Our professional development two weeks ago was centered
around technology in the classroom, specifically internet research. The speaker told us an anecdote of his own
daughter’s attempts to use the internet to research a topic she had to write a
paper on. The young girl (8-years-old or
so,) was supposed to write a paper on octopus, citing her resources. While doing her research, she came upon a
website that described the rare “tree octopus;” in other words, an octopus that
lives in trees rather than under water (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/). The young girl thought this would be a
terrific addition to her paper, and carefully cited the website after adding it
to her paper. If she had read carefully,
she would have noticed that this website was set up as a farce. Instead, she added it to her paper and had
points deducted from her grade.
The point
of telling this anecdote was to tell us that, as educators, our job is to
better educate our students on how to properly use the internet and its
resources, rather than simply taking points off when our students do not meet
our expectations.
The speaker
went on to show us how to use an advanced Google search. Using this, students can set the domain to
only include “.edu,” ensuring that only articles coming through accredited
educational institutions come up in the search.
As an added tool, you can also set the file type.
Young
students need this type of education in order to be successful in their
research. They are no longer going to
libraries and using encyclopedias. Using
the internet opens the door to nearly limitless resources and tools, but
without guidance, students can fall prey to such things as the tree
octopus. Even older students need to be
reminded of how to properly research on the internet. Even if they know how to advance search or
even use a database to find peer reviewed papers, it is always easier to type
in a quick Google or Bing search and be done with it. If we expect our students to be informed
consumers and to cite and research properly, it is our responsibility to teach
them the skills they need.
Check out the “Save the Tree Octopus” page:
Kristen,
ReplyDeleteWhat a cute story...but how unfortunate! I would have never thought about younger kids "falling" for things like that but it happens all the time- even to college students! I constantly discourage my students from using websites other than pubmed.org (for scientific papers) because the information they may find on regular websites may not be up to date, or may be just plain wrong.
I teach at the college level and still I am surprised about how little students know about which websites are ok to use (and especially site) and which should never be put in a paper (ex: wiki, webmd etc). I hope lower levels start educating students early about what is appropriate and what is not.
Katie
It's true that too often teachers take off points for things that should have been taught more thoroughly. How to conduct proper internet resource is the perfect example; this is almost impossible for my college students to do, let alone an 8-year-old like the one in your example. Too often students fill their resource page with dictionaries, textbooks, or wikipedia (none of which are supposed to be even listed on a resource page as it's "common knowledge"). I tell my students that wikipedia is a wonderful resource, but even though it is "peer edited", that doesn't mean the information is "right". In fact, I've printed out many wikipedia pages where I've found incorrect information posted as examples for my students. Wikipedia is great platform to begin on, but you need to stand on others as well. For young children, I like your idea of teaching them how to set up advanced searches to only find scholarly information. This is good for older students as well, but they also need to be taught how to determine whether a source is credible or not (and most students, it seems, are currently not).
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