Throughout the course, I think the most striking revelation that I had about teaching new literacy skills is that as much as we think our students (who have grown up with technology at their fingertips) know how to navigate technologies well, they really do not. Despite how much access our students may have to computers and the Internet, they still need a lot of training in reading and analyzing the information they find. In fact, literacy skills that were taught in the past do not suffice for them. It is necessary that new literacy skills are taught in schools as well as traditional ones for students to be successful now.
Going forward, I would like to incorporate more lessons where I focus on new literacy skills. Prior to engaging in an activity that involves technology, I plan to do a lesson that focuses in on how to appropriately locate and evaluate resources. The knowledge gained in this course will give me the tools to teach students the “how” in locating valuable resources.
I would like to seek out professional development opportunities (workshops) so I can grow as far as teaching literacy skills. I think it would be beneficial to attend workshops on inquiry based design. I could also seek out professionals within my own district for this. I know that one of the supervisors has everyone in his department use inquiry-based lesson planning. I am going to seek him out and see if he has any materials I can use.
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Marcella,
ReplyDeleteI also found the extent of our students skills and abilities using technology interesting. Throughout this program we have been feed the line that our students know infintely more technology than we do. I have actually found the opposite. Surveying the senior class at my high school I found that only 80% had internet access at home, 95% had cell phones but of these only 8% were the so-called smart phones. For those students who had internet access the majority of time was spent gaming and using social networking sites. I was shocked to find that under 25% of heard of skype and under 10% have ever used it. I think that the line that our students are innundated with technology might be myth. It seems that the technology use that is there is for entertainment and not educational. Therefore, when we attempt to use technology in an educational setting our students still lag behind. Instead I think we need to recognize that our students are more intuitive with technology and not necessarily more knowledgable.
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