After reading this article I feel a little more insecure. Before I started this class I knew my knowledge of technology and web was limited. Now I realize that I need to be a little more computer literate. I noticed that for reading online I should know how search engines work, how information is organized and also to be able to stay on task. I identified with Samantha.
I was never taught online reading. In fact, after I earned my credential about 15 years ago I took a class on computers but things have changed a lot since then. Internet access was not accessible. Most of what I know about Internet use I have learned playing with it. Reading the article made me realize that there are things that I don't. I would like to have taken a class that gave me more confidence on the skills I should be using so I could teach them to my students.
According to the article do not teach online reading even though our students need to become proficient in using information and communication technologies. As a teacher, I should be able to prepare my students for reading digital text. The first thing I should do is teach my students how to choose a link from a long. list of search result. Another skill I should teach my students is how to navigate within a web site. When my students are done with this two steps they should learn to evaluate the source of the web site because anybody can publish in the web. The last skill I should teach my students is to synthesize without copying. If we do not teach these skills we are placing our students in disadvantage because our culture is moving away from printed materials.
I hope that my generation of teachers and the following generations are better prepared to train our students. It is hard to teach a skill that I do not have.
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Hi Luisa,
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your last statement. We can not teach a skill that we don't have. I think the other thing we can't really teach is judgment. We look at something and know it isn't quite accurate because we are educated, mature people who have life experience and knowledge that our students don't. I'm not sure how we can help them in that respect.
See you soon,
~Colleen
I find that teaching students to synthesize without copying is really difficult. It is so easy for them to just copy and paste things into their work that they don't take the time to think about what they are using. A lot of times they copy/paste and then just go back and change a few words so that it is "not plagiarized".
ReplyDeleteHi Luisa. I too can identify with Samantha sometimes. Searching the web can be very frustrating at times and very time consuming. I also think it is more important now that ever to teach them not to just copy what you see. Before students at least had to what down the information and hopefully during that process they would put it in their own words. Now it is so easy to just cut and paste text, I can see how students would make much less of an effort to rewrite it in their own words.
ReplyDeleteHi, all. I agree that having students put ideas in their own words is helpful. Also, if they are answering a specific question (i.e. how is Afghan culture different from American?) they can write what the website offers about that specific question. They are required to do a bit of analysis to answer the question.
ReplyDeleteI agree with all of you and I look forward to class discussion on the topic.
ReplyDeleteHi Luisa,
ReplyDeleteI found that b/c of the widespread use of internet by students, I only assign in-class writing assignments. It is too easy for them to find information already written in the target language, in our case Spanish, and they just cut and paste and hand it in as their own work. They also heavily use on-line translators. I still give timed-writes, as Blaine calls them. I gave my first relaxed write the other day. A lot of them still couldn't produce 100 words even though they had double the time!
Am really looking forward to talking with you during the next class to compare notes.
Anne, Oceana
Hi Luisa,
ReplyDeleteYou are right about online literacy-it's a bit of a challenge. In addition, I would be a little apprehensive about teaching this skill that I haven't master. This is the first real assingment that I did online (no printing of materials), and I had a hard time staying focues. I can't image how students who are struggling readers feel when faced with an online assignment.