EDUC 6712 Reflection

I think the most striking revelation for me was the fact that many students believe they are good at searching the Internet but in reality their skills are lacking. I took half a class period to show my students how to critically evaluate a resource on the Web as I had done for an activity in this class and at least half my students were sufficiently lacking in their ability to properly evaluate a website. I had thought up to that point that my students would do well at this task. I found out that the majority of the time they search with Google, no matter what information they are looking for, and that they take the first or second site on the results list and do not delve any further into finding good information. Through conversations with my students I was also able to conclude that they find Wikipedia to be an excellent source of all types of information. It is often the first place they go when given a topic and they generally trust the information on the site.
Going forward I realized that I need to monitor my students better when they begin the research portion of inquiry based projects and that I need to model or teach mini lessons on how to research and find good information. When I did a mini lesson with students using the website given in class for the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus almost every student was intrigued with this creature they had never heard of before. Many wanted to know where you go to see one of these creatures. Only after I went through the REAL process (November, 2008) did they begin to see that the website was a hoax. My students seem to have difficulty evaluating whether a website is a good source of information. I know this is a skill I will need to continue to teach to my students. In the future I will have to be sure to break my inquiry based projects down into smaller pieces and that I will have to teach the new literacy skills to my students instead of assuming they are already competent at this task.
One professional development skill I would like to continue working on is updating and changing at least two of my research projects into inquiry based projects. In many of my classes I have research projects. While I find them to be valuable I think changing them into projects that use the QUEST approach (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007) would help me teach students the literacy skills that will be important for them to become fluent at when they reach college and eventually the workplace. As a Career and Technical educator it is important that I teach my students how to be successful in the workplace. I need to prepare my students for the ever changing workplace. Being able to create good questions, research well, and synthesize information into a presentation will become increasingly important skills to master. To accomplish the goal of adapting my lessons I will take the two breaks I have coming and work on a lesson during each break. Over the summer I will attempt to do at least two more projects. I believe I can best accomplish this by using the Inquiry Based Plan template given in this class. It allowed me to think, reflect, and change many of the activities and assessments I was doing and change them for the better. In the end, the time spent will be worth it when I know I am better preparing my students with 21st century literacy skills.

References
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the Web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.
November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousands Oaks: Corwin Press.