Reflective Thoughts

As I consider how we learn to teach and support information literacy, I have realized what a process this is; both for teachers and for students. In the past I have had my students use the internet to locate information and communicate that information back to me. Now, I have realized what a responsibility I have to make sure that I am properly preparing my students to become more than just users of the internet and to move to a point where they are critically thinking about and evaluating sources, making sure they take the time to be responsible users by giving credit to those who have constructed material and navigate away from the idea of “copy and paste”, and lastly, to ensure that they can synthesize all of the information that is available to them to avoid “textual vertigo” (Laureate, 2008).

This has been a valuable experience to me as I now feel prepared to model for my students the proper way to navigate through material, evaluate the content, synthesize the information, and ensure that ethical practices are being used throughout the whole process. This will be so important for me and my students as we participate in many project/inquiry based projects during the course of the school year.

As I continue build upon this knowledge in my career, I would like to develop my own literacy skills by taking the time to collaborate more with my colleagues on school issues and consciously evaluate ideas and resources that will appropriately help us to improve our teaching and professionalism. I would also like to take the information that I have learned and incorporate it into more inquiry based units in my classroom that would allow for multi modal communication. Many times I have my students use only one medium to produce projects and I would like to see them expand the media options they are using and to eventually use multi- media presentations. I feel that would increase my students’ experiences and performance substantially and I feel that would be in their best interest as it would best prepare them for life after school. I can do this by starting out with small literature projects that I already have in place and add one element, such as the incorporation of a new technology skill. I can then have the students build off of this concept throughout the year; this may allow us to have a culminating multi-media project by the end of the year. This would be a building process but I feel it would be beneficial for my 4th graders to work toward an end project rather than trying to accomplish this all at once to ensure age appropriateness, and most of all to ensure that learning of these valuable concepts has taken place.