Reflection
Teaching new literacy skills in the content area is a key to student success in this twenty-first century generation of new technology. The internet has tremendous potential to enhance student learning across all content areas (Eagleton and Dobler 2007). Teaching students to use the internet has educational value with the potential to support content curriculum.
The most striking revelation I have about teaching new literacy skills to my students as a result of this course is that I could finally use a tool that keep students engaged and motivates them to use critical thinking. In learning these new literacy skills I have been able to teach these skills to my students that will enable them to enhance their learning.
The knowledge and experience that I have acquired helped me enhance my strategies in teaching students. For example the REAL strategy which is a simple scaffold to help students validate Web materials which include reading the URL, examining the content and asking about the author and owner of the content (November, 2007). I recently used this strategy with my class and the students were amazed at some of the information that was researched was not reliable resources. Before I used this strategy the students used whatever information that they could retrieve on the Internet. I focused on using this strategy because critical thinking played an important role with this strategy.
The knowledge I acquired throughout this course has made me re-evaluate my teaching strategies to meet the needs of students to learn the new literacy skills that is required of this twenty first century generation of learners.
One professional development goal that I would like to pursue is to be able to setup a podcast for my classroom. I would like to use a podcast with my classes to publish information in my content area. I have had a difficult time in developing a podcast. I plan to take some professional development classes that are being offered in the summer in technology that focus on podcast, blogs, and wikis.