Theories of Critical Thinking- Ashley Clark

    Upon reading all of the articles I am reminded of things from my undergraduate courses, as well as in my teaching day to day. Digital literacy and technology are themes that you hear daily in the classroom or just education world daily. Just within the past year I think they have been more common things due to the pandemic and the need for technology and for all students to be 1:1. I know that in my current school K-2 were not 1:1, so in March of 2020 we were rushing to get packets made for everyone in our class. Since then we have become completely 1:1 K-5 this year in preparation of having to go home again. Thankfully we have only been out 2 virtual weeks around the holidays. After saying all this, a important thing to think about when talking about technology especially in younger children and pre-teen age kids is digital literacy, digital citizenship, and making sure we have the pedagogy to make these things make sense for students. 

    Students must first understand the responsible uses of technology and being online. This isn't just a one time teaching. I think that this is a recurring theme across all ages. Then digital literacies can be built grade after grade until mastery. Thinking back to how we gathered information in the past from books and newspapers, I think of all the false information that students must learn to sort through while looking for credible sources on the internet. I think that this is where the Bloom's Taxonomy comes into play for me. Students might start on the knowledge level, but we want to move them to the higher levels of thinking where they can analyze a source with the intent to see if it is credible. Then upon analyzing they can create or design a paper or presentation from the sources. 

    My degree is in Library Media, a lot of our course work is on information literacy and teaching students of all ages this important skill. Thinking of my first graders I currently teach this may mean using my pedagogy in a different way, not for students to just "sit and get" as I have heard it called. I am thinking about a lesson I am currently creating for a library media course that I can do with them. Often times younger grades are not ones that might do research on their own. It is usually guided research on a topic that the teacher facilitates. This lesson would play off of our learning from this week. Our reading has revolved around "Creature Features" this week. First we had to talk about what a creature feature was. Luckily, they love Wild Kratts on PBS. If you aren't familiar with Wild Kratts, it is a animated show where they talk about certain animals and their "Creature Power". Thankfully my students quickly correlated the two. Student's would get to pick a animal they wanted to research to find their "creature power". Students would use PebbleGo to research the animal and write them down. After researching the students would create a FlipGrid video telling us about the animal and its "creature power". We would then watch student FlipGrids in class and learn about everyone's animal. Although this may take all week to complete with such a young age it is important to get these early experiences in information literacy and digital literacy for students.