Blog Post 2

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:

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.ca/2010/11/what-digital-literacies.html

 Steve Wheeler’s blog on “What Digital Literacies” explores a list of digital literacies that are needed for learning with digital technology.  He goes step by step in describing these literacies- he calls it a road map.  His list of digital literacies includes:

 •  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.

Retrieved from http://www.kathmurdoch.com.au/uploads/media/inquirylearning.pdf

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.