Powered By Blogger

Saturday, September 11, 2010

El Ed Ch 12

I found chapter 12 very interesting and informative. The websites given all seem to be great resources and it really showed me that the Internet holds perhaps even more educational potential than I realized. However, it is true that "[a]s students gain experience with the Internet... teachers need to recognize that even elementary students now need skills in efficient and effective searching, evaluating sources for bias and authority, and ethics" (Hamilton, 12). When I was in elementary school, the computer class teacher taught us everything that we needed to know about the computers, which really just included typing, and the librarian taught us about researching and finding sources. Today's elementary students need to combine those two lessons, and in many cases, it needs to be taught by their classroom teaches, as Hamilton suggests. At first, that thought was a little overwhelming for me, since I haven't been formally trained in information literacy or teaching information literacy. But I looked at the website that the book offered in that section and found it extremely useful. I loved the graphic organizer that they used to categorize the lesson plans. It would make it very easy to find a lesson that teaches the exact skill your students need. Also, I was pleasantly surprised by the number and variety of lesson plans available.
The other part of chapter 12 that stood out to me was the idea of using mapquest.com to teach a lesson, thus making the internet more relevant to the lives of the students, making maps more accessible, and teaching the use of a website that the students will no doubt use in the future. This idea could be used for lessons in many different subjects. For math, students could calculate distances and travel time between various locations; for social studies, students could learn general map skills and geography; for language arts, students could write a story based on their maps; for art, students could draw or paint maps of their own. I think it would be really valuable to use mapquest.com in several different subjects in order to show students how the subjects can be connected.


(I liked the title to the information literacy lesson page because it moved a little bit from the link the book provided.)

3 comments:

Annie Tillmann said...

I loved the information literacy stuff, that's kind of what I plan on doing in the future so it really hit it home for me that I'm on the right track. My plan is to be either a sort of resource teacher or a consultant of some sort that will help teachers and students alike work with information literacy/visual literacy. It makes me really glad to see that you are really open the whole idea of it and teaching it, Mary! I, too, really liked the graphic organizer, it's little things like this that get me really excited about what I plan on trying to do.

liz exo said...

I really like your comment about mapquest.com and its implications for all different types of learning! I didn't even think how widely used an online mapping website could be. It's the small lessons like this that students are really interested in because they get to use the computer, and its something that they can actually use in daily life. I think this is the future for education because students can relate.

eschmidt said...

I also thought using mapquest in the classroom was really exciting. I remember in elementary school learning all about reading maps with boring worksheets. Personally, I'm a huge nerd and enjoy pulling out a map on a car ride to see where I am and where I'm going. However, most people do not have this interest. Nearly everyone will get on mapquest, google maps, or some other online mapping system to obtain directions to their destination. Furthermore, a lot of people even have this technology in their car or on their cell phones. What better way to learn maps than to use a resource that is actually used in everyday life? This makes the lesson incredibly relate able and relevant.