Reflection EDUC 6712

During this course the biggest thing that I have learned is the new literacy skills and their place in our classrooms. The literacy skills are questioning, searching, evaluating, synthesizing, and communicating. The thing that made the most impact on me was that I originally thought of literacy as having to do with reading only. Hearing of these new literacy skills opened my mind to what I can introduce to my students and how it can effect their learning.

The knowledge and experience that I gained in this course will influence my teaching practices. After reading the articles, books, and watching the DVDs I see how vital it is to teach students of any age how to use a computer.

It is extremely important that we teach them how to look for useful websites when gathering information. They must be taught how to spot pages and sites that are untrustworthy. As teachers, we also must show them how to navigate through websites and where they can find credits, authors, and copyrights. Lastly, we must model good use of the Internet to our students so that they will understand the expectations that we have for them when they are in the classroom as well as when they are at home. We as teachers need to prepare our students for their future and not our past (Laureate, 2009).

One professional development goal that I would like to pursue is to work with my grade level team in order to teach these new literacy skills. My team right now is unaware of any of the things that I have been learning in this course. We have not been confronted by these new literacy skills by our district or school. Therefore most teachers are not using them.

In order to accomplish this goal we would have to go through each new literacy skill and study what each one includes. Next we could create lessons using the Internet in order for our students to learn these skills and be successful. Finally, we could come back together are share what worked and what didn’t. We would talk about or strengths and weakness. This way we would be able to learn from our peers and motivate our students to be successful when using to Internet for an academic purpose.

Laureate Education Inc. (2008). “New Literacies.” Baltimore, MD: Laureate Education Inc