Evaluating My "New Literacy" Skills

According to Dr. Douglas Hartman, what literacy means has changed with time (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010).  I completely agree with him.  I have witnessed the evolution from the time of when I was in school to now my own classrooms.  We are now not just teaching our students to be literacy skills when reading print text, we are also teaching them to be literate when using digital tools and resources.

Part of my job as an Innovative Learning Specialist is to educate teachers in just this area.  David Warlick said, “We are preparing our children for an unpredictable future” and he is exactly right (Laureate Education, Inc., 2010).  We do not know what kind of jobs and resources might be available to our students when they graduate college or move into the workforce.  “The most important thing we can be teaching them is how to learn” (Laureate, 2010).  I consider myself strong in my understanding regarding the new literacies, as it is part of my job description.  By no means does this mean that I am an expert.  Most often I reference the 21^st Century Fluency Project when educating myself or others regarding the new literacies or in the fluency projects case, the new fluencies.  Either way, it is important that we begin to shift our views from the past to the future.  “Our past was rooted in book culture.  The future will be rooted in online and digital media” (Laureate, 2010).

As I took the quizzes, I was aware that I already had a good understanding of the new literacies and I was teaching my students important skills.  I could also see, that just like anything, there was still room for improvement.  With the first quiz on Web Strategies, I scored a 68 out of 75.   Although, I teach almost all of these skills to students, I often don’t follow them all myself.  On the second quiz, I scored a 54 out of 60.  For my role in my schools, I am required to be really good at most of these topics which gives me a leg up.  The only area I chose “I’m ok” at was on the computer games.  I chose ok because my schedule does not allow me to keep up to date on most of them.

As for teaching these skills, I usually utilize resources from the 21^st Century Fluency Project.  There are many lesson and units available that help me to integrate these new literacies into my already existing curriculum at any grade level.  I often like to introduce one at a time as we move through the year so that we can build upon our previous knowledge.  My favorite lessons to teach are on evaluating and searching.  I have videos that show a student trying to navigate a search engine to do some research on baseball but is overloaded with the abundance of information.  We discuss how we can locate information more effectively and use our background knowledge as well as doing some inferencing, to select a good resource.  For evaluation, I use hoax websites to trick students about the relevance of sites they find.  The motto they walk away with is to not trust everything they read on the web.

References

Crockett, L. (2014, April 9). Introduction to the 21st Century Fluencies. Fluency21. Retrieved May 8, 2014, from https://fluency21.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201965037-Introduction-to-the-21st-Century-Fluencies

Eagleton, M.B. & Dobler, E. (2007).  Reading the Web:  Strategies for Internet Inquiry.  New York:  Guilford Press.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2010). Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom: New literacies [Video webcast]. Retrieved from Walden University database.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2010). Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom: Skills for the future [Video webcast]. Retrieved from Walden University database.