New Literacy Skills

I love using the internet to help students find information. Search engines are my favorite resource to utilize while looking for anything school, or non-school related. I want to familiarize my students with the search engines, but I must also teach them how to find reliable information, and how to safely search the internet. This class has taught me many new techniques for enhancing the new literacy skills in my students.

I was introduced to many websites that are hoaxes or that contain false information, such as the tree octopus site. I could have my students navigate through these sites to decide whether or not they seem reliable. I will teach them things to look out for as they are searching the internet for facts related to their research topics for projects. I will assign them a project that requires internet research so that they can practice using Google and other search engines.

I also want to get my classes used to using email and blog sites to communicate with each other, however, my school blocks these sites. My goal is to persuade my school district to allow one monitored email site and one blog site. We can assign their email addresses so that they can all be monitored. I think this will open a whole new world of lesson possibilities for teachers of all grades and subjects. This will greatly impact our young students and prepare them for the future.