Reflections on Educ 6712

In this course, my classmates and I learned about literacies -- not the standard literacies that one might ordinarily think of, but literacies for the 21st century.

The most striking revelation that I had during this course was how to teach my students the process for evaluating the merit of web resources. I was never taught this in school, and gradually learned this skill through years of trial and error. I was pleased to learn a method for teaching my students how to evaluate sources effectively.

There were other skills that I learned in this course that will benefit my teaching, such as teaching students how to ask essential questions, and synthesize resources. The knowledge gained from this course will be valuable in teaching skills to my students that I needed them to have, but had difficulty explaining before.

One goal that I would like to meet as a result of this course is to share some of what I have learned with my colleagues to improve the literacy of not only my students, but my school's student body as a whole. I would like to speak at one of our inservices and explain some of the methods that I have learned during the course, especially how to help students evaluate resources.