I've long been concerned about how teachers can teach students to use the Internet in a constructive way - students encounter so much information online, and often they seem to believe that it's all equally valid or credible. There are good resources for teachers who want to teach Internet literacy, but even these are hard to manage for the average teacher, who is unlikely to have access to computers for all students in a given class. Even exercises and teaching methods that claim to work in the one-computer classroom, such as the outstanding WebQuest, get mixed reviews from teachers I work with, and may not fit into the demands of pacing guides. Of course, the issue of how to constructively integrate technology into the classroom is a much bigger issue than can be addressed here.
There are a few outstanding sites that contain resources for teachers to teach Internet and information literacy. I've summarized and linked to those sites here.
We've given a lot of thought to how teachers can facilitate student research, especially as the MSPDP is an extremely research-intensive program. While there is no substitute for the kind of media literacy lessons that should be associated with learning to use the Internet, there are some work-arounds that teachers can use, especially with beginning students. For example, it is best to begin with new students by giving them articles that you've pre-selected for content and readability, having students summarize the articles and work with them to extract elements for ARE-type charts.
With most MSPDP topics, we try to do a "pre-think" and "pre-search" of the Internet to find good, readable articles to link to from our site. You can see examples of this kind of research here -- when topics are no longer current, we move them to our "Topic Research Guide" page, so links can still be used by classroom teachers and others browsing our site. People sometimes ask me how we choose what articles to link to. Basically, we look for articles that are attributable (there is a posted author for the article), articles that seem credible (we don't link to blogs like this one), articles that have age-appropriate content(no inappropriate ads or adult-themed links, and the reading level should be accessible for a motivated middle school student), and articles that do not require registration to read (this last one is a biggie- we don't feel like it's appropriate to ask young students to reveal their email addresses, even to credible news agencies.
Most students will continue to believe, despite our best efforts, that Google is the best way to get information. And there's no disputing that Google works very well. But it must be supplemented by lessons and group work to teach students about the importance of credible and attributable information.
Over the summer, I read this article about something called "Search 2.0," and I decided to experiment with a new service called Rollyo. Rollyo allows users to create "Search Rolls" within specified sites. It's no substitute for teaching information and Internet literacy, but it is a good stopgap measure, and has a lot of uses in the classroom. I've created a sample MSPDP Search Roll for use in debate research, using some of our cross-posting guidelines. You can see it here. I'm interested in feedback on the guided search concept.
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