Reflective Blog Post: How has the program changed my teaching?

Looking back upon the past school year and my enrollment in the ISB Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy Program, I would say the first two courses—course #1: Information Literacy and Ourselves as Learners and course #2: 21st Century Literacy Ideas, Questions, and Issues—of this program have impacted my classroom practice and reflective thinking in a number of ways. The main impact of these two courses has been to raise my awareness of the issues and possibilities and responsibilities inherent in preparing our students with the knowledge, skills and understanding they will need to be literate in the 21st Century. With this increased awareness I have sought in my classroom practice to accept greater responsibility as an educator to provide my students with greater exposure to the possibilities and issues connected to 21st Century literacy while creating opportunities within my class curriculum to build the knowledge, skills and understandings students will need to be literate in the 21st Century. To this end, in my EAP 10 class unit on news writing, a stronger emphasis (more class time) and higher expectation (increased weighting on the unit rubrics) was established for the skills of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing and citing sources (inclusive of images and text) using MLA format. This discussion, instruction, and assessment with these skills then carried over throughout other units where the expectation for fair and accurate citing of sources is reinforces. I also am more cognizant of the learner benefits and confident as a teacher in the classroom with the use of various multimedia sources of information and communications. In my class I now use more...

• podcasts (some of my favorites are: CNN Student News, Grammar Girl, and Scientific American's 60-Second Science and 60-Second Psychology podcasts from the iTunes Store),
  
• online sources of videos (some of my favorites are: Nova, The Periodic Table Live from the University of Wisconsin, SciTech Video channel along with other YouTube videos),
  
• online interactive resources (some of my favorites are: The Biology Project of the University of Arizona, DNA from the Beginning, from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Dynamic Periodic Table),
  
• images (I still prefer Google image searches for the images I use in my science and ESL classes over flickr searches as I am better able to find the concrete or 'real' images I need for my science and ESL classes), and
  
• SMART Board files and PowerPoints.

Furthermore I now use a virtual learning environment (via our school's online course management system (CMS), panthernet and turnitin.com) for online discussion forums, course glossaries, and submitting written assignments.

Student interest is clearly captured, and understanding and memory enhanced by the use of images and videos. Furthermore, the effective selection and use of images and videos more easily generates class discussion that is broader and deeper than that generated by text alone. One student in my Foundations Chemistry 9 class asks each day if we can see more of Discovery Channel's MythBusters videos after showing the following video, MythBusters Viewers Special Threequel: Alkaline Metal Explosion Part 2, demonstrating the reaction of Alkali metals and water.

Looking forward to the next three courses of the ISB Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy Program, my goal is to have my students (and myself as well) more equally develop receptive and expressive information technology and visual literacy skills by becoming creators of the multimedia resources that have become more prevalent in our classroom.