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!
Our whole mindset has to switch. We used to believe everything we read, because we read textbooks and encyclopedias, which were approved sources. Now we are required to be the savvy consumers and filter through what we consume on the internet. We are learning this process along with our students. We are teaching our students, and ourselves, to be first of all suspicious, not trusting. Sad commentary, i think.
ReplyDeleteGreat post -- it definitely is a major switch that we as educators have to make.
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