Reflective Essay for Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom (EDUC - 6712I - 1)

At the start of this class I thought I had used the internet and technology effectively in my classroom. Now at the end of the class I see that I had not been using it effectively. One of the point that has stuck to me was that our students will be using technology in their lives that is not even developed now. How can we as teachers prepare our students for life using this technology if we do not even know what this technology is. The answer to is that we teach, as the new literacies as apposed to the old literacies or reading writing and math. The new literacies are questioning, searching, evaluating, synthesising and communicating. It is not enough for us to teach our students how to read and write anymore we have to teach them how to know what questions to ask, so they can find information to answer the question, decide if the information they found is reliable and then take the information to form a new idea and finally communicate their new ideas. Creating the lesson in the class was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I had never broken down the process like that before and trying to put it to the level of a sixth grader who had never had to do it before was even more difficult. I look forward to bringing this project into my classroom and producing more lessons for my students.