Reflection on Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom

One of the most striking revelations I have had about teaching the new literacy skills to my students because of this course is that it is not something we have to teach in addition to our state standards. The new literacy skills are already embedded in the standards you have teach if you really take the time to look at what you have to teach in the standards and what the new literacy skills are. As Eagleton and Dobler (2007) state, we would be doing students a disservice by not preparing them to apply the inquiry process to the world’s most massive source of information, one that will impact their future daily lives in ways we cannot even imagine.

The knowledge and experience gained in this course will influence my teaching practices going forward by not being apprehensive about educating students on the inquiry process but instead embracing it and learning alongside my students. I would like my students to achieve a greater understanding of the content being taught and what better way than by allowing students to choose a topic of interest in something we are already learning and permitting them to use the Internet to learn more in a way that is more meaningful to them and will interest their peers.

One professional development goal I would like to pursue that builds upon my learning in this course and develops my own information literacy or technology skills would be engage my peers to investigate the QUEST model of inquiry and work together to develop an inquiry project that includes our current standards. In order to accomplish this goal, I would need to survey my peers and see what level of knowledge they have with computers and the Internet. Then, we would work together to study and discuss the five steps of QUEST and how we would educate our students about each step. After each step was taught, we would meet to discuss the pros/cons of how it went. At the end of the inquiry project, we, including students, would reflect on the project and share things that went well and things that we could improve on for the next year. Each teacher in the grade would have to work together to share ideas and communicate how things were going in the classroom. If a lesson went well for one teacher, they could always “teach” that lesson to the other classes and see if it helped students gain a better understanding. After completing the initial preparations for this project, we can hopefully work together to create more inquiry projects for our students each year.

Reference:

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