Even though I joined the course late, one of the wonderful things I have discovered about online discussions (blogging) is that you can participate in conversations that have already happened and can join in and add to the discussions. I feel I have learned a lot through the readings and these discussions with others. I feel that I have participated and added meaningful comments to these discussions and have shown evidence of my learning through my posts on the discussion board, my blog, and assignments. For this course I had many opportunities to use the databases through UBC and I have particularly enjoyed exploring them to conduct my research. I feel this will contribute greatly to my work as a teacher and will help me in facilitating research skills with my students. In my previous self evaluation earlier in the course, I mentioned that I wanted to continue to explore the online resources our school district has purchased. I feel that I have done this very well and have achieved my goal. I am excited to explore our school’s online reference resources even further with students of other ages, such as our big buddy class. I also am excited to share what I have learned with my colleagues on staff and hope to help them explore these resources as well. In this reflection I will briefly summarize the points that I feel have been most important to me in my learning as evidenced in my blog.
What I already knew when I began taking this course:
I knew that the reference materials existed, but thought that most were too challenging for my grade one students to use because of the format and difficult reading level. I knew that some reference materials could be accessed online, but I hadn’t tried them. I mistakenly assumed that the effort required to teach my young students how to log on and use these resources would be immense and I thought my students ultimately would find it too difficult to use making my efforts not worthwhile. I knew that the students enjoy using technology and are motivated by it.
What I have learned:
1.) I have learned how to navigate my way through all of our online databases and am familiar with all of our print references as well.
I have examined several of our online reference resources in more depth than others but feel confident that I could show students how to navigate through them all. I have explored two of the online databases quite extensively with my students. I feel confident that my students now have the skills needed to access these online reference resources at school and at home. I am also very familiar now with the print reference resources that our school has as well and have recently explored two of the print reference materials with my class as well.
2.) I have learned that reference materials are not just for older students; younger primary students can use reference resources too.
I have learned many valuable things through this course but this new understanding has opened up a whole new dimension to my teaching. First of all, my assumption that reference materials are too difficult for my students to use was mistaken. I discovered that it wasn’t as difficult as I thought to teach the students how to use these resources and they really enjoyed using them. There are some print reference materials that my students successfully used as well such as several of our atlases and our World Book Encyclopedia.
3.) I have learned several fun ways of using reference materials with students.
Through my research and discussions with my peers in this course, I have learned several good ways to use reference resources with my students using both the print and digital formats. Some of these include ways to introduce the Encyclopedia sets we have as well as several fun games to play using the atlases. Through my collaborative work on assignment three I have learned that our online reference materials are an incredible resource and that even my young grade one students can benefit from using these resources. I have also learned some ways for sharing ideas amongst colleagues and helping others to grow and change as they explore new innovations.
4.) I understand how to evaluate a reference resource for its usefulness and effectiveness.
Our Riedling text has been a great resource for helping me learn how to evaluate reference resources and I have gained a lot of confidence in this area. One of the most surprising revelations for me in this course is learning that Wikipedia has its place as a reference starting point and can be used as long as other authoritative reference materials are also used.
What I still want to learn:
I still need to gain more experience using these reference materials (both online and in print) and time will provide me with this experience. I look forward to continued use of the reference materials with my grade one students. I still need to gain skill in evaluating reference materials but this will happen given time and experience using reference materials. Another goal of mine is to create a website which lists a variety of online reference materials for teachers and students which will be useful throughout the different grades. I have found our discussion threads to be particularly useful for gaining ideas for the great online reference resources that are out there. I have learned of many good resources already and in using these, I am pleased that I can say my website has begun!
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