Increasingly, students are using the Internet to obtain information about both general and academic topics. Along with this trend there is a growing concern about the dubious nature of online information, and users’ ability to validate or evaluate this information. Research shows that students are frequently deceived when viewing online content and are not able…
A central challenge for educators today is that students do not always think critically about information they encounter online. Research has raised questions about the ability of students to evaluate online information. Quite simply, many students appear not to have the evaluation skills and strategies to succeed in this environment. Apparently, students mistakenly trust information…
Many times in our classrooms we create WebQuests to have students explore online resources. WebQuests typically contain an introduction, task, process, evaluation, and conclusion. WebQuests play a vital role in the classroom by providing students with a scripted, guided examination of online resources in a topic. As students expand beyond the WebQuest, the next step…
Hypothesis is a free, open source annotation tool that can be used to build a peer review layer for the Internet. In your classroom, you could imagine individual students annotating and marking up a text or website as they read. Each student would mark up their copy of the text, and then possibly meet as a group…
The term digital native was coined and popularized by Marc Prensky in his 2001 article titled Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. In this he posited that the contemporary decline in American education was due to educators’ inability to understand the needs of modern students. Students were labeled digital natives and said to have an insider’s perspective…
Hypothes.is is a free, open source annotation app that aims to build a peer review layer for the internet. Hypothesis allows you to annotate (adding notes giving explanation or comment) or highlight content on texts across the internet. This allows you to individually or collaboratively research openly online. This research and discussion might take on multiple…
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been rebuilding and tweaking my digital identity, this includes the blog you’re reading right now. In an earlier post, I discussed the trail of recent changes as I rebuilt this site. In this post, I wanted to detail some of the choices that I made and the rationale…
Welcome to week eight of the Online Research and Media Skills (ORMS) Mentored Open Online Community (MOOC). The ORMS MOOC has existed in different iterations over the last two years. This current version is developed as an open learning experience for students in ED 6671 (syllabus here). ED 6671 examines opportunities for the use of instructional technologies in…
Welcome to week seven of the Online Research and Media Skills (ORMS) Mentored Open Online Community (MOOC). The ORMS MOOC has existed in different iterations over the last two years. This current version is developed as an open learning experience for students in ED 6671 (syllabus here). ED 6671 examines opportunities for the use of instructional technologies in…
Last week my first of four columns as Multiliteracies Department Editor for JAAL was published. The column, titled Empowering Learners in the Reader/Writer Nature of the Digital Informational Space discusses opportunities to move learners from readers to writers in the digital informational space. The Internet is the dominant text of this generation, and through intentional use it…