Reflection Statement

Throughout this course I have learned that my students need to learn digital literacy skills along with traditional ones. While printed books are not likely to disappear anytime soon, online and virtual text is ever increasing. By teaching my students how to navigate the web, use a search engine properly, evaluate resources, and give proper credit to authors, I am being a responsible teacher in a Web 2.0 world. I believe that the most striking revelation that I had was that I believe I was taking for granted the fact that I personally know the web isn't linear. People cannot read websites the same way as they read the latest fiction book, or even non-fiction textbook for that matter. I know how to read and navigate a website, and I realized that I often assume my students do as well. In the past, I could never understand when a student would say to me, "That information isn't on the page, I looked!" I would march over to their computer, click a few buttons, skim quickly, and point out that the information was right in front of them if only they had looked a little harder! (What did they mean they didn't realize that the place where toucans live is under the page called "habitats," not the main page?)


This ties into my goal for the future. I need to make more of a concerted effort to teach my students how to more easily navigate webpages. By skimming side bar (or top bar) links, scrolling down while looking at headings, and thinking of synonyms for the keywords they are looking for research will be much less stressful both both them AND me! I think that by modeling several examples and having my students "be the teacher" to practice will really help them to learn that digital literacy.