Reflection 5 - Critical Analysis of Information

Information is coming from so many different sources today.   We must be able to critically evaluate a web page for authenticity, applicability, authorship, bias, and usability.  Gaining digital literacy skills is dependent upon the student’s ability to find information, determine its usefulness and accuracy, and make use of it effectively.  We need to teach our students to critical evaluate a webpage so that they do not learn and use misinformation.                                  

When doing the MAPping Information activity, I started by taking the quiz.  I thought I knew more then the results showed, but I was "moderately savvy" J  I selected the “All About Explorers” web site.  The first thing I noticed was it is a webquest. The explorers listed were real explorers.  The information that followed appeared to be authentic.  I then clicked on the links, they were all active and appeared to be valid with pictures and the web address looked right.  The tab for teachers gave much information to help use the site and offered more challenging lessons so a teacher could use this with students on all levels.  I have seen many web quests and used some.  This had the format of a good web quest and had all the elements needed.  The site was created for educational purposes.  I did not see that it promote a certain agenda.  Because it contains historic information, it will not change throughout the years and was not out of date. This is definitely a web quest I would use if I needed the information for the curriculum.

I first used Altavista and the webquest came up second on the list.  I used Altavista as my primary search engine back when I was in grad school several years ago.  I had forgotten about it and wished I had used it more this time around.  I found I was able to locate more educational information using Altavista then using Google.  There were no advertisements that tend to distract from the    information.  I thought Go.com had too many ads and I was detracted by them.  I do know search engines produce different results, so educated people must select the right one when searching the Internet by first thinking about what the need is.

A website I have used in the past to help me show other educators what to look for when evaluating a web source is Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Educators.  She has links to many web pages to help with this task.  She even offers handouts for students and articles to help understand analyzing information.  A large task ahead of educators is to teach our students how to be able to critically analysis the information they are finding and to determine it accuracy and authenticity. 

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/eval.html

Watching the video, Social Bookmarking in Plain English was the first time I had heard of social bookmarking.  
http://www.commoncraft.com/video/social-bookmarking    This website is a free tool that provides annotation, metagging, and topic or name searches.  Using this tool can keep a list of your bookmarks online which means you can have access to these sites from any computer with Internet access.  I have had to email me so many web site addresses from my computer at work so I can have it at home.  After understanding social bookmarking a little more, I went to the Del.icio.us website where I created my own account.                                                 

I was able to start adding bookmarks right away.  I added the video and articles from this week’s assignments first.  I was able to add graphics and tag the sites once I saw the importance that play.  I tried to network with no success.     http://delicious.com/rkhall 

One thing that intrigued me about using Del.icio.us with your class was suggested in the November Learning article Social Bookmarking with Del.icio.us.   The teacher can set up a class page to have the students save their bookmarks to one class account.  The students will need to be taught to tag so everything will be organized.    The students can network to the class’s page and add their own.  A teacher can keep track of what the students are bookmarking.     This can also be a big timesaver for students to share bookmarks.

According to the article 7 things you should know about… Social Bookmarking, tagging is an important part of the success.  Visitors to this web site can search for resources that are being shared by others.  Using tagging can help organize and find good web sites.

I had used a bookmarking website years ago with some success.  I think it was called BackFlip.  Through changing jobs and moving around, I had forgotten about it.  This feature is helpful for people that use several computers.  Delicious has taken this feature and took it to the next level.  The sharing of websites features really caught my attention.  This will really be helpful and time saver in the future.  I also really liked the idea of created a stack for your students.  This will help with the lack of time for students to find useful websites and also help with the Internet safety issues for our students.  I can see our district libraries using these tools to share webs site that will show “Best Practices” for a library, along with book trailers and book reviews.

Easywhois is another good tool to help us when analyzing web sites.   This site allows us to check the publisher/author of the web site.  This can help in deciding if the author is reputable and reliable with their information or if they might have an agenda.  

The Internet has become the main place we go to search for information.  We must be literate and learn how to filter all the information that comes to us.  And more important, we need to share this knowledge with our students. This week has given me so many new tools and expanded my thoughts on the importance critical analysis of information.