Becoming a good digital citizen commonly includes the mastering of a multitude of skills.
The Digital Classroom Starter Kit from Common Sense Education provides digital citizenship activities and lessons as part of their classroom technology use ideas. They also provide a wonderful K-12 digital citizenship curriculum with the scope and sequence found here and have recently started updating their curriculum. You can visit their News and Media Literacy units here.
There are also many other sites which outline the nine elements of digital citizenship in detail as you can see from this Google search. Although these elements are all important, the element of digital citizenship I am most passionate about is the information literacy element. This great poster, in a post on ISTE’s site, describes it best:
"A good digital citizen applies critical thinking to all online sources and doesn’t share non-credible resources, including fake news or advertisements."
But how can a student, searching the Web to learn something new, know if they have landed on a non-credible site? Without a knowledge-base in the topic, it may be hard for them to determine incorrect information. I have been working with critical evaluation of Web material since the inception of the graphical Web. As I created my Guide to Educators back in 1995, I realized early-on that determining credible information was difficult. I have critical evaluation worksheets on everything from Web pages to podcasts located here to help students think carefully about a site they are viewing or a podcast they are listening to.
However, non-credible information used to be more about accidental mis-information by someone who did not know enough about a topic or the unsure decision about the credibility of the author, not the intentional trickery, as it is seems to be today. We must work with students so they can both recognize biased information and know the difference between a fact and an opinion. These skills are life skills, not just Internet information skills!
Recognizing bias
Kimberly Moran, in her blog post on WeAreTeachers, provides seven tips for teaching students to recognize bias. Moran includes some great ideas and lessons, too. Here are a few of her suggestions.
Help students understand what the terms “fake news” and “news bias” really mean.
Provide an explanatory overview of each.
Give your students information that seems real and have them evaluate it. Here is a list of some sites I have identified as useful for student critical evaluation practice.
Moran also suggests teaching your students how to cross-check information. Have them look for conflicting information about the author of the text, images that have been edited, exaggerated claims, and use the “Links to this URL” on Google’s Advanced Search page to see if credible sites link to the one they are researching.
Here are some additional sites and resources to help teach about bias.
The Institute for Humane Education provides a list of sites to help educators recognize their own unconscious bias and how to teach students to recognize implicit bias.
Teaching Tolerance offers a lesson plan for students in grades 6-8 that “focuses on teaching students to identify how writers can reveal their biases through their word choice and tone”.
The MediaSmarts site provides high school students with the skills to recognize bias and point of view in newscasts and newspaper articles based on the language used in the story and also understand the role of subjectivity and perception in the media. This lesson plan includes having students deconstruct a news story based on language, story selection, and story order.
This character education lesson, Recognizing Bias, provided by Learning to Give, helps middle schools students, through a simple classroom activity, to understand about personal biases.
Discovery Education includes a 2:37 Common Craft video called Bias Detection. This short video demonstrates the importance of recognizing and accounting for bias when evaluating sources of information. It is intended for students in grades 6-12.
Humans as Variables (4:47) is another Discovery Education video clip and it is intended for grades K-5. Its purpose is to show students how a person’s bias could have an impact on a scientific study’s results.
The Facing History and Ourselves site includes an eleven lesson unit, Facing Ferguson: News Literacy in a Digital Age. This unit is to help students understand and recognize the choices facing journalists, explore the impact of social media on current-day news cycles, and become critical consumers of news. The essential question for the unit is:
"What is the role of journalism in a democratic society, and how can we become responsible consumers and producers of news and information in the digital age?"
Fact or opinion?
An information literacy topic, related to recognizing bias, is that of determining if something is a fact or an opinion. Oftentimes, students mistake well-stated opinions for fact. There are some great sites on the Web with information and tips to give students practice with the skills to know the difference..
Media specialists Donna Mignardi and Jennifer Sturge curated a list of resources to help middle school students recognize the difference between fact, opinion, and informed opinions. The sites they include focus on fact-checking lessons and resources.
A lesson plan by Scott Ertl is a guidance lesson for students in grades K-5. The lesson includes the comparison of fact and opinion materials in the news media. It also contains a guidance component titled “My Opinion Matters”. In this section, students practice positive responses to not-so-nice opinion statements classmates might make.
This lesson, posted on MediaSmarts, for grades 9-12, Fact Versus Opinion, was adapted from a publication by the Canadian Newspaper Association titled “News is not just black and white”. The lesson includes activities for recognizing bias and understanding how newspapers often include both fact and opinion in the same news story.
The New York Times Learning Network provides practice in determining fact and opinion in this lesson. Of course, the Learning Network has plenty of material to pick from, and provides links to real articles that students can discuss. The activities include use of pencil and paper, but students could just as easily mark them up on a digital device.
This mini-lesson from the Public Schools of Robeson County (NC) is an excellent resource for teaching the younger (grade 3-5) students about fact and opinion. The lesson includes explicit instruction and pedagogical tips for the educators, too! I believe that this min-lesson would also work for middle school students. Some of the components of the lesson can easily be completed using online tools, too.
Discovery Education includes materials for support of teaching and learning about fact vs. opinion for students in grades 6-8. The 4:21 video segment, Fact vs. Opinion, provides scenarios to help students recognize both fact and opinion in informational text.
The Author’s Purpose, another video clip in the Discovery Education collection, is a 4:24 video for grades 3-5. It helps students evaluate writings and decide if an author is trying to inform (fact) or trying to persuade (opinion).
How do you teach about fake news? Share your tips on Twitter. #kathyschrock
Microsoft has a great new initiative for K-12 education called "Bing in the Classroom" which can help support digital literacy in schools. The program was created to do three things-- to provide a safe environment for students to learn their digital literacy skills, to offer digital literacy lesson plans for teachers, and to provide an easy way for schools to get more hardware. 1. AD-FREE SEARCH Technology directors can sign up their school district for an enhanced search option for Bing that provides an ad-free search environment for the staff and students. This option eliminates the ads that usually appear when searching. It enhances privacy protection for students and teachers and includes the ability to filter adult content via SafeSearch. 2. DIGITAL LITERACY LESSON PLANS The Bing in the Classroom program offers daily mini-lessons focused on search and digital literacy skills. These lessons include mapping to the Common Core Standards and have been created by the educators who are members of the Microsoft Educator Network. This network includes a collection of over 1500 lesson plans. The lesson plans can be narrowed down by grade level, subject, the 21st century skill set, and instructional approach. Here is a sample of a search page for one of the digital literacy lesson plans.
Bing in the Classroom digital literacy lessons
Each lesson includes the learning objectives as stated in the Common Core standards, as well as an overview which contains the skills, instructional approach, Microsoft tools needed, and any required hardware. There are details to help the teacher use the lesson plan, and many lessons include an attached product, such as the Microsoft PowerPoint attached to this searching lesson.
Sample digital literacy lesson
The PowerPoint presentation presented with the lesson above contains a teacher guide, slides to use with students with speaker notes, and a background slide about the lesson creator.
Support material for a lesson plan
In addition to these digital literacy lesson plans, Bing already has many features that make it a good choice as a district-wide search engine. Here are my favorites!
Search by "calculator" in the Bing search box to get a working calculator
Search by "unit conversion" in the Bing search box and convert almost anything
When searching Bing for images, students can limit the search to Creative Commons-licensed items
Another useful search limiter in Bing Images is to search for images that have no background
3. SCHOOLS CAN EARN CREDITS FOR TABLETS The third component of the Bing in the Classroom initiative allows those (13 years or older) who sign up for Bing Rewards, an program that allows users to earn credits while using Bing to search, to donate their credits to a school of their choice. The schools can earn free Microsoft Surface tablets through this reward program!
Take a look at Bing in the Classroom for your schools! Disclosure: This is a sponsored post to raise awareness for Bing in the Classroom.
This is the seventh in a series of blog posts highlighting the digital literacies our students will need to succeed. This post will provide you with some ideas on how to infuse information literacy and digital literacy skills into the curriculum.
INTRODUCTION
Information literacy forms the foundation for all of the other literacies. Students need to know how to state their information need, search for it effectively, evaluate what they find for validity, and utilize the information they find.
There are many information literacy models available and many include a component of the best ways to conduct research on the Web. Let’s look at one of these processes.
In order to begin their research, students need be able to ask the right question. Of course, the overall context of the research will be determined by the unit being studied in class, but there are some standard information literacy steps students can use to develop the query they will research in order to gather their information.
Students should create a list of keywords about the topic
They should then create a question that is not too broad or too narrow.
Students should list the places for gathering their information. This may include the the Web, subscription databases, or experts in the field.
They should conduct some cursory research to make sure there will be information available for their topic.
If necessary, they should re-work their question.
Once they begin the research in earnest, students need to become familiar with the critical evaluation of information in order to determine the credibility, validity, and authority of the information they locate.
Students also need to gather their assets and remember to cite their sources
NoodleTools has a wonderful flowchart-like, hyperlinked page, Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need, which allows students to consider the type of thing they are looking for (i.e. controversial topic, background information, primary sources, etc.) and leads them to specialized search engines and directories to use.
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
The development of the essential question that will guide the student through the research process is also an information literacy skill. How do you engage students with questions and, at the same time, encourage them to think about using this technique when determining their information need?
Grant Wiggins describes what an essential question entails in an article on his Authentic Education site. Wiggins states essential questions…
cause genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content
provoke deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions
require students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers
stimulate vital, on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons
spark meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences
naturally recur, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects
Teaching students how to develop an essential question to articulate their information need can help. ASCD offers a chapter from the McTighe and Wiggins book, Essential Questions: Opening Doors to Student Understanding, on their site which provides a practical way for teachers to learn the best ways to create these questions, and can help you explain the process to students.
Having students look at samples of essential questions can be useful, too. Here are some resources to help.
Each day, the Essential Questions site presents visitors with a random list of twenty-five essential questions.
The TeachThought blog has a giant list of essential questions by broad subject area, such as social justice, adversity, conflict, and utopia/dystopia.
SEARCHING TIP
There is one thing about Google search that has changed and you should make students aware of. In 2011, Google began giving you results based on some of your searching habits. To avoid that aspect, you should have students conduct a verbatim search. Here is how they can do this.
Once a user conducts a search, they need to click on SEARCH TOOLS – ALL RESULTS – VERBATIM and the search is refined to include all of the results, not just those tailored to searching habits.
CRITICAL EVALUATION
The skill of learning how to evaluate information is a practiced one. Once students look at information with a critical eye, using a form or online tool, they begin to internalize the things they need to think about.
I have come up with these five over-arching questions.
Who wrote the pages and are they an expert?
What does the author say is the purpose of the site?
When was the site updated and last created?
Where does the information come from?
Why is the information useful for my purpose?
And here is an expanded version of the “5 W’s of Website Evaluation” that you can print out and put up in your classroom or put on your blog!
I have also created evaluation sheets for all levels that students can use when beginning the process of looking at Web sites with a critical eye. Those forms and many additional resources can be found on my Critical Evaluation page on the Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything site.
LOCATING IMAGES
The Creative Commons project has helped immensely with the ease of finding images that can be used in a research report or project. The Creative Commons project allows content producers to explicitly state how their content may be used. These creators make a determination of whether their asset may be used commercially or just non-commercially, can be transformed into a new product by someone else, and, if they allow transforming of their work, the creators can also require the person who made the changes to apply the same CC license to their new creation and allow others to edit the new work.
When creators upload images to Flickr or a video to YouTube, they can pick the combination of permissions they want to allow for the use of their creation, and the Creative Commons license is published. Here is what a sample license looks like:
The Creative Commons site has a search engine that allows students to search by license terms, but the three places that students usually search for information and images — Google, Flickr, and Bing — now also have Creative Commons-licensed image searching built right in. It works pretty much the same way in each of these tools.
CITING SOURCES
Once students find credible and reliable information and Creative Commons-licensed images, and save these to utilize in some way, they have to become experts at citing where they obtained their information.
You can review the many sites for both learning how to cite the new materials as well as the tools that make this easier. One of the best is the Purdue Online Writing Lac (OWL) which includes research paper and citation formatting for the three popular citation systems.
There are also some great online citation creators which both take the students step-by-step through the process as well as port the citations to the student’s desktop. My top favorite tools for this are bibme, EasyBib, WritingHouse and Son of Citation Machine.
DIGITAL LITERACY
Digital literacy skills involve using the digital technologies, the communication tools, and networks to find, evaluate, use, and create information. One of these skills that I feel is the most important for students is the use of the communication and collaboration tools, commonly referred to as “social networking”.
The online collaboration skills are not much different than the in-person collaboration skills we help students develop. There are some great rubrics dealing with collaboration which can be used with students. Here is a portion of one from the University of Wisconsin- Stout collection.
The student who is a good collaborator:
Stays focused
Demonstrates and encourages effort
Follows through
Is a “good” group member
Gathers research
Looks for solutions to problems
Has a positive attitude
As an educator, gauging mastery of these collaboration skills is a bit more difficult in the online world than in the classroom setting. You will probably want to be a virtual partner in every online group, ask students to save a transcript of their discussions (which they can easily do in Today’s Meet) and share it with you, have students use hashtags to keep their group’s comments together, and monitor the revisions in a Google document. I have a collection of both collaboration rubrics and posting rubrics on this page, if you are looking for some additional ones.
Students also need to be reminded, when collaborating and contributing to a school-based social network, to “pay it forward” and share good ideas with others, post often and don’t just lurk, be a productive member of the network by adding and building upon the content of others, think of the possible consequences before they post, and provide either positive or neutral feedback to others. I firmly believe that negative feedback does not belong in a group social network. That does not mean a student cannot give another student constructive, negative feedback or strongly disagree. However, my preference is that this is done in a one-to-one manner, such as a face to face conversation, an email, an IM, or a direct message in Twitter.
What tools do you use to teach information literacy? Let us know on Twitter! #kathyschrock
