Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom - Reflection

The most striking revelation I have had about teaching the new literacy skills to students is that most students, although highly proficient in many ways when it comes to the digital world, are in fact lacking the skills necessary to navigate the web and locate, evaluate, and synthesize information . It is my obligation as a teacher and educator of young people today to continue to educate myself and model appropriate and effective skills when it come to online inquiry. In my particular case, because I teach kindergarten, I simply need to model these skills and at least expose my students to many of the tools they will soon be using independently. This will be necessary to ensure my students have a solid foundation and they move along and learn further skills in navigating the resources available to then in the years to follow.

The professional goal that I would like to further pursue will be to basically continue to educate myself and practice more inquiry based exercises myself in order to further expose my students. I hope to find more ways in which I can expose even my youngest students to these tools. This is the best thing for these young students because they are not yet at a stage where they have the capacity to understand these inquiry based projects and work on them independently. I did really enjoy creating a screen cast project earlier in this course and hope to use that more often in my work. This is a very helpful tool for the older students but I can also use it to help my young students learn to navigate particular websites as well!
This course has been quite beneficial and I am excited to further my understanding of online inquiry in the classroom.