EDUC 6712 - Reflection (week 8)

The most striking revelation I had about teaching the 21st century literacy skills was that this was a much greater task than just learning how to read the web. Students must have the basic reading skills to attempt understanding in an enormous collaborative like the Internet. Communication and synthesizing were necessary in order to effectively and efficiently understand and utilize all the information available to students with just a few keystrokes. This is a much more complex task than simply presenting content, practicing and testing to see what the students have retained. As the course progressed, it was clear that these are skills that as a teacher I was going to need to get up to speed with as well. As I took what I was learning back to the classrooms I serve, I was delighted that students were excited and wanted to apply what they had learned outside my science class. "To truly determine whether your students have internalized new strategies for reading and learning on the Web, be on the lookout for evidence of generalization and transfer" (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007, p.280).

Many of the things I learned from this course I took back and immediately used/taught in my classroom. The day after I realized I didn't know as much as I thought I did about search engines, I took my new knowledge back to a fifth grade class. I explained what I had learned about Google not being the only way to search. We did an example of a search first with Google, then with altavista.com using a host command to narrow the search to edu urls. The students were impresses with the difference it made. We also discussed how to determine if a website was a good source for reliable information. Two of the tools I passed on to the students were www.archive.org and whois.com. These were both new sites to me and we discussed how useful it could be to see former versions of a site or the owner/persons responsible for the content.

There are a number of professional development goals I would like to pursue, building upon my learning from this class. Prior to this class I had little experience with inquiry-based projects. I would like to learn how to effectively implement more of these in the near future. I would also like to incorporate pod casts into every class I work with, from kindergarten to fifth grade. In the process I hope to learn and share with coworkers who are leery of using this technology. Finally, I have already started discussing and modeling how we as teachers should be modeling ethical use of technology. It did not occur to me until this class how often I use something some one else has created without giving it public credit. Simply not stating it is my own work is not enough. I have started to label or credit every picture, graph or piece or information I use on a worksheet or handout. Students need to see ethical behavior if they are going to behave ethically