Saturday, October 31, 2009

Reflective Essay

The new literacies are essential skills students develop and understand in the classroom today. Teachers need to be aware of technology policies and safety for students including teaching them curriculum. The digital skills are engaging to middle school students and incorporate relevant skills for their futures. Students need to be aware of ethical usage and not just present information as their own. If students learn to be digital citizens they will incorporate a strong sense of locating and evaluating information, by developing essential questions and putting it all together to share with others.
The Fair Use Policy that teachers have some leeway in the use of online material for instruction helped reassure my use of articles and other resources in the classroom (Laureate Education, Inc, 2009). Teachers should help ensure that students will use the materials in an ethical way. Before this class, it seemed that there are some stipulations on work created by others, but teaching this to students was not completely part of each assignment. The use of the websites for clarity and teaching students about ethics in informational literacy is valuable for the 21st century. Students need to be taught to respect an author’s photo or published information and give them credit for it. Students need to learn how to synthesize information from multiple resources that contains accurate and appropriate facts after they evaluate a website for credible information. Getting students to go beyond the facts is an important literacy skill of using critical thinking skills to process the facts in sources and then create their final products that represent what they have learned (Jansen, 2005). Teaching students those transferable skills is something that will benefit students’ learning in the future, so creating writing, technology, presentations and performance assignments helps students learn material, but also associate it with other interests and digital media.
As technology becomes embedded into the classroom, students must learn the appropriate ways of sharing and using everything that is available online. There is a strong need to educate students and teachers on how to navigate the Internet’s vast amount of resources responsibly, safely, and productively by establishing a clear set of rules and expectations for usage. The specific focus for having rules shields students from finding inappropriate or sharing unsafe material, but when it does happen students should know what to do. This enlightened my teaching practices of digital citizenship and made me more aware of what guidance should be provided in the classroom for students’ safety.
The professional goal I would like to pursue would be to incorporate better essential questions into the curriculum to guide students’ inquiry. There needs to be a balance between students choosing their own topics as the focus area and the teacher selecting a central theme for research. Then after topics are selected questions are necessary to guide the process, but learners need to be skilled at asking the right questions while reading online (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007, p. 82). As the teacher developing and determining researchable topics and not topics with questions that students have too little or too much prior knowledge. The steps to improving students’ essential questions includes keeping students’ interests and prior knowledge in mind along with assessing students’ understanding of good research questions by using a research questions assessment as a tool to begin a class discussion. Improving this step of the inquiry process should increase the effectiveness of projects and student motivation to complete assignments with vital and relevant information as they evaluate and synthesize the information into a comprehensive project.
If class instruction and student awareness is extended to increasing the new literacies the potential for continued success is available not just in the classroom, but globally. The new literacies require students to be more sophisticated in their technology usage and broaden their digital understanding. Giving students a worthwhile purpose for inquiry will improve their questions and make a difference in their online success, as I continue to work on my professional goal. As Jukes (2007) states “The primary task of the educational system must be to give learners the right tools and provide them with a critical mind, so that they can ask the right questions and make the right connections.”

REFERENCE
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.
Jansen, B. (2005, October). Meaningful products: Making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Library Media Connection, 24(2), 27–28.
Jukes, I. (2007). 21st century fluency skills: Attributes of a 21st century learner. Retrieved from http://www.committedsardine.com/handouts/twca.pdf
Laureate Education Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Warlick, D. Program: 7. Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom [Educational Video]. Los Angeles: Solution.