When I started this course, I wasn’t quite sure what new literacy skills were, let alone how to incorporate them into my lesson planning. The most striking revelation that I had about teaching new literacy skills is how prevalent they are in my students’ everyday lives. This combined with the fact that most of us do not teach new literacy skills in the general classroom setting amazed me. Our students are using these skills everyday either via social networking, cell phone communications, reading articles online, searching the Internet for various items, and programs such as instant messaging. It occurred to me that our students may know more about new literacy skills than we do and we are the ones that are to be teaching them these skills. If we don’t begin to assimilate these skills into our everyday teaching, we will not be reaching out students and teaching them that there is a right and wrong way to use these skills. It is our job not only to bring the content to our students but to teach them the correct way to utilize new literacy skills to respect both the information infrastructure and others when utilizing these kinds of skills.
The knowledge and experience that I gained from this course will help me to incorporate new literacy skills into my everyday teaching style. I have already begun to utilize some of these skills during the summer school session that I have been teaching the past few weeks. I thought I would try out a few things with my students that I took out of this class. The great thing has been how open they are to the new learning of not only content but new literacy skills. I have talked about how to search for items in the proper manner, what to do and not to do when you are communicating via the Internet or other messaging service, and a little about social networking sites and how they can be utilized in the proper manner. I hope that they take a little out of this summer school session and apply it next school year when it comes to their own individual research and communication. I am also looking forward to being able to apply these new literacy skills to my regular classroom for the coming school year. I want to make it a point to cite everything I use, whether it be from the text book or a website. I want to stress the fact that students need to cite anything they take out of a resource. I am planning on starting out projects with an in-depth discussion on the new literacy skills that the students will be utilizing along with giving them a checklist to monitor their own progress. These are all goals I have made for myself in dealing with that I took out of this class.
Dr. Warlick stated in his video segment that technology increases the ability for students to connect with each other, connect to experts, connect to other classes, and connect to content (Laureate Education, Inc., 2009). A professional development goal that I have for myself is to find workshops that deal with this “connected connectivism.” I want to take the opportunity to perhaps attend a short workshop on videoconferencing and collaborative projects over the Internet. I would love to connect with a classroom in the coming months and work collaboratively with their classroom to complete a project. I think that it would be a wonderful opportunity for the students to utilize not only their new literacy skills but for myself to apply what I have learned in a professional setting. I also want to start bringing these ideas to my colleagues in a productive way and perhaps do a professional development session at our next in-service day that deals with new literacy skills. I want share the knowledge I have gained with my colleagues and really make a push for more technology professional development in our school district.
References
Laureate Education, Inc. (Executive Producer). (2009). Supporting Information Literacy
and Online Inquiry in the Classroom. Baltimore: Author.
