EDUC 6712I-7 Final Reflection

As week 8 wraps up for my Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom course I can reflect on the information and personal growth I've taken away from the research, communication, and coursework. I will specifically reflect on what was striking about teaching new literacy skills to my students, what influences I will take away from this course, and a professional development goal that I will work towards relating to what I've learned in this course.

In the first few weeks of the course we started looking at what exactly new literacy skills were and what the education system would need to provide for students to be successful in the 21st century. This was best seen in our resource web article titled, 21st Century Fluency Skills, which included skills like the ability to analyze and authenticate a variety of information sources (Jukes). The thing I found striking about teaching these new literacy skills within my own classroom was that, although the list was at first quite daunting, most of the skills are already being taught within many of the lessons already in place. As I continue to develop these skills with my students I have been looking at which new literacy skills from Juke's list are missing in my classroom and ways that I can integrate them into the lessons I have coming up this year.

Many of the new literacy skills that we talked about in this course will be influential in my future instruction. The experience of creating a unit that integrates many of these skills was a great practice for how the things we were reading about and discussing can have real world application in our classrooms. I also was particularly influenced by the work we did with analyzing websites for credibility and usefulness. Our text, Web Literacy for Educators, offered many helpful tips like, examining the URL, asking about the author, and looking at the content rather than the graphics (November). I put a lot of these skill into practice when I created an audio sample application of examining a website that was questionable. I think these skills are incredibly important for students to gain at a young age, so I am glad I can apply what I have learned and done in my 4th grade classroom.

Our text, Reading the Web, contained a lot of great information about teaching students to properly search for information using the internet. Specifically they talked about getting students to ask inquiry questions and steps to using the internet as a tool to answer those questions (Eagleton). My professional goal for the duration of the school year is to integrate more inquiry and web research into my classroom instruction. To make this happen I plan on examining the lessons that I have coming up and how they could benefit from both inquiry and web research. I also would like to communicate with other teachers in my building and possibly collaborate on projects that they have in place relating to inquiry and web research to see how other teachers approach this task. To keep this knowledge fresh I plan on keeping the texts from November and Eagleton in my classroom so that I can refer to them when planning lessons and to also pick up on things I might have missed during our coursework. By next year I hope to have integrated inquiry and web research into every subject that I teach at least once a quarter. By taking some of the steps I mentioned I hope to achieve that goal so that next years students have a full year to focus on many of these new literacy skills.

In conclusion, the face of education is constantly changing, but it doesn't always keep up with the pace of technology. As educators it should be our goal to prepare students for the future rather than the present or the past. To do this students will need 21st century literacy skills and often the classroom is the only place where this can happen. I've gained a lot of experience and knowledge over the past 8 weeks, but I have a feeling it will be my students who will benefit the most from the work that has taken place.


Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.

Jukes, I. (2007). 21st century fluency skills: attributes of a 21st century learner. Retrieved from http://www.committedsardine.com/handouts/twca.pdf

November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousands Oaks: Corwin Press.