Alex Lawhon

Reflection for Standard 1.4 Integration of twenty-first century skills and learning standards
Candidates advocate for twenty-first century literacy skills to support the learning needs of the school
community. Candidates demonstrate how to collaborate with other teachers to plan and implement instruction
of the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and state student curriculum standards. Candidates employ
strategies to integrate multiple literacies with content curriculum. Candidates integrate the use of emerging
technologies as a means for effective and creative teaching and to support P-12 students' conceptual
understanding, critical thinking and creative processes.
Artifact Description
ISTC 653, ThingLink Pathfinder:
A digital pathfinder was created with resources on immigration for parents, students, and teachers. The
pathfinder was created via ThingLink.com and can be accessed using a QR code scanner or by typing in a URL.
The digital format of the pathfinder allows for access to the technology and resources outside the classroom
setting. In a society where it is important to find and set aside irrelevant information, it encourages students to
take ownership of their own inquiry-based learning and provides support to teachers who are implementing
lessons on this Harford County reading unit in their classrooms.
ISTC 541, Instructional Plan for Technology Integrated Lesson:
A detailed lesson plan was created to teach students in English language arts the definitions of mood and
tone and how to identify them in a piece of text or media. The lesson requires students to demonstrate multiple
literacies by analyzing images, video clips, poetry and literature. This lesson also provides teachers with
engaging technological tools and assessments for analyzing how well students are meeting the objective before
and after teaching. Digital tools include TodaysMeet, ClassFlow, and Glogster; these applications were used to
promote discussion of and to create presentations on the topics of mood and tone.
ISTC 702, Screencast Tutorial on Edublogs:
This screencast tutorial video was developed so that teachers could become familiar with Edublogs and
the benefits of using them in the classroom. The Edublogs technology gives students the opportunity to apply
21st-century learning standards by having a safe, teacher-controlled Internet space to collaborate with other
students, to post, and to reflect on their own and their peers’ works. The video guides educators through a
sample blog and the advantages of using this technology in the classroom.
Relevance
The three preceding artifacts support AASL Standard 1.4: Integration of 21st-century skills and learning
standards. Each one provides an opportunity for students and educators alike to use technology and to work in
partnership with the library media specialist to further their learning.
The ThingLink pathfinder is relevant to this standard because it is a way that the media specialist can
provide resources to the school community on a unit of study for reading. It encourages students to practice
21st-century critical thinking skills by using the technology to access both print and non-print resources and then
glean information from them that is necessary to their education. The pathfinder also provides links to videos,
virtual field trips of Ellis Island, and the Ellis Island Archives where enrichment in the subject of immigration
can take place.
The instructional plan for a technology integrated lesson demonstrates AASL Standard 1.4 as a valuable
resource for combining multiple literacies and integrating content curriculum. The use of many different
technological tools to provide data, promote discussion, and create and present new synthesized information
makes this a resource that exemplifies 21st century learning skills. Teachers can use the data from pre-
assessments to drive instruction and use the digital tools to allow them to facilitate a lesson that meets the
learning needs of the students. Because the lesson uses texts, poetry, and video clips and Web 2.0 tools, visual,
digital, textual, and technological literacies are all addressed.
Edublogs and the coinciding screencast tutorial reinforce Standard 1.4 as well. This artifact
demonstrates how I can collaborate with teachers by providing them with a useful means of teaching them how
to use a Web 2.0 tool to enhance students’ critical thinking and creative synthesis of information. Edublogs
allows for the integration of technology, curriculum content, and the use of multiple literacies through its
various features. Students can write posts, respond to others, create audio tracks or videos to accompany their
work; a number of other features allows for creative expression in various ways that suit the learner.
Analysis
As technology becomes more present in the classroom and home settings, AASL Standard 1.4 becomes
more important to emulate for students and teachers. After completing these assignments, it was clear to me
that to promote the growth of students’ critical thinking skills in the 21st century and the use of multiple
literacies, as media specialists, we need to provide them with the opportunity to collaborate, reflect, and create
in ways that work best for them.
After implementing the pathfinder on immigration, I was able to provide students and teachers with a
scaffolded way of searching for resources. It also provided access to multimedia resources and information that
relate to multiple literacies, and students can choose what will work best for them. This helped students to build
their conceptual understanding of the topic, to gather information, and to think critically about what they were
learning on the subject while they created presentations on the immigration experience at Ellis Island. Since
implementing this resource in my classroom, I have decided to add links to outside resources that provide more
primary documents for students to search. This will allow students to further enhance their literacy skills and
incorporate more cross-curricular content social studies. Also, I would like to incorporate more resources to
specific fiction and nonfiction print resources to further the promotion of textual literacy when I curate my own
collection in the media center.
After the implementation of the instructional plan for technology lesson, students were able to meet the
objective of identifying and discussing the mood and tone of an assigned text more successfully. It was also
clear that textual and digital literacies are an area of weakness for the students taught. Moving forward, the
library can become a place where students can be given resources to enhance these specific forms of literacy by
exposure to information in various formats. The media center can also become a space where students can
complete formative assessments to determine where their literacy needs are ahead of teaching integrated literacy
lessons.
Lastly, the Edublogs screencast promotes to teachers how technology can be used creatively in the
classroom to enhance students’ conceptual understanding, critical thinking and creative processes. It
encourages the use of multiple literacy skills when students post, reflect, and respond to others. They also gain
the ability to synthesize information in new ways by creating videos, audio tracks, and posting their work on the
blog for their peers to evaluate. The screencast provides a way for me to become a leader in a strong Web 2.0
tool in collaboration with teachers to create fun, meaningful learning experiences in their own classrooms. I
have found that students who have used this digital tool enjoy having the ability to choose creative outlets for
synthesizing information and would like to further the use of other Web 2.0 tools to keep the media center at the
forefront of technology use.