Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Trying search tools besides Google is one of the ideas that I feature in Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know. Wolfram Alpha is one of those alternatives to Google that I frequently mention to teachers and students. Wolfram Alpha is best known as a computational search engine that can help students with questions related to math and science.

Data Literacy Playground is an online space where visitors can use, interact with, and understand the benefits and issues of using and sharing data so that they can make informed choices about data sharing and understand the data shared with them.

Common Craft has released a new, timely video for this fall. The new video is Disinformation Explained by Common Craft. The new video explains what a disinformation campaign is and why organizations create them. Equally importantly, the video explains traits of disinformation campaigns and how to people can try to prevent the spread of disinformation.

I've been revisiting some of my favorite books this summer. Doing that has reminded me of some ideas that I've shared in the past and also sparked some new ideas. One of those ideas is using multimedia creation tools to create alternatives to traditional book reports. Here's a handful of ideas for alternatives to traditional book report projects.

One way to inspire students to be lifelong learners is to teach them how to collect, categorize, curate, and tag resources with a social bookmarking tool or app. I have listed some of my favorites for students and teachers below. Social bookmarking makes research fun, engaging, and collaborative. Social bookmarking helps students visualize and personalize their learning in boards, magazines, or walls! 

Talking to children in clear, age-appropriate language about the dangers of the internet can be tricky. Fortunately, Google has a free (and pretty fantastic) toolkit you can use to discuss the fundamentals with your kids.

In 2017, Google launched an internet literacy program called Be Internet Awesome. It’s aimed at elementary-to-middle-school-aged children but is also accessible to those a little younger or older than that. Recently, after a slew of feedback from parents and educators, Google updated the program, which makes this an even better time to take a look if you haven’t already.

Google is definitely one of the major entry ports for searching the net. Knowing how to conduct effective and smart search queries on Google has become an important skill for 21st century students. There is an over-abundance of information online and unfortunately a decent amount of the online knowledge is amateurish, unfiltered and at worse misinforming. This is why Googling the world wide web goes beyond randomly typing a bunch of words and waiting for the ‘feeling lucky’ button to do its work; it’s rather an informed process that takes into consideration a wide range of variables that include the choice of the words we use in our queries, the positioning of these words in a search phrase, the use of operators and symbols and many more.

Checkology is a website designed to help students learn to be discerning consumers of online, print, and television media. Checkology has a free version and a premium version. This review is only about the free version of Checkology.

Traditional-age students are digital natives. Professors are trained researchers. Neither of those qualities, though, prevents people from falling for misinformation online.

That’s one finding from a memorable study, released as a working paper in 2017, that documented how three groups of “experts” — among them historians and Stanford University undergraduates — evaluated online sources. Members of both groups tended to dig into a site, according to the study, by Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and Sarah McGrew, his doctoral student. The students and historians followed many of the tips that students are usually given for conducting online research, like examining a site’s domain name. But the tactics didn’t work.

The key to unlocking the educational potential of the virtual world is through knowing how to effectively search it with the minimum time and efforts possible. Effective search in this sense refers to the ability to locate targeted information online using ‘informed search queries’. It does take time and practice to develop such an ability but it is worth every single second you spend learning it.

This afternoon I was talking with a few of my students about TikTok and its new relationship with Oracle. The course of that conversation brought up a lot of "I've heard X" and "I've read X" statements from my students regarding news about TikTok. As you might imagine would happen with teenagers talking about their favorite app, the conversation got animated. I spent a lot of time helping discern fact from rumors and opinions. All that to say, this afternoon reminded me to review facts vs. opinions with students. I used this Common Craft video, but there are some other good resources you might want explore. Those are outlined below.

In yesterday's episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff I shared some information about an update to a favorite resource of mine, Factitious. Factitious is a game that is designed to help students practice identifying real and fake news stories. The 2020 version of the game features stories about COVID-19.

As the world careens from one crisis to another—as COVID-19 brings us closed schools and massive unemployment, as horrific videos of police brutality spark more than a week of nationwide protests—one thing has been constant and concerning: We are devouring digital media, seeking out information and scrolling for solace.

And, let’s face it, we’re seeking and scrolling in the dark. We’re doing this literally, as we sit up at 2 a.m. in our bedrooms, scrolling and clicking and unable to sleep. And figuratively, clicking through mazes of media messages on social media, pushing through brush to find a trail. Most of us have had no guides to orient us in this streaming and screaming digital world.

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Being able to critically evaluate information sources is a key digital literacy skill. With assignment time rapidly approaching, it’s important to make sure you know how to evaluate information before you reference it in your work.

You can use the memorable CRAAP checklist to get started

A couple of weeks ago TED-Ed released a video about spotting misleading headlines. I quickly added that lesson to my list of resources for helping students become discerning news consumers. This week TED-Ed released another video that I'm adding to that list of resources.

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“How do I embed digital literacy into my curriculum?” This is a question we are being asked more and more frequently and as such, I felt it would serve as a good topic for a #5MinuteReflection. In this post I’m going to cover some key things to consider when redesigning your curriculum to include more digital skills.

In this post, I refer a lot to the wonderful JISC resource on Digital Capability, if you haven’t already had a look at this resource, I strongly recommend checking it out.

Students often think that because they can type a phrase into Google or saying something aloud to Siri they know how to search. Of course, any teacher who has heard a student say "Google has nothing on this" or "there's no information about my topic" knows that students don't inherently know how to search despite growing up in a world filled with Google and Siri. When your students need help formulating or refining a search, have them review the following ten tip. Better yet, have them review these tips before starting their next searches.