Through the work completed in “Supporting Information Literacy and Online Inquiry in the Classroom”, I have come to understand how technology can help students work through their thought process to learn more about a topic. Creating the inquiry project unit plan involved thinking of a lot of questions to ask the students. How did they know that the website they were using was reliable? How did they know that they had complete information on their topic? Developing the essential questions for the unit was a good reminder that there should be essential questions in every lesson that I give, whether it is based in technology or not.
The most striking thing that I learned through creating the unit plan was that internet research isn’t just for older children. In my first grade class, the structure of the internet research had to be modified. I used “delicious.com” to bookmark sites that I wanted them to consider, but they were able to choose which ones they wanted to use based on the quality of the webpage. The children were able to navigate easily using “delicious” and that was what surprised me the most. They can use the internet more freely with this tool, and I can trust them to do so appropriately and productively.
Going forward, I will use what I have learned in this course to have more inquiry based learning in my classroom. Although the focus was on technology in this course, I could also see how this could be done with books and other media. I think that I will use different elements of the project, like creating essential questions and considering what new literacy I am trying to have the children use in their work.
My goal is to find more resources that make technology and especially the internet; more child friendly. Through using Jing, Delicious, and other tools that I have rediscovered during this course, I’ve found ways to make the information on the web accessible to 6 and 7 year olds. I would like to continue to find more tools that make projects like this inquiry based learning plan possible. I also hope to share what I’ve learned with other teachers at my school.
