Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom

Throughout this course I have learned a lot about how to use the web to teach literacy skills. Teaching students to use the Internet and how to properly navigate it, is such an important component. This course gave me some real world application on how to do that.

The biggest revelation I had during this course and learning about the new literacy skills was that I teach an age that can really take advantage of learning these skills. I work with first graders and some of the material we have learned has been way above their head. But during this course I was really able to benefit from some of the new information given. For example the websites given (www.yahooligans.com, and www.kidsclick.org) are really beneficial for my students. I would not feel comfortable, neither would my school allow, students to use general search engines. I felt like these websites really allow me to teach important new literacy skills, such as searching for and locating important information, evaluating information, and synthesizing information. All of these skills are so important for students to learn at an early age and through the ideas given in the videos, I feel that I am now more prepared to teach them.

Learning the different literacy skills has changed my views on how to teach literacy. Teaching first grade means that I do a lot of literacy work. I teach the foundations for reading. I never realized what a valuable tool the web was to help my students create that foundation. I really feel like after the first of the year my students will be ready to integrate technology as a part of our literacy program. I love that students will be using higher level thinking than just searching for information in a book. I liked that the question is given at the beginning and students must use deeper level thinking while looking for the answers. I am excited to start teaching the foundations for researching on the Internet.

One professional goal that this class has inspired is to learn more multimedia tools. I realized this while creating my unit plan. I felt very comfortable with all of the other aspects but this area really stumped me. I am very familiar PowerPoint but I want to offer mys students more. I feel that I must first become more comfortable with these tools before I introduce them to my students. I have considered mentioning this to our schools computer specialist and either sitting down with him and allowing him to walk me through some of the tools or even better having a staff development that is centered around the usefulness and use of multimedia tools with students. I feel that other teachers do not realize the usefulness of technology and the usefulness of the new literacy skills.

This course has taught me a lot and allowed me to expand my horizons when it comes to literacy and teaching in general. This information will help to change how I teach literacy and will me grow as a teacher and continue to prepare my students for the world outside my classroom.