This article has summarized all the information we have been talking about. Teaching our students to become literate people is not easy. It's a long process. Even adults have difficulty finding information and evaluating it. It is very clear that the Internet is not designed for structured people. You are reading one page and then there is links with in the text that take you somewhere else. All of the sudden you are lost and you don't remember what was the page you started with. Thank God for the "back" button.
Going back to the article, it is true that we as informed teachers have the responsibility to model and guide our students through what they need to learn about searching the Internet, recognize reliable resources, plagiarism, and give credit to the sources.
Fact or Folly: Authenticating Online Information
Everyone and anyone can post information on the Internet. They all can seem experts. So what students have to learn first is hoe to find good information online and how to evaluate it. To find information students need to use dependable sources like bookmark collections from the library and educational sites. It is very important that students also learn to make effective searches, which is something that we really have to teach our students because they think they know "how" to search but in really not all of them know. We also need to teach our students to evaluate the information they find. As one of our previous articles mentioned,"We need to create infotectives, which is a student thinker capable of asking questions about data to convert it into information and eventually insight"
3 comments:
For students so young, maybe it should start with having launch pages and using webquests. I understand how difficult it can be to teach our kids to be literate, and then now we are adding Internet literacy. I admire you for teaching kids how to read. That is a challenging task I am not quite ready to take on as an educator.
Our ultimate job as teachers is to teach our students how to think analytically, not just take things at face value. That extends to using the Internet. I agree that we need to teach, not assume that they already know, how to properly use the Internet.
Critical thinking is the number one ability that our students need. Granted, they must also be able to read, write, complete math computations, understand science, learn American history, some philosophy, and maybe squeeze in some music and art as well. Yikes!
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