Search engines and how they work caught my attention for several reasons. The graph on page 104 shows that over 90% of
online adults use a search engine.
Personally, I have started putting our phone books in the recycling box
as soon as we receive them, because it is so convenient to look up information
on Google. Another reason it caught my
attention involves a reading lesson I've seen several times in the past few
weeks at Sylvan. Students are asked
about resources to find an answer to the question, and NONE of them chose
"encyclopedia" as one of the correct answers! During the discussion while grading the
responses, they admitted that they had never seen a set of books called an
encyclopedia, and did not consider any of the sites they had seen on the
Internet to be an encyclopedia.
Evaluating online information (pp. 112-117) was almost frightening. When one considers the sheer quantity of
information on the Internet, the odds of finding "misinformation",
"malinformation", "messed-up information", or "mostly
useless information" are pretty high.
Educators have a responsibility to teach our students not only how to
find information on the Internet, but how to look at that information
critically and sort fact from fiction.
Using technology together as digital citizens (pp. 121-123) referred to empowering
students to use technology wisely.
Students must have authentic activities, not paper-and-pencil exercises
that have been typed into a computer, if they are going to respect the powerful
tool they have in their computer. This
section also referred to cyberbullying, which I researched for a discussion
post. I was astounded at the number of
articles about cyberbullying and its effect on our students. I know that bullying has been around forever,
and I guess it was just a matter of course that bullies would begin to use
technology to bully their victims. This
is another area of technology that educators cannot ignore, but must address
from the early grades, encouraging students to report every incident of
bullying to a trusted adult.
Look at you - out there creating ToonDoos! :) Excellent and glad to see you exploring the tools. Creating comics is a great way to help students understand sequence in a fun way...other uses, as well, and definitely engaging. The issue of website evaluation is so critical for good information and great practice for critical thinking skills, too! Unfortunately, I have seen teachers (young and old) not use those critical thinking skills in reviewing websites and thus, poor examples to students. One problem is that the internet didn't come with an instruction manual so even those of us who have been around for awhile have had to explore and make decisions as we go along. It is an exciting time to be in education and to help create this 'instruction manual' for ourselves and students. :)
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