Visual literacy: With the increasing use of technologies in the classroom, visual images have become an important means of accessing information about the world. Visual literacy refers to the skills of understanding and interpreting visual images as well as producing images to represent and express one’s ideas.
Multiliteracies: In the 1990s, the New London group challenged the dominant view that literacy is a technical skill which could be taught and then transferred to other contexts. Rather, they view literacy as socially constructed as one acts and interacts with others in a particular sociocultural context. One cannot make sense of a child’s literacy learning outside of that context. The term multiliteracies considers the many ways of being literate or communicating meaning beyond printed texts or spoken words (multimodality), including body language and gestures, images, layout, artistic creations, media productions, and movement. Learning to read a text is not just a matter of memorizing letters, sounds, and words, but is a complex process of making meanings and relating them to one’s own experiences and understandings in a particular context. For instance, we learn to read and interpret someone’s body language and gestures just as we would a written book. When focusing on multiliteracies rather than the traditional literacies (reading, writing, listening, and speaking), teachers are able to draw out the many strengths each child brings to school. This goal is especially important given the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in schools.
New literacies: Related to multiliteracies, the theory of new literacies consider the ways in which the internet and other communication technologies have changed our understanding of literacy and what it means to be literate. Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, and Leu (2008) outlined four main principles of new literacies. First, internet and communication technologies (ICTs) necessitate using new and different strategies and practices. Second, these new literacies enable full economic, civic, and personal participation in our global community. Third, ICTs change as technologies change or new ones develop. Finally, as multiliteracies, these literacies are multiple, complex, and multimodal (that is, they take multiple forms and can be represented in many ways).
Multimodality: Multimodality considers meaning as related to and communicated through image, gesture, gaze, body posture, sound, writing, music, speech, and so on.
Modal affordances: Modal affordances are those that can be represented and expressed easily.
