REAL Review of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

This is a review of the webpage Help Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus (at http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus).  The goal of the video is to show educators and students a way of determining whether a website can really be trusted in terms of content for research. I used Allan November's acronym R-E-A-L to analyze the components and content of the website in order to demonstrate how to go about doing this on your own.

This video can also be found at http://youtu.be/QrXdpGLO-dQ
 
This was my first time using ActivePresenter (http://atomisystems.com/activepresenter/) but it went pretty smoothly.  The built in video editing software is not too shabby.  I would recommend it to anyone looking to try out Screencasting

I encourage you to try out your own review of any other site, but here is a list of great examples that are fun to check out even if you don't feel like you are in an educational mindset right now.  Google any of these phrases and they will be the first links:

RYT Hospital Dwayne Medical Center
MartinLutherKing.org
The British Stick Insect Foundation
Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
Britain for Americans
Computer Tan
Save the Rennets

21st Century Fluency

A while back, we spent some time looking into 21^st Century Skills.  While many organizations have come up with lists of skills today’s kids will need to succeed, the foremost organization is probably the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (www.p21.org).  This week we have been discussing not a new set of skills but an offshoot of the skill sets described by P21.  One of their four Student Outcomes is titled “Information, Media, and Technology Skills” and includes literacy within each subset.  I would place this week’s topic of 21^st Century Fluency within their broader category.

Coiro (2003) argues that there are key differences between fluency in standard text versus that of digital text we will find on the internet.  Among a list of differences, Coiro shows: “that Internet texts are often constructed with inconsistent features, pass through few editing processes, represent an infinite amount of links to related information, and are often designed to sell, deceive, or persuade young readers” (p 32).  These differences lend themselves towards a new set of skills students must have in order to find useful, valid, and accurate information in an ever more cluttered online environment.

So what are the specific skills that go along with 21^st Century fluency? After reading several lists this week I believe it boils down to two key ideas.  The first I will call Searching, and the second I will call Evaluating.  We discussed “Searching” a bit last week as we looked at how to maximize queries using search engines.  In addition to the physical search, fluency here also includes an understanding in how websites are designed and organized as well as how to maneuver in and around a site.  In terms of teaching, this is no easy task.  Whereas written books generally adhere to a set protocol, online texts have much fuzzier boundaries and much more artistic license.  This means that we cannot simply show students one way of doing it and be done; instead, it is a constant game of “click-and-go-seek” which takes time and practice.

The second aspect is what I will call “Evaluating.”  This is what we must teach students to do once they have found a site that they believe has good information.  This is a hard thing to learn, let alone teach, especially when so many sources online are intentionally inaccurate and biased.  Every expert has their own way of going through a website to determine its validity and accuracy.  For example, Philips (Laureate Education, Inc., 2011) recommends using the “ABC’s of Evaluation” where A = Author, B = Bias, C = Content, D = Dates, and E = Editor.  Working through this list could help students determine how trustworthy the site and information on it are.   I personally like November’s (2008) Get REAL acronym better.  In this, R = Read the URL, E = Examine the content, A = Ask about the author and owner, and L = Look at the links.  This is a little harder to remember for students, but open ended enough to work for whatever website you are dealing with.

In any case, 21^st Century Fluency is going to be an uphill battle.  As students are raised with more and more web access they seem to take the information they find at face value without looking much further into what it is they are reading.  Perhaps it is the “get it now” mentality that makes them accept the first links summary on Google as fact.  No matter, we must be adamant about teaching both Searching and Evaluating skills within our classrooms, despite our content area.  Furthermore, we need to get parents educated and on board with such skills so that they can work with their kids too.  This is not a skill set that one teacher can teach for an hour a week and think it will stick.  These skills need to be built in across the content and both in and out of school if we are to succeed in making the next generation digitally fluent.

Try Out Your Evaluation Skills On These Sites:

1) Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

2) Computer Tan

3) RYT Hospital Dwayne Medical Center

Resources:

Coiro, J. L . (2003). Rethinking comprehension strategies to better prepare students for critically evaluating content on the Internet. New England Reading Association Journal, 39(2), 29–34.

Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2011). A teacher’s perspective: Evaluating information online [Course Media]. Supporting information literacy and online inquiry in the classroom. Baltimore, MD: Author.

November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (2012). Framework for 21^st century learning.  Retrieved from http://p21.org/overview

Learning to Search

I have always considered myself to be reasonably advanced in my ability to peruse the internet.  I have also enjoyed showing students how to do so when needed.  However, the concept of explicitly teaching students how to use things like search engines has never really occurred to me.  I have simply tried to build in opportunities to show students how, and only if I think they need help.  This week, Alan November (2008) convinced me that: “It is essential that we teach our children the discipline of making meaning from a very complex and constantly shifting global warehouse of information and communication” (p. 6).  Though all of our resources had good ideas, November did the best job of describing practical applications for our classrooms, and ourselves.

Though many of the techniques described in our resources were elementary, there were also many good suggestions.  Many of the search techniques I have already figured out, but the activities described for students would be great for showing them why we must be cautious when clicking on search results.  As I searched for three resources this week I attempted to employ several of the techniques described in our resources. 

For the project I am having students do, each student will be selecting their own organism to research its place within the levels of biological organization.  To make things interesting, I am not allowing any overlap of species, meaning that students will be researching more than 160 total species.  In order to aid them in this endeavor, I thought I would find several databases that they can use to select and begin their research.

I began my search on good old Google.  I decided to first employ basic Boolean operators as described in Eagleton & Dobler (2007, pp. 61-62). Working through various combinations of +’s and –‘s I eventually found a great animal database created by Sea World (http://www.seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-bytes/).  This I bookmarked using Diigo (www.Diigo.com) which I to be the most useful bookmarking program for me, even if it is not as good for sharing my sites with others.  I liked the ability to highlight and take notes as well as the quick features of the Diigolet Toolbar App.  I also like that I can add my own descriptions and tags for quick searching within My Library later.

Next, I tried to use November’s (2008) suggestion of searching “extensions” using Alta Vista’s (www.altavista.com) host: command.  My success was somewhat limited and may reflect a change in the search engines “host” feature over the years since the book was published.  About 80% of my search results had the correct host extensions (I was searching for .edu domains) but they also seemed to search for the word “host” literally.  When combined with the term “animal” this meant I got a lot of hits about parasites (which I do find interesting :-).   In the end, I decided to try removing  the command “Host” and try just searching “.edu” in a normal Boolean search.  This yielded several good sights, including one nugget called the Animal Diversity Web (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/index.html).

To play devil’s advocate I decided to find my last one by just going to Google and typing a search like a student probably would.  I clicked the first link (like they would) and found another animal database (http://www.kidsbiology.com/animals-for-children.php?animal=Star-Nosed%20Mole) that is for younger kids and does not have all that detailed of information, but would work for brainstorming and as a launch point for further research.

In the end, I discovered several ways to refine my everyday searches.  More importantly, I have found some great resources, and reasons, to use in my own classrooms to get my students to be more advanced Web surfers.  I agree with all of the authors this week that these are skills that we must teach students before setting them free on the web. 

In Diigo, I created a public list of these three sites.  In order to do so, I had to install the Diigo toolbar (kind of annoying) but it would be good for me to use with students.  Here is the link: http://www.diigo.com/list/hiscitech/animal-databases

Resources:

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.