Chapter 5 Journal Post
10/3/12
Focus Question: How can teachers or students thoughtfully evaluate online information resources including the online encyclopedia Wikipedia? Many websites are focused on “search engines” to do their searches. There are many different search engines to choose from for example, URL’s ending in ‘.com’ are commercial business, ‘.org’ is organizations, ‘.gov’ is for government, and ‘.net’ is for network organizations. We need to use information ethically by accessing, searching, and finally evaluating. The 5 tools to consider for evaluating a website are:
1.
Authority – who is the expert and how do you know?
2.
Accuracy – if there is only 1 website is it credible?
3.
Objectivity – is there bias, slanted one way or the
other?
4.
Currency – Publication date, how current is the
information?
5.
Coverage – is it relevant? Does it cover what information you’re looking
for?
Wikipedia is a search engine that gives teachers the ability
to teach students strategies for surfing on the web to gather accurate
information.
Tech Tool 5.2: Customizing
your web browser with iGoogle, this task I have learned through trial and
error. I have had a few different web browsers but iGoogle is a tool I recently
started using in my home office after reading this chapter. It has links for
Discovery news, weather, science, and most recent new events on the main page
for convenience and awareness. Imagine using this in the classroom, keep it
relevant and interesting. This is my new tech tool favorite after my iPad of
course!
Summary: Chapter 5 consists of how to gather
information via the web through different search engines as well as evaluating whether
the information given is current. This
is particularly important nowadays as many younger students do plagiarize via
the web. As a teacher this is something I will keep a careful eye on
particularly in writing and will use such websites as TurnItIn.com to help curb
this ever-growing problem. This chapter discussed ways a teacher can handle
plagiarism and whether it was intentional or not.
Remember to make your links clickable! iGoogle is pretty cool, but don't get too attached as Google is going to pull it and so you might want to look for a replacement - maybe Netvibes?
ReplyDeleteThank you for the information; I was not aware of that so I will check out Netvibes. Thought I had hyperlinked this one. I appreciate the input. Mol
Delete