The most striking revelation that I had about the teaching of new literacy skills to my students as a result of this course would be that the students need to start learning these skills at a young age. I think that it is easy for teachers to look at the list of skills as say that their students are to young for them or that the skills are to challenging for their students. The problem with that is when the students get into the upper grades, they have no prior experience with the new literacy skills and those teachers have to start at square one and get them to where they need to be for them and then get the students ready for the next teacher. I think that when I first looked them over, it was overwhelming, but once I started breaking them a part into smaller pieces and realizing that I can at least start working on the foundation of that skill I was more comfortable teaching the skill.
The knowledge and experience that I gained in this course will influence my teaching practices going forward by helping me feel more comfortable and capable of teaching inquiry based project and undertaking teaching the student new literacy skills and technology skills require for them to complete the inquiry based project. I feel more comfortable letting the students lead their own learning and taking that step back and just being support when they ask for it. I know that inquiry based learning not only pushes me out of my comfortable zone, but also the students. They have learned to depend on me for their learning. Though I believe that once they gain self-confidence in the inquiry based learning, they will not want to switch back to teacher-centered learning.
One professional development goal that I would like to pursue that builds upon my learning in this course and develops my own information literacy or technology skills would be to have my class take part in an online collaboration with other classes that are outside of our own school district. The second part of my goal would be to one day host my own collaboration, where I set-up the medium of the collaboration and lead the different classes through the different steps of it. The steps that I will take to accomplish this goal would be to first search different education websites to see what kind of collaboration projects are already being offered through different classrooms. Once I have found one that I believe fit my needs and my students needs, I would sign-up to take part in it. While I am taking part in someone’s else collaboration, I plan on asking the lead teacher questions about how they went about setting up this collaboration and if they have any tips. Then for my own, I first would survey what different topics that teachers would be interested in researching for a collaboration project. After I have figured out which topic most teachers would be interested in, I would start putting together the different activities, technology, and website that would be needed for the collaboration. I would also try and have a teacher that has lead a collaboration before to help me set-up mine up and guide me through it. After the collaboration was finished, I would want feedback from the other teachers on what work and what did not work, so that I could improve for the next collaboration project.
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