I was able to teach a web evaluation lesson this week. I had put a lot of time and effort into this lesson. I read many sources on the topic and created an outline, then made a power point presentation for three 9th grade English classes. I looked at so many lessons on this topic that I began to get confused about which way to teach it. There are tons of sources on web evaluation. I stuck with a book titled, Cyber Literacy, by Susan R. Gregson. I also was able to use part of a lesson plan created by a fellow student for our School Library Media III class. She had gotten some of her information from Joyce Valenza's page. Kathy Schrock's website has some good resources on this topic as well. One of the most challenging parts of the lesson was finding a bogus website to use to show the students. Most of them were blocked at our school. Joyce Valenza's website is blocked too. I actually did get one unblocked by the time I had to teach the second class.
My lesson consisted of going through the power point and asking questions of the students along the way. Two questions were what does it mean to be literate? and what does critical mean? We discussed cyber literacy, the amount of information on the web, why we have to be careful, and why people put false or misleading information on the web. At the end of the power point we went over web evaluations tools that would help them critically evaluate a web page. Then I split the classes into groups (with the advanced help of the teacher), giving each pair a laptop from the mobile lab. They looked at two different websites and evaluated them, writing down their strengths and weaknesses. After that, we discussed each websites' strengths and weaknesses.
The lesson went very well. I was excited to get the chance to present these principles to the students. No one that I know of has addressed web evaluation in depth. A lot of the time teachers tell their students what websites they can use, therefore they don't use ones they need to evaluate. Even though this lesson was a lot of preparation, I want to use it again with some fine tuning. I would like to offer it to the 10th grade English students. I also got to use an easier set of evaluation tools along with this power point for a last minute session with two 7th grade classes this week.
One of my goals for this Practicum was to create a web evaluation lesson for both the high school students and the middle school students. After thirty minutes of fine tuning, I think I will have both of them in a place where I will be able to use them on short notice. I am very excited to have nearly reached this goal. The effort I put in was worth it and I feel like the students learned something.
The five lessons that I taught on web evaluation this week cover all of AASL standard 2. I am very pleased that I have teachers who are willing to let me present this information because they feel it is important. The 9th grade English teacher decided to use some of this lesson in the research the students will be starting next week. She wants them to use the websites we are going to show them next week and if they need to use another website they will need to show three or four evaluation tools that they used to determine if the website was credible.
I also got critiqued by my librarian on this lesson. I was very appreciative of her input. She was able to make a few suggestions and showed me where something I had said was incorrect. I am glad that she had the time to listen to most of my lesson. During one of the periods, we had a class behind the screen that I was teaching from, and one off to the side using computers. We like to offer our libary to be open to as many teaching and learning areas as possible. Carol and their teachers were able to keep them quietly working while the Freshman worked on my lesson. It worked so smoothly, but I know that part of this was because of having two adults working together to coordinate the use of the library in a quiet manner. (AASL standard 1.2 & 1.3)
It was a very productive week.. I could write more. We actually had school everyday with only one two-hour delay.
Teaching students to be critical users of the Internet is hugely important. I am glad you got a start with it at your school. Have you thought about evidence-based practice methods for documenting this to your principal?
ReplyDeleteI am glad that your librarian was helpful in her critique. I would also suggest that you ask teachers who you believe to be highly successful to give you some feedback.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to seeing you Tues.!
ReplyDeleteI do give thought to EBP when teaching but find it to be a hassle to store and tally the results. Am I allowed to say that? Now that you mention it, I will try to get the students to write some feedback on my Web evaluation lesson. I need to figure out the easiest way.
ReplyDeleteI would ask for more critiquing but the one teacher who saw this lesson is not highly successful and the other one is pretty new.
I completely forgot that I used part of someone's lesson plan that had a self-assessment included for the students. I had them take the self-assessment on how they understood or could use web evaluation before the lesson and then had them answer the same questions afterword. I am having a student volunteer help me tally the results.
ReplyDelete