6712-REFLECTION-Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom

The most striking revelation that I had about teaching of new literacy skills to my students was learning about the QUEST model. A simple exercise such as analyzing a web site quickly before spending too much time or deciphering whether the website is true. The exercise we did in class determining if a website was legitimate or not was so extremely valuable lesson to me as a teacher. In all of my internet usage I don’t think I ever question a domain name or a website and I now understand how wrong this is not to question. The statement made early on in my studies that must become different teachers, we must prepare them to learn a different way.

The knowledge and experience gained in this course has influenced my teaching practices by explaining to me the importance of preparing our students way differently than when I learned. It is so important that students do their own questioning, understanding the resource, evaluation, synthesizing and transforming what they’ve learned. This course has supplied me with a whole group of new ideas. I have handouts, exercises, models, and teaching different ways to learn or teach.

Though there are many professional development goals I have, the one goal I would like to pursue the most upon my learning in this course is to share what I have learned with other teachers that I work with. Not only there are new skills that we need to teach but it can be done in a way if we work together and combine lessons. The unit plan that I created for this course was very detailed and there are some areas of the lesson that I could overlap with a math lesson or even social studies. I realized that a great lesson takes a lot of planning and even revisions if necessary. The steps I would take in accomplishing this goal is to first present the idea of teaching new 21st century literacy skills. Then I would push for this to be a topic of one of our institute days. I would even volunteer to put together a PowerPoint presentation using the QUEST model.