Chapter 10: What About Literacy 3.0? Continuing Professional Development

This chapter is called, "What About Literacy 3.0? Continuing Professional Development" and since it has come to an end this chapter discusses a lot of more information. This talks about the important of blogs and portfolios. This chapter talked about blogging and digital portfolios and to be honest it brought me back to this class and how we are writing blogs about the chapter. I found this (blogging) to be super helpful because it was a great way to express my thoughts about what I believe in and what I learned in this course and this chapter. “Blogging forces you to analyze your thoughts and actions in a much more methodical way than to simply reflect on your day. It enables you to learn more about your teaching, your students, and the value of your own ideas” (159). I completely agree with this quote from the book because as I mentioned before it was a great way to reflect on what I learned in the course and what I've read in the book itself. I would love to bring blogging into my classroom so that my students have a way to express themselves freely about what they learned and how they learned it in the classroom. It was exciting to read about the future of technology and how our teachers are now constantly up to date with the latest and how to incorporate it in their classroom. This shows how teachers are using different techniques and are flexible and open-minded in the classroom.

Another interesting thing that the book talks about is the digital portfolios. They are used to document teaching practice, professional growth, and student learning throughout systematic documentation and reflection.This chapter lists different tips and considerations when creating a digital portfolio such as information overload, structure and layout, ease of navigation and permission releases. Portfolios are something I would love to consider while conducting a classroom. This book has thought me a lot of new things to bring into my classroom and I can't wait to see it and see how it works out with my students! 

Chapter 9: Assessment in a Literacy 2.0 Environment

In this chapter called, "Assessment in a Literacy 2.0 Environment"  focuses on assessment in a Literacy 2.0 environment providing very meaningful knowledge construction. The transition between this chapter and chapter 8 was very smooth because having just learned about the different learning styles of each student may use, now it is time to assess those learning skills. There are two different types of assessments that the book talks about, formative and summative. Formative assessment is assessment for learning. This assessment focuses on the process of learning and is ongoing providing information needed to adjust teaching and support learning. Summative assessment is the assessment of learning that focuses on learning at a particular point, such as a cumulative project or an activity at the end of a unit. Both of these assessments are very valuable and important to consider in our classrooms. This chapter also focuses a lot on how to give feedback to the students using different tools such as inventories and surveys, checklists, rubrics and portfolios.

What was super interesting in this chapter was reading about the new generation of assessments for the Common Core State Standards and how it will be conducted completely online and how it will require students to respond to multiple-choice items, open-ended responses and performance assessments. This shift is a reminder of how important the use our technology is now in our society. Our teachers now have to be very open-minded and flexible to the change in standards as technology progresses. As a future educator, I plan to be very careful and cautious with using the different types of assessment because I do not want to discourage my students and I want to try to make it less difficult than what it really looks like. 

Chapter 8: Technology Across the Curriculum

"To scaffold students' capacity to ask questions within the context of academic content, teachers must first engage and motivate students with content, sparking curiosity to pose questions that prompt deeper thinking" (pg. 121).

Chapter 8 talks about the important of critical thinking and developing informative and essential questions that relate to the text that the child may be reading. In the classroom, the teacher's influence on the student's learning is very important. As teachers, it is important when we organize the student's thoughts and guide them through their reading. The book mentions the importance of making textual connections based on the student's personal and past experiences. In another course I took last semester, we went over the importance of the student's connection with the text. Just like this chapter, it talked about the important of the text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. It is important for students to make these connections because then they can create their own meaning of text based on their own emotions, concerns, life experiences and what they are reading.

While reading more into this chapter, it presented other information such as the use of the media and the Internet to find good sources to analyze while researching a text. This chapter gives a lot of critical thinking questions that our students should ask themselves while looking into a particular topic that they are researching. The book gave some questions such as: What am I trying t find out about my topic? What do I want to know or solve? What key words should I use in my search query? What kind of information am I looking for? (pg. 124).  As we all know Google is the first search engine that we go to when researching something that we want to know more information about. The book talks about a site called Gooru (www.goolearning.org) which is a great search engine to use for this particular search. One of the citation services that was mentioned in the chapter was Easybib. As a English major, Easybib was my best friend because all I had to do was plug everything in and they would do the citation for me. It's easy to use and very helpful when trying to make citations for a paper.