New and Improved Literacy!

Perhaps one of the most interesting views gleaned from this course was from just this last week; as David Warlick says "It's not about the Technology" (Laureate, 2009). As teachers, we want to hitch our star to the latest teaching wagon so to speak and unlike some others I am usually all about trying anything with technology. However, I have come to realize that technology is what you make of it and how you use it. I'm not just talking about just for our own personal convenience in grading and handout making either. It's about understanding how to teach the students to use information technology tools responsibly, critically, and reliably in appropriate situations. Instead of just saying "It would be a great idea to have my students post their notebook responses on a blog!", I now realize that it goes beyond this. I know that I need to work to model appropriate ways to interact with others in online communities. Students need to look at online sources of information and not just trust them blindly.I have to show my students ways to show how others have influenced them without plagiarizing. And thanks to the many strategies I have learned such as QUEST, (Eagleton & Dobbler, 2007) I feel confident in teaching my classes to be technologically literate before using technology tools.

As I mentioned, I do plan to apply my new knowledge of online literacy to a variety of projects in the classroom, but I believe that this will be most useful when teaching students lessons for research on their National History Day projects. When you ask a sixth graders to choose a topic to research and even to determine what they plan to prove about it in a thesis statement, they are excited. However once they have to find sources of information, cite them, and explain how they are useful in an annotation, they panic. Just today I had a student say "Why can't I just Google it?". Instead of falling back on the old teacher (and parent) standby, of "Because I said so.", I can fully address his question.

One professional development goal I plan to accomplish is to work more closely with my sixth grade team to explain the many tips and strategies I have learned about throughout this course. I am proud of the unit I put together to guide my students in a comprehensive inquiry and I think it would be useful for both my co-teacher and I to use it in our classrooms so that we can not only see it in action, but to reflect upon it and make any adjustments for future reference. Furthermore, I know that the language arts teachers would be excited about new ways to use technology in their current literacy lessons. And particularly I think the science team would be able to make their content more accessible to the students. I know what its like to have a curriculum full of unfamiliar vocabulary and difficult concepts, but using the inquiry strategy in combination to teaching online literacy would be beneficial, no matter what the course is.

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

Laureate Education Inc. (2009). “Developing Students' Digital Literacy.” Baltimore, MD: Laureate Education Inc.