Post 11: New Literary

I took a look at several of the articles.  The new literacy glossary and the article from NPR stood out the most to me.  Fake news is really something that we need to teach students about.  I remember being in school and never learning about fake news.  I almost think that if we do not teach students about fake news then we are doing them a disservice for preparing for the real world.  I am looking into teaching about fake news for our upcoming writing unit where students will be doing some research.  The NPR article would be a great way to teach students some vocabulary for checking out news to begin deciding if it is accurate and from a reputable source.  I liked the lesson plan where there were some fake news stories and forcing students to decide pretty quickly if they were real or not.  However, I feel I would need to bring them down a few levels some of the material seemed more secondary and not at an elementary level.  Students at the elementary level have a hard time determining information from the news since they often just "parrot" what their parents say.  I think it would be best if I begin my research unit teaching how to actually research check news.  We might bring in newspaper clippings discussing sources about different stories.  Eventually we could build up to students doing their own research.  We would have to being with teacher modeling and working together first.

Post 10: Search Tools Ninja

I took a look at sweetsearch and yippy.  I was not familiar with either of these and I am really looking for opportunities for students to conduct a search, and I do not have to be concerned that inappropriate information is going to come up.  Sweetsearch was great because students could search and there were no ads popping up on the sides and the information was related to the search as I tested out a few search ideas.  I thought about how students sometimes get to do a research report or a biography about a person.   Many times students like to choose a singer or sports player and inappropriate pictures, social media, or news clips can come up.  However, using sweetsearch seemed to give more appropriate information and the information was coming from reputable sources.  This is also something that we are trying to teach students all the time..."Just because you see it on the internet does not mean it is true." Students many times like to include images with their projects and this search engine was doing a good job providing appropriate pictures.  I also looked at yippy it seemed to do similar to sweetsearch as I tried to search people and images.  It kept information appropriate for students.  I really liked how it had the features of narrowing down a topic on the side.  Students are sometimes unsure on how to narrow topics down and this I think would help them learn this particular skill.

Thing 09: Databases

I explored culture grams.  This year is the first year I have taught social studies in a while.  I am teaching 5th grade social studies this year.  Using culture grams there is a state edition and world edition.  In 5th grade we study the Western Hemisphere.  I thought students could use the state edition for a project maybe at the beginning of the year and just focus on learning more about the United States and geography.  So many students struggle knowing the difference between states, cities and countries.  Then later in the year we could use the world edition for projects and students could learn more about countries in the western hemisphere.  This is also a quick way for students to get facts and accurate information without doing a google search that might bring up some information that is not best for children's eyes.

Culture Grams