The lecture today actually got me pretty excited about teaching information literacy in the future....worrying I know! I definitely agree with the comments made about the importance of teaching, or at least modelling critical literacy to children as early as possible. We are bombarded by images and text in our everyday lives, which we as adults are constantly processing and filtering to be able to obtain useful information and discard not so useful information! We have learned and perfected this throughout our lifetimes but this is something we need to teach our students explicitly.
By explicitly teaching our students what questions to ask when they are exposed to new literacies, and the process of triangulation, they will be able to challenge and build on their current knowledge. Digital literacies offer the perfect opportunity to teach critical literacy. The amount of information out there is seemingly endless and without the tools of critical literacy (crap detection 101!) it would be virtually impossible to find and identify useful sources of information.
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It certainly highlighted the importance of explicitly teaching students how to ask the right questions and read information with a high degree of critical analysis. It is hard to acquire totally new information from the web especially if you as a student lack the background knowledge. Although the content of the old fashioned book do change and become dated, the sheer amount of false or untrue information on the web is a concern and the art and teaching of critical literacy becomes far more important.
ReplyDeleteI recently noticed in a science lesson with Year 5s that a lot of students were were facing difficulties finding websites for their research. One kid was so disillusioned, he thought he should start again with a new topic. I think it must feel overwhelming for kids - i.e. the amount of sites out there & where to start. This is where teachers need to give a lot of support, pointing out sites such as Simple English Wikipedia & spending lots of time on info literacy, so that kids don't give up & feel it's all too much! :)
ReplyDeleteGood point Ness. It could very well be overwhelming for students to plain out research a topic. As teachers we need to set guidlines and direct students
ReplyDeleteWith so much information out there we need to teach the children the skills to help understand this data. This will only get worse as the web continues to grow. Critical literacy teacing is essential for children of all ages.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Vanessa, the amount of informtion available can be overwhelming and I have had those feelings myself, despite having fairly well honed research skills. However, apart from directing students to particular websites to use so as to limit the information they are exposed to I am not sure how else you teach them to limit information efficiently.
ReplyDeleteAt lower levels, there is probably some value in directing students to particular websites, while gradually expanding choice as they progress through the schooling system. In all cases, a structured approach is good idea. For example, the first step in a project might involve students working in pairs or groups to find two or three relevant websites, write up a brief account of the value of each, and then select the most useful. This could all be done with scaffolding from the teacher and pre-established questionnaires. Only once this first step is completed would students move on to the next step.
ReplyDeletethis is where i imagine a tool like delicious to be useful for the classroom. as a teacher you can pool some relevant resources and students can use these as a starting point for their research. by including variety in this inital pool on delicious students still need to use their critical literacy skills to determine what they consider to be of valuable for their project. once they have a baseline understanding they can extend their search more independently without the overwhelming feelings on info overload attached.
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