Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom Final Reflection

The most striking revelation I had in this class was the sheer amount of literacy skills we need to be teaching students. I do not believe my school is doing a good enough job of teaching our students these skills. Other than the gifted teacher, I do not know of another teacher that has students creating products using technology. In fact, most of the teachers only use the computer lab to take tests. We have to step it up, especially considering I live in Huntsville, Alabama, a city that has scores of technology related industries.

I have learned so much from this class. The part of this class I got the most out of was the readings and resources on effectively searching for information. I have always wanted a better way to teach students how to search and evaluate potential web sites, and this class provided me with those tools. I also realized how critical it is for me to teach students how to evaluate web sites. There are many misleading sites out there and students will be tempted to use the first one they come across instead of taking the time to make sure it is a reputable site. I feel I am much better prepared for next year when I start talking to my students about searching the web for information. Based on the things I learned in this class, I will be starting my year out teaching my students how to effectively search for information. This will help me down the line when we start working on inquiry projects.

I would like to learn more about using programs such as Skype to communicate with classrooms around the world. I hope to set up epals for my students next year. This will be my first step in having my students communicate with other classrooms. I would like to take a professional development class in using Skype if one is ever offered around my district. After having my students communicate via epals, I would like to take that next step of video communication. The media specialist at my school has shown us how to use Skype once, so I will seek out her knowledge to help get an account set up and figure out the logistics of using my classroom. Hopefully by the end of the first semester of next school year my class will be involved in working on a project with a classroom in another part of the country or even world.