Reflective blog #2

As I read through the links and information for this week’s reflection, an idea occurred to me about how I receive information. Through my coursework and my years of teaching, I have always thought of myself as a sequential learner, building upon prior knowledge to create new understanding, and consequently this affects how I teach and develop lesson plans.  After reading Prensky’s Do They Really Think Differently?, It occurred to me that my preference for information retrieval is actually more suited to hypertext and that my propensity to teach sequentially is because this is how I was taught.  My online courses and obsession with Google confirm that my own “cognitive structures” are less linear and sequential and far more random. As I clicked on each link, I accessed information simultaneously--I moved back and forth between links, often with 10-15 windows open at one time.  I think about how many times I have scolded students for jumping ahead of me in the lesson and skipping steps, and now I see that this was their natural way to process information.  As a result of this week’s reading I would like to be more sensitive to students’ learning differences and how they prefer to analyze information.

The American Library Association’s definition of information literacy is “the set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze and use information.”  Because of the vast amount of information that is available on the Internet, these skills should be embedded into the curriculum. The implication of not teaching these skills is that students will not see the importance of inquiry and thinking critically about information.  Alan November mentioned the Holocaust hoax on the Internet and this is a perfect example of what could happen if we teach technical skills but fail to teach critical thinking skills. To add to this, I can see a growing need to teach digital citizenship starting with early grades.  Issues such as plagiarism and cyber-bullying have created a need to teach students to use information ethically and to use social tools safely.

Reading is the foundation for learning and is also an important indicator for future success. I believe that it is important to connect kids with books, peruse resources to find good material and search for connections to link a student to something he/she is interested in. Students are attracted to picture books and graphic novels, but my goal is to see them read an entire novel before they go into the 6th grade.  My thinking is that one day a student who chooses to go to college will be able to read countless pages from textbooks and research papers without the help of elaborate graphics or hyperlinks.

Concept maps

When I was choosing which concept map tool to use I decided to use Wordle because of its aesthetic appeal. I can see a tool such as this being useful in a blog because it offers the reader an eye-catching visual to introduce the topic.  The advantages of using social bookmarking with tag clouds are the ability to retrieve websites from any computer and to see what other people are reading and using. The only social bookmarking tool I have used is Delicious because I was required to for a course; however, I did find it very useful at the time and was able to link to other information because of the “folksonomy” that occurred when people tagged their websites.