Digital Badge #D- Ch. 5. Teaching Information Literacy and Digital Citizenship

The internet can be a powerful tool for teaching and learning. We, as teachers, should overcome the intimidation of navigating the web, and make use of the web to answer the learning needs of our students. We can also focus on the educational opportunities that the internet provides for the instructional strategies. Now days, everyone must know how to surf the web, look for information, and evaluate its accuracy; this is known as information literacy (Maloy, p. 99).

The internet is such a helpful tool that allows us to navigate through learning environments. It provides us, and the children, to learn the skills of navigation that are necessary for working in the modern world. The internet also permits us to have access to diverse e-books that can be read digitally on a computer or any other digital device. Although many parents believe that having access to electronic books can affect negatively their child’s desire to read, I think that it is wonderful how easy it is to have access to books and scholarly information through the use of a computer.

In many elementary schools, students at an early age are already learning how to use a computer. Teachers and students use computers and other technologies in almost all subjects; this is called Information technology (IF) fluency in schools (Maloy, p. 103). It is also important to know how to properly use search engines to locate information, and also know what engines are more appropriate to use in the classroom. We all know that Google is the most common search engine used by almost everyone, but this engine is most used for general searches. It is better to choose a search engine that allows teachers and student to focus directly on the educational and academic topics.

The internet provides teacher with many useful tools to organize lesson plans, note taking. And it is valuable that it allows us to do so, since teachers spend so much time of the day moving quickly. It is also important that teachers teach their students how to search for information on the internet. Search engines can provide us with three ways to search online, which are: free-text search that focuses on the title or keyword typed in; keyword/exact match search, which gives us information that contains the exact words that were typed in; and Boolean search that uses the terms and, or, and not to narrow a search. Teachers must find what material on the internet is appropriate for the class curriculum, what are the best for learning, and teach students how to search the web by themselves. Teachers also need to teach students the how to conduct an effective search and to critically evaluate the search results. It is important to point out the difference of a scholarly and not-scholarly webpage, such as Wikipedia. And explain the differences about those web pages; for example, encyclopedias are better to search for scholarly information because experts write and review them; whereas internet readers who may or may not know the field of study are the ones who write and edit Wikipedia (Maloy, p. 114).

The Internet is a dynamic teaching and learning medium with which teachers can facilitate learning, enhance comprehension and provide rich contextual learning environments for their students. Today, students are more familiar and adept with these technologies, so teachers need to take advantage of these student skills to rethink teaching as a collaborative journey. We, as teachers can provide guidelines and pathways for students to learn more about technologies.

References:

Maloy, R., Verock-O’Loughlin, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B. P. (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.