When utilizing any type of information, on the internet, print, video or any source for that matter, truth and bias are important considerations. Know your source and how it might influence the validity and reliability of the information.
Chris Betcher’s presentation focused on this issue and asserted the importance of teaching this to our students and that it should be part of the curriculum. I completely agree with this concept. I enjoyed the “Spaghetti” video and the Bonsi kittens are awesome! These “fun” sites plus his useful PowerPoint “5 Factors for Evaluating a Website” provides some great tools to make these concepts fun and memorable for students.
In addition, he stressed the importance of internet searching, how to conduct a search and to teach students to be aware of different types of web sites. We did some work with this in grade 7, starting at the beginning of the year. Robin put together a wonderful lesson about searching the internet which we all used with our students. Throughout the year, we continue to build on what they learned about internet searches.
Furthermore, Chris led an interesting discussion about Wikipedi and defended the reliability of information at that site. He took us to parts of Wikipedi and showed us how you can see the updates for each site. Very interesting!
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Harvey pointed out to me the discussion tab in Wikipedia is a great place to point students to prepare them for a class discussion about controversial topics.
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