Final Blog Posting

The most striking revelation I have had in teaching new literacy skills to my students is the 21st century fluencies. The information literacy is very important to the students of today. They need to be able to read what information is true and not true, evaluate the information, understand the grammar of the internet, and to find the source of the information. From a teacher's perspective they need to be able to evaluate the information online. Student's need to be able to navigate their way around the internet. Teacher's are having to be steps ahead of their student's.

The knowledge and experience I gained in this course will help me determine where to take my student's irregardless of what level they are at. I might be teaching a 4th grade classroom, but have many levels within that grade. This course has given me guidance on how to teach new literacy skills the proper way. I now have the resources to go forth and figure out how to best incorporate the new up and coming skills. It isn't easy to do sometimes, but I feel better prepared to do this.
One professional development goal I would like to pursue is the bring the teachers together by grade levels, and have one grade level tell the grade before them what skills their students are lacking, and how they could improve. I think this is very important. After bringing the teachers together in a grade level, I would have them write down the things that they think their students are weak in. I feel like if they can start to bridge the gap of technology between grades then the other things might fall into place. The particular skill that one grade is lacking might be a simple fix, or it may be one that the technology teacher stresses, reviews and goes over during specials. Becoming literate in books and computers goes hand in hand. Furthermore, the teachers could review with the other grades the things that are needed to make the classes flow. This would take a few tweaking of steps, information and data collection to make this go smoothly. It would take a few years to make it work. Being proactive and telling the administration what you have planned would show initiative and show that you wanted to ward off problems before they start. This might be able to diminish the problems, but nothing will make them go completely away. Working together to promote new literacy skills will make their learning invaluable.