Teaching our children to think critically about what they find on the internet, how to ask the right question when doing a search, to help and teach the students to build 'personal trust' networks. What implications does this have in my practice? A lot. . . it is taking it one step further, moving from textbooks, which are ministry approved resources to trying to teach the students to filter all the information they can find on the internet. As Howard Rheingol' vlog post indicates it is important to teach the children to detect all the crap out there. All ready in the intermediate classrooms we are having to do this every time we assign a research project.
I attempted to limit my students on an essay to strictly finding their information from non-fiction books, unfortunately my school library did not have everything we were looking for and I had to relent and let the students use the internet. I was trying to teach them to take notes without the temptation of copy and paste that is so readily accessible on the computer. So much for that idea - then I tried to limit them to World Book Student website, but it also didn't have enough information. In the end we used a variety of websites and I had to continually remind them that wikianswers is not a creditable source. So all that to say it is extremely important to teach the students how to search and how to sift through what they find and we only have 5 hours in a day in which to get all this done!
Monday, May 24, 2010
Networks and learning . . .
If I think about my classroom and when learning takes place with my students, some of the most significant learning is through discussion, when we are pulling apart ideas and together constructing knowledge. The students in the classroom act as a networked environment and knowledge and meaning change as we discuss, read, and explore different topics. The internet has opened up a whole new networked environment that we can tap into. We have at our finger tips a vast resource of information and opinions in which to explore our environment and construct knowledge from this. My struggle is how to incorporate this into my teaching in an effective way and how to teach my students to not take everything they read on the internet at face value as 'fact' but to look at the information critically, to question it.
If I think about my classroom and when learning takes place with my students, some of the most significant learning is through discussion, when we are pulling apart ideas and together constructing knowledge. The students in the classroom act as a networked environment and knowledge and meaning change as we discuss, read, and explore different topics. The internet has opened up a whole new networked environment that we can tap into. We have at our finger tips a vast resource of information and opinions in which to explore our environment and construct knowledge from this. My struggle is how to incorporate this into my teaching in an effective way and how to teach my students to not take everything they read on the internet at face value as 'fact' but to look at the information critically, to question it.
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