Reflection

I have learned a lot from this class, Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom, just as I have with all of my classes of learning to integrate technology into my classroom. It seems that with each class, and with each week’s assignment, I am learning and become more aware of how important new literacy skills are into today’s classroom. During this particular course, I have learned how important it is for students to be able to inquire about various topics and ask meaningful questions. I teach second grade, and in the past I have been very quick to assume that my students are too young to come up with their own questions for a research topic. I have learned throughout this course that with the proper guidance and modeling, students of any age can create wonderful questions to guide their research.

Throughout this course, I have gained insight on how to go about teaching my students how to create appropriate, well thought out questions and this is something that I would like to incorporate into my teaching. Questioning strategies are useful in many content areas and in life, so the time you spend guiding your students through this process will be time well spent (2007). In the past, I have taken control of my lessons and research that my students complete. I have come up with the questions, the topics, etc. In the future, I would like to given my students more control over their research. I will of course model for them how to go about creating questions and working on inquiry based projects, but I would like for them to take ownership of what it is they are doing.

One professional development goal I would like to pursue is to familiarize myself with the most current technology out there. I have learned about so many new technology tool throughout the courses at Walden that I never even knew existed. I would like to take a deeper look at the tools I have been introduced to, as well as research about other technology that is out there. Using other teachers is a great resource to help me accomplish this goal. I am always finding blogs and message boards where teachers are posting ideas that they are using in their classroom. I am also learning how important it is to actually use these tools myself and have a true understanding of the technology before I try and teach it to my students. I am excited about the technology that is out there and greatly anticipating integrating it into my classroom.

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