  "Careful" and "sensitive" are not adjectives that I would typically associate with the literacy practices of most people I know.  I hope throughout this course I can learn ways to help improve upon that.

Durrant, Cal; Green, Bill. "Literacy and the new technologies in school education: Meeting the l(IT)eracy challenge?" The Free Library 01 June 2000. 18 September 2016 <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/literacy and the new technologies in school education: meeting the...-a063132991>.

Hello to all!  I am Megan Marino.  I am a hopeful MEDTL student who currently teaches middle school French in Saranac, NY.  I live in Morrisonville (just outside of Plattsburgh) and love my community.  This degree will be the last stop for me on my long and tedious journey to professional certification.  I have just started my 17th year as a teacher, which astounds me when I stop to think about it. Time really flies!  I am married to wonderful man, who is also a teacher (but of Physics, Chemistry and Forensics) and am a mother to three amazing children, two daughters ages 9 and 7 and a son who is 4.  They are my motivation for finishing this degree and continuing to be a lifelong learner.  When I am not teaching French, I really enjoy doing yard work, reading, sewing and crafting. I am looking forward to using what I learn and do in this class in my own classroom.