Reflection Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom

The most striking statement during this course came from David Warlick, “It’s not about the technology; it is about the connections and conversations made available to the students” (Laureate, 2009). Technology allows the students to connect to each other, experts, global classrooms and current real life connections to our content and standards. Our world is in a constant and rapid change. Textbook and strategies used five years ago are outdated and unable to equip the 21st century learner. We cannot allow our fear of technology and change to keep us from incorporating it throughout our lessons and daily interactions with our students. Our students are comfortable with technology and need the guidance to connect and apply to their academic world. When students are able to make these connections, they will be able to use their language to accomplish education goals and life skills needed to succeed in the 21st century workplace. Another great revelation is that it my responsibility as a third grade teacher to prepare them for the 21st century workplace as collaborative and global communicators.


The second Aha moment was in Sara Armstrong’s video, Safe and Ethical Practices, concerning modeling ethical practices. She stated that we must teach students to respect online work, authors and graphic illustrations by citing our sources on everyday plans, PowerPoints and other work displayed throughout our curriculum (Laureate, 2009). We should teach students to respect and be critical evaluators for materials and information found online. Armstrong also stresses that in order to keep students “cyber safe” we should teaching them to make responsible choices, thus remove “filters” from our class computers. Many of our students use computers and technology without any parental supervision and need to know how to practice and engage in cyber safety after school hours (Laureate, 2009). Due to budget cuts, our technology position was lost. I now know that not only do I train my students how to use technology, but must provide training for cyber safety skills and responsibilities. This means that I must remember to include time in a unit to teach technology, as well as curriculum content and standards. I cannot assume that my technology savvy students have the literacy skills to navigate the web and read the content found.

One area that I plan to pursue for myself is collaborative learning groups in a global capacity. My students lack background knowledge and experiences of many of their global peers. I want to fill these gaps with virtual field trips, classroom connections and hands on experiences through global classroom experiences. I am currently educating myself on how to use online opportunities and experiences with groups such as ePals Global communities, Skype, . edu20.org, and Collaborative Internet Projects. Collaborative inquiry based projects allow students the opportunities to learn or reinforce content standards while building learning networks. They also provide authentic experiences with real world application (Laureate, 2009). Science, social studies and math content can be easily be implemented in collaborative inquiry projects, especially for elementary students. Hands on projects that work with whole class participation would be most beneficial.

References:

Collaborative project site http://teams.lacoe.edu/documentation/classrooms/gayle/projects/projects.html#other-current

Edu2.0 http://www.edu20.org/

Epals Global Communities http://www.epals.com/

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom (DVD). Inquiry Based Projects. Baltimore, MD: Author.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom (DVD). It’s Not About the Technology. Baltimore, MD: Author

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom (DVD). Safe and Ethical Practices. Baltimore, MD: Author

Skype http://about.skype.com/

Square of Life http://k12science.org/curriculum/squareproj/

screencast ABC Navigatio

ABC Navigation on the web