Last week, one of the teachers with whom I work came to me with a dilemma. In a few months, his fourth-graders will participate in their annual State Night. To prepare for this event, students choose a state to learn more about. Their findings form the basis of a presentation given in front of an audience of peers, teachers, parents, and other members of our school community. My fellow teacher expressed a desire to expand the resources that his students use for research from encyclopedias and reference books to websites and informational databases available through our school library. His worry, however, was that their note-taking skills were not up to the challenge of the amount of information available on the internet and that in frustration, they would simply rely on copy-and-pasting to create most of their reports.
We quickly identified several strategies that this teacher could use to avoid this situation: generate an essential question, such as “Why would a person want to live or visit this state?” to force students to make an answer composed of original thoughts, rather than just find an answer; educate students about plagiarism; and directly teach strategies for paraphrasing and notetaking. However, an idle comment by the teacher produced the most interesting strategizing from us. That comment was, “My only concern is that they’re going to come up with garbage if they just Google – stuff from Wikipedia and Ask Yahoo! How do I get them to look beyond the first hits their search query produces?” (Fairchild, D, personal communication, November 2, 2010). We decided that before we could spend any time on any of the other ideas we had generated, we first needed to devote some class periods to teaching the kids how...
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Laureate, Education, Inc. (Producer). (2006). Program number 3: Literacy processes [DVD]. Literacy and learning in the information age. Baltimore, MD: Author.
Lee, M., & Baylor, A. (2006). Designing metacognitive maps for web-based learning. Educational Technology & Society, 9(1), 344-348. Retrieved November 8, 2010, from http://www.ifets.info/journals/9_1/28.pdf
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English Language Learners (ELL) require thoughtful and careful instruction for both reading and writing education. Both of these skills are necessary for a bright future and to be a functioning citizen in Canada. Those that do not possess considerable literacy levels will be effectively 'locked out' from so much knowledge, information and ideas that are part of the culture of society (Christie 1990, 20). Having a low level of literacy usually means acquiring an unskilled job. The relationship between literacy levels and poverty is something that should not be ignored (Gibbons, 2002). Developing literacy skills in ELLs is a daunting task and especially with students that have not developed those skills in their first language originally. Through the Curriculum Cycle and proper scaffolding of writing strategies, this paper will provide a lesson plan that will help develop an ELL's writing skills. It will include many different tools that will help students gain an understanding and confidence of the narrative writing form.
I think the main idea from the article “How Google, Wikipedia Have Changed Our Lives – For Better and Worse” who was written by Jennifer Woodard is how this generation of people rely entirely too much on the internet to find their answers for school and everyday life. When people used to research for information they were looking for they could spend hours in the library, reading countless books to find their answers and even find more then what they were looking for. Now when researching people are so used to finding out what they want to know it only takes seconds to type in in your phone and find on Google your answer. Learning before there was computers or google, you had to listen to the whole lecture to get an understanding of everything
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As a sophomore in college and majoring in education, this article makes me understand why Herrington wants teachers to see, “the correspondence between the act of learning and the act of writing” (1). Students in today’s generation are in a far more advanced state than when I was in high school. A lot happened in two years, students now are taking tests where the questions are half multiple choice and half short essay questions. As a former student in high school, I never had a teacher who expanded my knowledge in a way that involved writing and with this in mind, neither did my English teacher. There never was that one teacher who took it to the next level for us students; somehow they always stayed in their comfort zones.
Internet sources are becoming great source for research and educational purposes. Among the main reasons for this are the easy access it provides, the different views that you can get about a certain topic and the different concepts about it all in one paper. This is important especially for me since I am gathering information in order to write my paper. There are different links and videos as well that I can use making my research the easier. This is more than I can get if I will be using the old timer encyclopedia. Also, with the internet, there are always new sources available that I can use and I can check my sources from the old one to the new one.
My personal literacy development has been a constant struggle since my arrival in America as a boy with a Spanish-speaking mother and a bi-lingual father. We spoke Spanish at home. As I began school I could only speak a small amount of English and understood only slightly more. I learnt, as young children do, through listening to the people around me and using any visual aids I could to scaffold the gaps in my understanding (Winch, Johnston, March, Ljungdahl, Holliday, 2012). My lack of basic literacy affected every area of my learning with only math classes allowing me to feel slightly comfortable due to the international nature of numerical literacy. I quickly developed the oracy skills required to be able to contribute to social and academic situations but unfortunately developed other ways to hide my lack of progress in other areas.
A comprehensive approach to literacy instruction is when reading and writing are integrated. This happens by connecting reading, writing, comprehension, and good children’s literature. A comprehensive approach to literacy should focus on the many different aspects of reading and writing in order to improve literacy instruction. This includes teachers supporting a comprehensive literacy instructional program by providing developmentally appropriate activities for children. Comprehensive literacy approaches incorporate meaning based skills for children by providing them with the environment needed for literacy experiences. This includes having a print rich classroom where children are exposed to charts, schedules, play related print, and
It is a constant truth that technology is growing rapidly and it is opening up many opportunities for students as well as teachers. Through the use of the internet information that would take scholars months to acquire out and interpret can be found in less than a minute though a Google search and not only is the information their, but in many cases the information that you wanted is shown in bolded so it can even be found quicker.
Most of the time the Internet makes learning fun, unlike the plain fashion of the "almighty" textbook. Computers and other technology can also heighten the learning process by actively engaging students in the task of exploring data. Some students may be tempted to simply download information from the Internet that does not have anything to do with a particular subject that they were asked to research. This shows that the Internet may have a greater impact to education than to learn that information from a typical textbook. Since computers and the Internet have expanded the way with which
New books and research studies are posted on the Internet daily for the world to read. In the past, if you were from a poor school or a sheltered community that banded books from school libraries, you may not be able to read some important information. Making the student that had the opportunity to read and learn this new information better educated than a person who did not have the same books on their school library shelves. The author of the article The internet as a classroom explains this fact when she says, "We have arrived at a new moment in history: a moment in which such terms as class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality and ideology are no longer useful" (Hendricks). This statement applies to education because information can be found on any subject on the web.
The Center for the Digital Future’s 2005 report found that 'among users 17 and older, 56.3 percent consider the Internet to be a very important or extremely important source of information for them' (p. 4). Online resource capabilities save an individual time as well as provide ease of access and availability to a broad scope of materials. Print books and journals, though they provide in–depth information on a particular subject, are not easily accessible and available at any particular moment. In order to access many books, an individual must either visit the local library or contain the book in his or her own private collection, which could be costly. Online resources can be accessed anytime at anyplace. “Overall, there is expanded access to information in a variety of formats from worldwide institutions, businesses, and universities" (Darrow & MacDonald, 2004, p. 22). Access to “worldwide” information puts a broad range of information in the h...
The question people are asking themselves today is, Is digital literacy just as important as daily subjects such as reading, writing, and math for our students today? To prepare for this paper I was given three excerpts to read. Right away I was drawn to how much time we spend on the internet daily and what types of things we do while we are on the internet. I realized that today’s society is dependent on the internet for most things like doing homework, researching information, shopping, and getting on social media websites. While reading a fact sheet named Fact Sheet: Digital Literacy, “We live in an internet economy I came across interesting facts such as 96% of Americans use technology and internet at their jobs and 28% of American don’t
What is technology? A definition of technology literacy might well begin with a definition of technology. Technology consists of all the modifications humans have made in the natural environment for their own purposes (Dugger 2001)—inventions, innovations, and changes intended to meet our wants and needs, to live longer, more productive lives. Such a broad definition of technology includes a broad spectrum of artifacts, ranging from the age-old (flint tools, wheels, levers) to the high-tech (computers, multimedia, biotechnologies). In short, if humans thought of it and made it, it’s technology.
Through the internet, the quality and ability of the students and teachers has become much greater. One example of the use of the internet in their school was on research on Ancient Egypt. The fifth grade class was to use the in...
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