Must Read: "Teaching Students Better Online Research Skills"

EdWeek recently published a fantastic article that I would love for all of my colleagues to read and digest: Teaching Students Better Online Research Skills: Improving web research tactics is a priority. Next year's library/media classes will have a heavy emphasis on the research process, giving students frequent opportunity to explore and interact with many different information sources and tools.

We want our elementary and middle school students to have a firm understanding of what quality, reliable, and current information looks like. We want our students to see that Google is not the beginning and end of research, that often a subject specific database or teacher/librarian designed pathfinder will guide them to academic appropriate information more quickly. We live in an age where information is rushed to publication, riddled with bias, or simply not fact checked. I want my students to be more than information consumers, I want them to be critics who carefully evaluate everything they read, see, hear and experience.

The interactive image below highlights some of the areas targeted during a typical library/media class. Are these strategies new to you? How comfortable are you leading students through academic research?

Scholastic's Character Scrapbook

Scholastic has a neat little tool to help your students develop a simple Character Scrapbook. Link to the page from your class wiki or print a template do an offline version.

Students begin by entering the title of the book and the character's name.  There are limits: title field allows 22 characters, name field allows 10 characters. The second page of the tool allows students to choose the physical traits of the character by scrolling through a small set of choices; some students may find these selections limiting. This page also invites students to list ten things about the character. List choices include:

• Ten things I know about X
• Ten words that describe X
• Ten details about X's appearance
• Ten facts about X's personality
• Ten challenges X faced
• Ten accomplishments X achieved

The Power of Internet Badges

Note: This post is written as a part of the first challenge of the WebMaking 101 course at P2PU.

The 8th grade Web Design Advisory is currently building what will be the 2013 GTSD Student Media Festival.  They are using HTML and CSS to build pages that will showcase media projects from grades 1 through 8.  Some of the students are showing great interest in web design, and I would like to give them a way to continue their learning after graduation. A few of my colleagues have also expressed interest, but they don't have the time to sit in on our classes. I have directed all to explore the tutorial sites listed on the SMS Wiki. When browsing Mozilla Webmaker for possible inclusion, I stumbled upon the ultimate in extrinsic motivation: Badges.

I first discovered the power of badges when using Edmodo as a digital classroom. Students earned badges for completing class projects (Audacity, Pixlr, Word), class participation (Great Response, Critical Thinker), and for demonstrating exemplary behavior (Class Coach, Stinger Pride). Students liked the badges because they were novel, sometimes difficult to earn, often a bit silly, and void of grade like judgement. Either you accomplished the task, or you didn't. I liked the badges because it was a tangible way to visualize how students developed their academics and character during our short time together. 

So now I am exploring P2PU, a peer-to-peer learning site. The badges I earn through this site will be sent to my Mozilla Backpack, which already contains a few badges earned by trying simple HTML challenges at Mozilla Thimble. While there is still more exploring to do, I am sure that learners with a sincere interest will be able to use these sites to continue learning independently. The self-paced, easy to follow challenges give learners hands-on experience with the tools and resources they are learning about. There is a supportive community which is ready to answer questions and provide productive criticism.  

So if learning HTML is something you've always wanted to do, consider Mozilla Webmaker or P2PU. Let me know when you earn your first badge!

Video: Every kid needs a champion (TED)

This newly released TED Talk is a must watch for the teacher counting down the days til summer. Educator Rita Pierson passionately shares why "Every kid needs a champion."

Cool Tools: Quick Plagiarism Checks

I want to believe that all of my students share my enthusiasm for learning. I want to believe that all of my students understand the importance of citing their sources. I hope they realize that what they learned from the research process is far more important to me than what the quoted words of their authoritative sources.

While I do have Pollyanna tendencies, I am ultimately a realist. Sometimes teachers are so focused on the end product that we don't allow time to focus on proper note taking or paraphrasing. Sometimes students don't feel the passion, think about the ethics, or realize the full consequences of their actions. Sometimes they just want to finish the project so they can move on to the next item on their list.

A teacher may notice a disconnect between the writing on the page/screen and the student who turned in the work. It could be the result of a new writing style, liberal use of a thesaurus, poor note taking, or even an over zealous parent editor. Or, the content could have simply been lifted directly from the source and dropped into the student's report.

Here are two simple and free tools to help quiet or confirm the suspicion of plagiarism:

Google is the easiest to use and most accessible of the free plagiarism checkers. Simply copy and paste the questionable material into the search box and review the results. Words from the search box are bolded in the search results to facilitate scanning (click image at left to see a larger view of the results). When large blocks of bold text are visible in the results page, it is a clear sign that something is amiss. This method will detect plagiarized text from Wikipedia, arguably the most plagiarized web site among students of all ages.

The freemium PlagTracker compares student work against a bank of academic papers and the accessible web. Type or paste the questionable text into the box, click the button to "Check for Plagiarism," and moments later see a report listing how much of the content appears to be original. After the initial check users must create a free account and wait up to 30 minutes for results. The report is helpful in that it provides a direct link to possible sources for verification. Click the image at right to see a larger results view.

For each of these examples, I used a paragraph from a post at Mashable titled "Use These 10 Sites to Detect Plagiarism."