GA 4: Information Literacy

The ability to:
> Locate / identify resources appropriate to the discipline;
> Apply information from various sources to address discipline-specific requirements;
>Interpret and analyse information from various sources to address a discipline -specific task.

"She has also always researched for materials, resources and ideas for her teaching, through the local library, Curriculum exchange, Learning Place etc. These have been age appropriate, relevant and interesting".
(Ann Birch, Supervising Teacher, 2009, feedback on professional development, 2nd year toolkit)
Standard 2: Design and implement learning experiences that develop language, literacy and numeracy. 

Due to being placed in a prep classroom in my final year, I have a well developed ability to create a variety of weekly  focused learning activities which develop language, literacy and numeracy for rotational groups. The prep classroom that I was in had student groups rotating over four activities a week. The activities created had a particular focus on phonics, writing, reading and maths. This young and diverse classroom needed very engaging and hands on materials. I am very proficient now at creating a variety of  games, resources and activities that engage children and teach these skills. I also have the skills needed to adapt the activities to match the different abilities of the children in this class.

Over the years I have developed childrens language skills in a variety of interesting and creative ways, through poetry, drama and the incorporation of ICT. The digital text innovation, for example, (See Information Technology competence for further information), provided an opportunity for developing readers and writers to use oral language to tell a story and develop sentence building with descriptive language. This also provided an opportunity for children to make connections between pictures, words, language and meaning. 
 Lowenthal (no date given ) refers to the following people when expressing the benefits of Digital storytelling:
-“Further, multimodal texts, like digital stories, ‘increases the meaning making potential of a text’ (Hull & Nelson 2005: 225), thereby giving students a different kind of meaning making and a different way of knowing.”

-Perhaps one of the greatest benefits is digital storytelling’s ability to reach the many ‘unheard and unseen students’ in our classrooms (Bull & Kajder 2004/2005). Storytelling give students voice (Burk 2000). Further, it can help give voice to struggling readers and writers (Bull & Kajder 2004/2005), students with special needs (Salpeter 2005), as well as students who do not fit the typical academic model (Ohler 2005/2006).

-Students are motivated, engaged, and interested in digital storytelling (Davis 2004; Hoffer & Swan 2006). This is because digital storytelling, unlike traditional instructional strategies, engages students in the “language of their generation” (Hofer & Swan 2006: 679).