CI 553 Reflections - Week 7

Final Reflection

Whew! I finally finished all my assignments...and not a minute too soon! I get to head back to high school this week! To begin my final reflection, I looked back through my assignments and reference notebook. For me, this course turned out to be a study in research skills. I learned so many things that will transfer to my classroom, and have several really great lessons that I am going to use in my classroom next year. It is always fabulous to take a course that has real value where you are able to transfer ideas and projects into the classroom. I plan to do that with everything I have created for this class!

Some of my highlights (lessons I will DEFINITELY use):

• Review of Library Research Resources
• make a resume of an American author
• a one page research project
• using and analyzing primary documents from the LOC website

What I can use in my class... When I began teaching several years ago I was charged with the "junior research project/paper." This was fairly intimidating for me, and I have struggled through the teaching of it for the past two years. This class gave me the resources and background to feel comfortable and confident teaching research skills to my students. I have realized that research is not just about this one, huge paper students write in the spring. Research is a skill that is taught a little at a time over the course of a career. Students get to be better researchers through continued practice. I am seriously considering overhauling the research in my class and having students write one research handout (as described in my unit lesson Introductory Research and Presentation on Native American History) each quarter. Of course, the topics of research will change. I think that approaching the research in this way will be better for a variety of reasons: the students will practice the skill over time, they will research a variety of topics, they will learn the valuable skill of concise writing, and, due to the shortened time frame for their work, they will be more focused on the topic at hand.

What I can use to develop our school's Library Media Program... As per the things I can use in our library program, I have already been in contact with our school's library media specialist. She is excited to use some of my ideas for our library media program and collaborate with me to build a better program for our students. Especially useful for this will be the "Government Information for Kids and Teens" PPT and the "Information Literacy Rubric." Additionally, she is more than willing to collaborate with me on a library session for juniors that reviews the research resources available to them.

What I can use as a profession and as a graduate student... The research skills and resources that have been introduced and reviewed in this class will help me professionally and with the requirements of the Curriculum & Instruction program. I don't know how many times I have heard the phrase "research-based" in the last several years, but there is no doubt in my mind that is where educational best practice and district policy is headed. Especially helpful in this area will the indexes and databases I can access online through the University of Montana (like ERIC).

Finally... In all, this course was full of information and assignments that I can actually use! This was refreshing and exciting. See you in the classroom!

CI 553 Reflections - Week 6

Assessing Information Literacy Skills

Assessing learning is an essential part of the educational process, including assessment of information literacy skills. I see assessment as having two aspects: formative and summative assessment. Teachers and Library Media Specialists guide students through the learning process using formative assessments (i.e. - rough drafts, peer reviews, individual conferences about student work). For summative assessments, there are a variety of methods of assessment. For writing and projects which seem more subjective, I favor rubrics which are given to the students early on in their work. The rubrics provide clear guidelines and targets, and allow students to work toward measurable goals. I frequently discuss the rubrics with as a whole class and individually with students.

Occasionally, objective assessments, like quizzes and exams, provide a better summation of student learning. The TRAILS (Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills) website does a fine job of providing this kind of objective assessment. In fact, I think it will be interesting to use this assessment with 9th graders as a pre-test in the fall and a post-test in the spring. I may even use it for my 11th graders to try to track the differences between the grades, as well as learning over the course of the year.

That said, I think it is important to teach students to reflect and self-evaluate. There is a fine example of a guided self-reflection based on the Big6 in figure 9-1 of our text (Murray, 2008, p. 90). I think these questions could be easily modified to fit nearly any project. I especially liked that the questions are designed to encourage students to transfer the skills they have learned, practiced or mastered to other projects. Ultimately, I believe that this is the most important skill we can teach our students - how to find information quickly and easily and how to transfer this skill to any subject matter.

Copyright and Plagiarism

The final LM standard deals with the safe, legal and ethical use of information and technology. Personally, I find this to be one of the most challenging standards to teach. Let's face it: we live in the era of copy & paste. It is so easy to just take information, ideas and pictures that students are used to doing it all the time without. It is our job, then, to teach students that they must give their sources credit.

Last year, with the help of one of my colleagues, I found Turnitin.com. This is website that indexes and cross checks student writing with an enormous amount of information: websites, books, encyclopedias, other student works. It then provides students with an originality report based on its findings. In general, I require students' papers to be in the green (less than 10%) to even turn it in to me. It's not perfect, and some papers need to looked at more closely than the program is capable of doing, but it works well as a learning tool. After the first time, students rarely try to give me work that is not their own.

We talk a lot about originality and giving their sources credit. I think the key is to hold students to a high standard. This year, I plan to introduce my students to the Creative Commons as we start to use more images in our work.

On a final note...

I especially liked a few ideas in chapter 9, and think that they can be modified to suit me in the English classroom. One idea that really stood out to me was the WWII Leader resume (Murray, p.93). I would modify this so the eleventh grade students would be writing a resume about an American author. We could then divide into selection committees, and "pick" authors to interview based on their resume! This activity would give my students practice researching, formatting resumes, and selecting candidates to interview. The real-life experience would be fabulous!

CI 553 Reflections - Week 5

Government Documents

For this assignment, I spent time reviewing Jennie Burroughs' powerpoint, "Government Information for Kids (and Teens)" and the Library of Congress page for teachers. I found both resources to have valuable information that, if incorporated into the classroom, would provide students with the sort of authentic experience from which true learning springs.

Burroughs' PPT was a plethora of resources, giving websites and suggests for research for everything from the ocean to NASA to CIA intelligence. There are links to sites about American Memory (LOC) and the history of Montana. Some of the sites were more appropriate for elementary schools children, and others had the more in-depth information that high school students need for research projects. In all, I was impressed with the depth and scope of the resources included in this document. As I began to wade through all the information, my brain started turning round and round about how to use this powerful resource. There is SO much information that actually presenting this as a PPT seems like too much. However, I think that it would be a great starting place for my juniors to begin their research projects. Often, the students don't know where to start. This document provides plenty of fantastic ideas about all sorts of things!

In addition to the possibilities of using this PPT for our junior research project, I began to see others ways to incorporate some of its suggested resources into the classroom. LOC's American Memory, Montana History Wiki, and the Montana Historical Society seem to be especially relevant to the English classroom where we spend a great deal of time discussing the settings and historical situations of the novels we read.

Primary resources are great way to help students connect to the past. Seeing pictures, letters and other documents reminds us of the people who lived through times past. Primary documents lend an authenticity that connect us with others. Ultimately, it is this connection that sows the seeds of questions in all our minds.

On the LOC teacher's page, I found a ton of information that will help me incorporate primary documents into my classes. I especially liked the thematic lessons resource that has lots of great ideas. I already use a modified version of their suggested lesson for "To Kill a Mockingbird" and have found to be a great way to get students to visualize the times of the novel.

Photo Credit: Thanks to Flikr user Chris McCorkle for his photo Library of Congress; it is available through a Creative Commons License.