My three areas of focus are Digital
Literacy, Information Evaluation and Inquiry-based Learning. I look at a number of different articles
addressing these topics but chose the following four as I thought they would be
most helpful in addressing the needs of the students at my school and second
language learners. I also included articles
that were new to me and that could be used as a learning tool for further work
in the course.
No
longer a Luxury: Digital Literacy Can’t
Wait by Troy Hicks and Kristen Hawley Turner. Retrieved at http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/EJ/1026-jul2013/EJ1026Longer.pdf
This first article begins by creating a
scenario of two schools with different levels of technology. Despite one having an abundance of
technology, important skills developed through digital literacy were not being explored in the
classroom.
While this article was written with English
teachers in mind, the information presented would be useful to all educators. The article outlines five different practices
used in the classroom that destroy digital literacy. The article then goes on
to talk about what we can do as educators to help develop digital literacy both
with ourselves and with the students we teach.
Making
critical thinking an integral part of electronic research by Roland Case Retrieved from http://tc2.ca/uploads/PDFs/Critical%20Discussions/making_critical_thinking_an_integral_part_of_electronic_research.pdf
This article looks at how to help students
think more critically about technology with a particular focus on the
evaluation of information. In the
article, the author questions how effective checklists are for evaluating
websites for elementary students. He
goes on to state that this is often due to the students’ lack of background
knowledge and critical thinking vocabulary.
Checklists are also often geared to isolated assignments. Students need to be taught the necessary
tools in order to think critically about the Internet and evaluating
information. These tools include
developing background knowledge about a topic or technology, developing criteria
judgement so that are aware which options are most appropriate, exploring critical
thinking vocabulary so they know what they should be evaluating and becoming
familiar with different strategies to help guide their thinking and finally, exploring
habits of the mind such as being open-minded.
At the end of the article, there are examples of lessons pertaining to
how this can be accomplished in the classroom.
Digital
Literacy 1- What is Digital Literacies? by Steve Wheeler
Retrieved from:
• Social networking (explores why it is needed
and what users need to do),
• Trans
literacy skills (he defines this as being literate across a number of social
platforms)
• Maintaining
privacy (looks at privacy settings, and your personal information),
• Managing
identity (looks at people portraying themselves differently depending on the
social platform)
• Creating
content (tagging and social bookmarking)
• Organizing
and sharing content (Creative Commons)
• Reusing,
repurposing, self-broadcasting content (Web 2.0 tools for broadcasting)
Inquiry-Learning-
Journeys through the thinking process by Kathy Murdoch.
Kathy Murdoch is an educator/presenter who
has done a great deal of work on inquiry.
She has an interesting blog called Just Wondering, which explores
inquiry and gives ideas to use with this approach in the classroom along with
questions to ponder with our own practice. This article, “Journeys through the thinking
process” provides a framework for a
teacher/ teacher-librarian to use when exploring inquiry in the classroom. Murdoch gives examples of what to do and what
not to do along with examples of questions to explore with the students. Her approach helps the teacher in setting up
an environment where students are thinking deeply about their learning and
making connections with the real world.
