Don’t Believe Everything You See Online
Why is our first impulse to believe something that we see, read or hear? Especially if it is in print, online or comes in an “officially” looking packaging?
How do we teach ourselves and our students, that another impulse has to follow the first one immediately: Evaluate…critical thinking… learn to listen for and to your own “gut feeling”… cross referencing…
Information literacy is an important part of being literate. Being able to know how to read and write alone, just doesn’t “cut it anymore”.
As always, I started out by asking my PLN on Twitter if they had any resources that might be interesting. Thank you all who contributed!
How easily can your students be fooled?
Start out by:
- showing them the following video clips for example. Observe their initial reactions?
- designing a lesson around a website deliberately sprinkled with false facts
- find out how many just blindly trust everything the read, see and hear online?
- find out how many of your students are critical web users?
Once we prove to our students that “they too” can be fooled, we might be able to get them to see the value of having a process (criteria) in place that allows them to evaluate websites and other media
The House Hippo
Dove Commercial
I blogged about this site as a valuable resource a few weeks back. Lesson plans, activities and resources are assembled for you to lead your students to research and evaluate information critically.
Further resource links and examples of bogus and hoax websites:
Fake Internet Resources- The Bogus Internet
Facts about Dihydrogen Monoxide
Google: The Technology behind Google’s great results.
Mr. Puffin‘s Evaluating the Web links
Website Evaluation in Elementary School (Washburn Elem. School)
Evaluation criteria you want your students to consider when doing research:
- Kathy Shrock’s Guide for Educators: Critical Evaluation
- Chris Betcher‘s 5 Factors for Evaluating Websites
Great lesson plans and Student evaluation checklist from Cybersmart for different grade levels.
[...] I’m going to help students learn to detect bias and plain falsehoods on various websites (and Langwitches has some great resources on that topic), I’ve been exploring accessible tools that students [...]
A great post on an important topic. http://sekolahbogorraya.edublogs.org/2008/09/10/seeing-isn%E2%80%99t-believing-anymore/#more-162
[...] has jump started me a bit by finding some wonderful links here. It so happens that my current Year 11 are coming up to their exams, where they can often get [...]
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
[...] Langwitches » Don’t Believe Everything You See Online [...]
[...] can use. There have been some very good posts about this topic already. Langwitches post “Don’t Believe Everything You See Online“ being [...]
[...] Read the article and watch the interesting videos here [...]