I thought the MAPping activity was really enlightening. I did something similar in ETEC 557 over the summer. I think that learning how to evaluate the validity of a website is incredibly important. I’ve been using the Internet for over 10 years, and this past summer was the first time I ever had someone teach me techniques to evaluate the sites I was using.
I did pretty well on the Information Literacy Quiz, but there is still some room to improve. Guess you never know it all, huh? Only one of my educator prep classes was devoted to technology; my other courses barely even mentioned using technology in the classroom. I was very surprised at that, because technology has become such an integral part of our lives. It truly is everywhere you look these days.
I think that it’s extremely important to teach students how to evaluate the websites they are using for research. I’ve watched my students doing online research during class. Often they go for the first link they come across and accept the information they find as verbatim. I remember one student visited a site that was sponsored by a lobbying group. He was completely confused when I asked him if he thought the information was biased. “Why would it be biased?” he asked me. When I explained that the site he was on belonged to a lobbying group that only presented information that supported their position, he was shocked. He truly had no idea how to determine whether or not the sites he was using as sources were credible or not.
I already had an account on Delicious, which I set up after taking ETEC 557. So far, I have only used it to save and retrieve bookmarks. I really like the networking feature. I think it will be a great way to find other sites that have basically been recommended by the folks in my network. I definitely need to spend some time getting my bookmarks organized and categorized. Right now there’s no rhyme or reason to them.
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