Digital Citizenship

I decided to complete my Digital Citizenship Lesson on smarter searching and determining what sites are actually helpful/useful/trustworthy and which are not. I have noticed that this is on of my biggest challenged with using the internet to do research. Students have a difficult time searching Google. They don't know how to pick out the important search terms in a question and often end up with results that have nothing to do with what they are actually trying to find. The websites that come up also tend to become less reliable since their searches are not really on target. This leads to students feeling frustrated with their results.

It was a bit challenging working through all the materials online. I very much appreciated all the links, articles, videos, and other resources that were posted on the blog to go through. They were very helpful and I felt very informed. After going through them all, the biggest challenge was deciding which of the issues were most related to what I was seeing in my classroom and which would be the most helpful to address.

After talking with the librarian at my school, we came up with a lesson based on her previous work on teaching students how to search Google. She was able to help provide a starting point to the lesson. Using the many online resources we were given via the instructional blog, as well as an article from Educational Leadership, I was able to build a follow up lesson where students would need to evaluate websites in order to determine if they were credible or not. Using a Google Form for this activity, I would like to be able to integrate this form into research projects as just another step of the process. This way, anytime students were doing research online, they would have to go through the process of evaluating the site. Hopefully, overtime, students would get so used to doing this that they would do it in their head all the time, without me having to assign the Google Form.

Lesson: https://docs.google.com/a/edmonds.wednet.edu/document/d/1RwhNLYmU7wEC3FIB83gn3zfxzyY5uZTqAq0yRD_qQtU/edit?usp=sharing

Google Game:
https://docs.google.com/a/edmonds.wednet.edu/document/d/13OJSNwUTX4W4YgCMgOdw-UkjnsGrEEglyZPNQQm1o6s/edit?usp=sharing

Search Tips: https://docs.google.com/a/edmonds.wednet.edu/document/d/1dYGufyScPgJoC3o7kirGLL8Sbc7TVqWvfmaLu9-LebA/edit?usp=sharing