Reflection for EDUC 6712

Upon completing the course, Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom, I realized how important the teaching of new literacy skills is to every student in today’s society to prepare them for the 21st century. One quote I read at the beginning of the course that stuck with me and really summed up the importance of learning new literacy skills was written by Jukes and MacDonald (2007), “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn” (p. 1). The most striking revelation I had in this course was that there are new literacy skills that need to be addressed in the curriculum, and that these skills are important for every student to know by the time they graduate from high school. It is taken for granted that every student knows how to use these new literacy skills, so teaching students step by step is a very important way for students to become exposed to these skills. I also have realized that the way in which I teach will allow these literacy skills to be added into my lessons and units seamlessly. I usually model for student ahead of time during a lesson or unit what I want for them to do, and by including these new literacy skills, this will be very easy to do. I can model for students how to ask questions, how to research, how to synthesize the information and how to then communicate the information in their own words to an audience. Each step of the way can be modeled for a seamless production.

The knowledge and experience gained from this course will influence my teaching practices in the future in two different ways. The first way my teaching practices will be influenced from my knowledge and experience from this course is before I do an inquiry project with my students, I will have already practiced the skills on my own, therefore, most of the bugs will have been worked out before my students practice on their own. Since this course gave me personal practice with each piece of an inquiry-based unit plan, I will know how to go about it with my students. Secondly, my teaching will be influenced because I have learned many different ways to assess that students have successfully learned each new literacy skill. There are a multitude of assessment strategies from Eagleton and Dobler’s book, Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet Inquiry. This book provides handout examples for every step of the inquiry process and provides pre and post assessment strategies. I will use many of these when assessing whether students understand the new literacy skills or not.

One professional development goal that I would like to pursue that builds upon my learning in this course is going to be a gradual goal process. The first part of my goal will be to include one online inquiry-based learning project next school year for my first year Spanish classes. This will build upon my learning in this course because I will use what I learned and will adapt it to fit with my first year Spanish curriculum. I will also have to do the project on my own first, to work out any problems beforehand. After I successfully implement one online inquiry project, I will then add one inquiry project for my second year Spanish students. Once I have both classes that I teach doing an online inquiry-based project next year, the following year I will proceed to doing two projects each year, and then hopefully the third year I will have students doing one online inquiry-based project every unit. I have four units each school year for each level of Spanish that I teach. I am going this gradually because I want to take time to perfect each unit project, so there are no problems and it is well organized. I have chosen the goal of eventually implementing an online inquiry project for every unit of study into my curriculum because, according to Eagleton and Dobler (2007), “If we want to prepare today’s students to excel in tomorrow’s workplace, we had better start teaching them to be web literate” (p. 4).

References

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.

Jukes, I., & MacDonald, B. (2007). 21st century fluency skills: Attributes of a 21st century learner. Retrieved from http://www.committedsardine.com/handouts/twca.pdf