Construction also brings in the role of groups of learners in the process of learning and as a result includes elements of social and cognitive constructivism. Learners are encouraged to be creative as they build and revise content.

Internet Reciprocal Teaching Promotes the Five CsCreativity: Students use divergent-thinking skills to generate their own questions and keywords for online searches. Their final projects require them to creatively express their own point of view. Communication: Students share what they learn as they work in small groups and with the whole class. They communicate with a wider audience by posting on a class blog. Collaboration: Students create collaborative knowledge through Internet inquiry and social interactions. They comment on one another's work using technologies such as VoiceThread and support one another through instant messaging. Critical Thinking: When using the Internet, students build the text they read, choosing which links to follow and which to ignore. The nonlinear nature of online reading helps support critical thinking. Students also learn to question the perspective and bias of online sources. Comprehension: Students learn important online reading skills, such as how to distinguish news articles from blog posts and editorials. They carefully read texts they encounter online to understand and evaluate different perspectives.

Phase 2 is a collaborative phase during which both teachers and students conduct think-aloud demonstrations and minilessons. Teacher modeling in the beginning of the phase gives way to student modeling in the latter half. Students take responsibility for teaching their peers a variety of online reading comprehension strategies. Instruction also begins to move from search skills to critical evaluation and synthesis skills. (See a complete checklist of skills.)

Reciprocal teaching revolves around four global comprehension strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. The teacher explains these strategies to small groups using a shared text, first modeling their use, and then asking students to lead the groups.

First, they had to find five Web sites that criticized zoos and five that supported zoos. Each group posted links to a classroom blog. Then the groups had to choose three Web sites for each position from the class list and rank these sites on continuums of usefulness and truthfulness. They also posted on the classroom blog comments about the strategies they used to evaluate the Web sites. Finally, each group chose a side, wrote a position statement, and posted it to the blog. (See a video of students working on this and other online search activities.)

Reciprocal teaching revolves around four global comprehension strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. The teacher explains these strategies to small groups using a shared text, first modeling their use, and then asking students to lead the groups. Internet reciprocal teaching builds on the same principles; however, the teacher first instructs students in a whole-class setting with each person constructing his or her own text while building the online reading comprehension strategies of questioning, locating, evaluating, synthesizing, and communicating.

hese Cs include such skills as creativity, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and comprehension

Her science book, for example, was divided into chapters, each chapter was broken into sections, and she could answer the first question at the end of each section by looking for the first bold word. The structure of the textbook was a map that Sarah could easily follow.

Participating on the open web includes connecting with the communities that share, build, and sustain meaningful content online. A healthy online community requires knowledge of how to create, publish and link content, and an understanding of security in order to keep content, identity, and systems safe. 3 Participating on the web allows users to remix, modify, and share content, and the skills and competencies in this strand drive the open web.

Reading on the web is a critical skill for engaging content online. They can be viewed as “exploring,” or “navigating the web.” Just as traditional reading requires knowledge of the text and concepts of print, reading online requires a basic understanding of web mechanics. Good online readers know the tools and strategies that can be used to search for and locate people, resources, and information. They then know how to judge the credibility of these sources.1 The web literacy skills and competencies identified under reading on the web are as follows.

In a blog post, or in the comments below, please use the following prompts to guide your response: In no more than three sentences, please define digital literacy.Make a list of the skills that are a part of digital literacy.What is the difference/relationship between digital literacy some of these other perspectives (e.g., information literacy, media literacy, etc).What do you think of the definitions/statements provided above? What do you like? What is missing?What are some perspectives that we left out above…but should include?What are some ways you teach digital literacy?What are some ways that students can best learn digital literacy skills?What do you believe the most effective way to teach digital literacy?How digital literate are you? In what ways are you “digitally literate”?

Empowered learner Digital citizen Knowledge constructor Innovative designer Computational thinker Creative communicator Global collaborator

So if you are tired during the day, check that you’re giving yourself the opportunity to get 7 to 9 hours.