What is New Media Literacies

This chapter discusses a formative experiment studying professional development given to fourth- and fifth-grade teachers to help improve their integration of digital tools and writing instruction. The authors focus on the need for teachers to study and integrate both the Common Core writing standards and new media literacies. The authors discuss which new media literacies elementary teachers of writing seemed to identify with most and why. Subsequently, the authors discuss where the new media literacies were implemented through digital storytelling. The authors focus here on narratives at the elementary level and give teachers practical suggestions not only for how they might make these stories digital, but also discuss the underlying skills that their students might gain from engaging in such practices.