Reflection: Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom

Taking the Walden course, Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom, has made me realize how important it is to teach and guide my students to use inquiry based projects. According to Armstrong, S. (Laureate, 2009), project based learning challenges students to think more broadly and deeply, and collaborate globally.

This course introduced to me many new ways to produce student project based learning, which I plan to implement in my classroom. When working on these type of inquiry based projects, it is especially important to teach online literacy skills so students can validate reliable websites. Strategies like Phillip’s ABC’s of evaluating websites (Laureate, 2009) teach students how to navigate around websites and use their critical judgment to assess their accuracy.

The biggest revelation of this course has been the need for my fourth grade students to cite their sources and to copyright their own publication. According to Warlick, D. (Laureate, 2009), students become more responsible when they claim what they own, and teachers should model this by citing their technology resources during instruction.

I would hope that my district would provide more professional development for integrating technology through student and teacher collaboration. The ethical use and monitoring of wikis, blogs, and other tools could be taught and monitored, and would be advantageous for our students’ learning, while keeping them up to date with Century 21 skills they will already use at home and will use in their future.

References

Eagleton, M. & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). Armstrong, S. (Presenter). Inquiry Based Projects

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). Hartman, D. (Presenter). Developing Students’ Digital Literacy


Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2009). Warlick, D. (Presenter). Skills for the future [DVD]. Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom.