EDUC 6712 Reflection

Application 8: Reflection
I had a few revelations about the teaching of new literacy skills to my students, but I will narrow it down to one, searching for information and how easy it can be made. What I found, like most teachers, is that students can search for information, but that they give up so easily. This I feel is because of confusion and looking at a bunch of text and pictures, which can sometimes lead to overload. Most students only know the good old-fashioned way of searching using Google, Wikipedia, and Ask.com. With just a little help and showing them a couple of easy tricks and examples, students can become better researchers and deciphering information.

The knowledge and experienced I gained from EDUC 6712 will definitely influence and an impact on my teaching practices going forward. Probably one of the biggest things I will do is starting near the beginning of the year will be to teach how to do proper research. I will start small and build to bigger, longer examples and assignments/projects. By spending more time explaining and giving more examples of research techniques, including how to search and how to tell what websites are reliable and which are not, my students will become better researchers.

My goal after this course goes along with what I talked about earlier, I would like to become a better researcher myself and to continue to pass that on to my students. The step process will consist of series of steps for both my students and myself. By continually going in and evaluating websites for quality and quantity of information, this will help to keep me sharp. When teaching my classes, I will start with very simple projects that are only one day in length. I will start by following the plan I laid out for locating and evaluating internet resources in EDUC 6712. I will start with a website analysis activity where students look at two different websites and tell me what website they think is most credible, or if they both are. Then as a follow up, ask them to define or explain what the ending of a website address means, (.com, .org, etc.) I then will explain the difference between the two websites and how to determine which one was credible and which was not. Following this, I will show them what each of the endings of websites means, answer questions and show examples of each. A short activity will follow where students will be allowed to use a variety of search engines including Google and altavista.com. I will model first where and how to use the search engines by showing multiple examples and results to determine how to conduct a proper search. This should take no more than about 10 – 15 minutes depending on student questions. Then, for the rest of the hour, students will be allowed to start conducting searches on their own, while I am walking around and helping where necessary. By choosing topics that they are interested in will help them stay focused and on task. After completing this, a follow up and question and answer period will done clarifying any issues or problems students had and checking for understanding making sure everyone is a little more comfortable in the research process. As the year goes on and projects get a little more in depth, I will still have a short recap before starting just to make sure students are ready.