Reflection on Information Literacy Skills in the Classroom

Reflection on Information Literacy Skills in the Classroom
At the end of a course surrounding information literacy skills I am asked to reflect on any striking revelation I have had. An issue that comes to mind is realizing how important it is for me to stress to the students that they need to be critical readers of the Web. What this means exactly is that I need to explain to my students that what they are reading, albeit published material, may be biased or, even still, untrue. This is a factor that they do not have to worry about with published books. The internet, however, is a completely different animal. The strategies I learned in my graduate course will go a long way towards helping my students properly evaluate a website.

When constructing an inquiry project for this course I was involved in helping the students to generate a question for the project, elucidate how to effectively find good sources, evaluate those sources and finally to synthesize their information into idea they could call their own. I will depend on the topic + focus stratagem to not only help the students better concentrate on what their question should look like but as a tactic that is useful to find sources on the internet when plugged into a search engine. This is a valuable skill that has helped me in the classroom and will be incorporated into every inquiry project I create both on line and off line.

Finally, I am passionate about sharing my new found information literacy skills with my colleagues. We have a Professional Learning Community meeting once a week and I would like to put together a series of lessons wherein I can pass along all the effective tools and skills that I have learned in this class. There are numerous handouts that I can share as well as putting forth the experience I have gained from completing an inquiry based unit that involved the students researching on the internet. I would not be surprised if some of my colleagues are in the dark regarding checking for the validity of websites. Unfortunately we live in a time when you have to demonstrate rigor towards safety and cannot trust information as easily as we once could. I am looking forward to generating these lessons and passing them along to my colleagues.

Ruth Crawford