It is now that time again to take some time out to reflect upon all that I have learned throughout the seventh course of my master’s program through Walden University. This course focused on the teaching of new literacy skills to our students and the importance it has. I have to say, I was surprised to find that many of the literacy skills that are considered to be new, were in fact skills that I not only have been teaching all along, but many of them were skills that I was taught during my own schooling. For those skills that are new to my students, such as evaluating websites for reliability and validity, they really aren’t so scary when the teaching process is done step by step using easy to follow methods.
As with all schooling, there always seems to be courses that teach helpful information, but that information isn’t always to applicable to ones profession. Fortunately, this course was not one of those courses! This course really helped remind me that we simply cannot let our students jump onto the web, head to a search engine, and get what is going on. There are evaluations and synthesizing that needs to be done, and of course, the citing of all the sources. I think many of us, myself included, sometimes take advantage of the fact that the information on the web is so easy to come by, that we sometimes forget to give credit where credit is due. I think if I can do a better job of modeling how to cite sources to my students, and teaching them that even the simplest thing such as taking a picture from clipart needs to be cited, our students will develop a second nature of giving credit for their resources.
One professional goal that I have made for myself after taking this course is teaching my students how easy and effective it is to evaluate websites when conducting any kind of research. This evaluation has been one of the hardest things for my students to grasp in the past few years of my teaching. Students get frustrated, and so do I because up until now, I really did not have a simple and effective way to teach Internet research. Now, I fortunately have an easy to use, step by step method, that was shown to me by Technology Specialist, Beth Phillips, in one of the video resources of this class. The method shown consisted of checking every website for five major components: Author, Bias, Content, Dates, and Editors. I practiced this method on a few websites and it really took a matter of 5 minutes at most to complete these steps and determine if a website was quality or not. Obviously, I expect this to take more time for my students, especially in the beginning of their learning. Students will need some great modeling for this process, as well as some time to work with partners, but I think after enough practice, students will be able to evaluate websites on their own, with very little frustration.
I’m happy to say, this course was undoubtedly one that has increased my abilities as an educator in the 21st century!
