Throughout this course, I have had several revelations regarding the importance of 21st century skills. The first of many was the stark difference between traditional literacies, and new literacy skills. These new literacy skills require students to develop higher level thinking, questioning, and evaluation skills. They incorporate not only reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, but also information skills, technical and media skills, and cooperative group skills. These new literacies foster encourage students to recognize what information is known and what is unknown, fostering a need and ability to seek out missing information, which is an important skill that traditional literacy skills do not address (Jukes & Macdonald, 2007).
My greatest revelation throughout this course, however, has been the importance of guiding students in the creation of meaningful, viable, and researchable questions, during the inquiry process. Giving students a question to answer is not enough to satisfy and teach students new literacy skills. The questions students develop have to be questions that students don't already know the answer to, questions that are researchable, defensible, and whose finding can be presented to others. These have to be questions that stimulate further questioning and continued learning, even after students have completed the inquiry process and their final projects (Eagleton & Dobler, 2007; Thornburg, 2004). This process of developing these types of questions has to be explicitly taught, modeled and practiced by students prior to initiating the research and inquiry process. Without the ability to ask deeper, more meaningful questions, students will not grow, learn, and develop through the inquiry process.
The full understanding of the steps and skills needed for students to complete an inquiry project in my classroom will have a tremendous impact upon my teaching in the future. I now know that prior to beginning an inquiry project, I must plan enough time within the unit to teach students to develop essential questions, search the internet effectively, evaluate sources efficiently, synthesize the information they gather, and finally create an artifact utilizing a multimedia or technology tool, while simultaneously focusing on the content information and standards. This will require me to plan for these units much more diligently, so as to have the resources and time available to effectively teach the concepts alongside the content learning that the inquiry project will provide students.
As I move forward in my teaching, I have one professional development goal that will greatly impact my teaching, my technology skills, and the learning of my students. I would like to develop a collaborative with another classroom of students. This will not only give my students an opportunity to see how students elsewhere in the country think and view certain topics, but it will also give them an audience for projects and partners with whom to collaborate and learn. It would teach students the true Web 2.0 skills they will need for the future: participation, collaboration, and distribution (Knobel & Wilber, 2009). To accomplish this, I will need to work with a classroom teacher in another part of the country. Since I recently moved from Colorado to Illinois, I am still very connected to many of my colleagues in Colorado, most of whom are also striving to create a 21st century classroom with collaborative and technology infused experiences for their students. I will need to find a colleague who would be interested in forming this collaboration, and maintaining it throughout the year. I would also need to create a classroom blog and wiki, through which my students and the collaborating class can communicate and respond to each other's common topics. The development of both of those sites will require me to work with district personnel to create email addresses for my students, so that they may be able to utilize these tools. It will also require me to make computer technology readily available to my students, on a daily basis. Most likely, I will need to seek out a grant to secure enough computer technology, 15 machines or more, to allow students active participation in the blog and wiki, as we collaborate with another class on learning projects. Once the technology has been secured and the partnership has been formed, I will need to diligently plan for ample time throughout the day to communicate with the collaborating class about the learning we are all doing. I will need to stay in close contact with the collaborating teacher, in order to organize time schedules and plan collaborative projects between the classes.
While this goal of forming a collaborative distance relationship with another classroom could be time consuming and difficult to arrange, with regards to technology, it will be well worth the effort. I believe it will provide my students with a multitude of collaborative, social and technological experiences that will have a great impact on student learning and success.
Resources:
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for internet inquiry. New York: The Guilford Press.
Knobel, M., & Wilber, D. (2009, March). Let's talk 2.0. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 20–24.
Jukes, I. (2007). 21st century fluency skills: Attributes of a 21st century learner. Located at http://www.committedsardine.com/handouts/twca.pdf.
Thornburg, D. (2004). Inquiry: The art of helping students ask good questions. (Executive Briefing No. 402). Retrieved from http://www.tcpdpodcast.org/briefings/inquiry.pdf
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12622247@N02/2370861203
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