An Authentic Context For Practice

By Author: Jordon
Total Articles: 91
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The extreme example of Stormfront's website pro-vided a good model in detecting an author's bias and in examining how bias can cast doubt on the reliability of information. It became clear to me during our discussions that the students were starting to gain a greater appreciation of the need to evaluate while reading online. We were making progress. After modeling the Omega Replica Watches strategies and practicing them together, I felt good about having students move toward independent practice. I wanted to be sure that this practice was done in an authentic context, though, so it made the most sense to practice with students' topics for their research on a specific challenge facing teens.

To begin their practice, students selected a challenge to research and generated two or three re-search questions about the challenge. By extracting important words from these questions, students came up with keywords to use with Internet search engines. I set aside a few class periods for work in the computer lab, giving them time to conduct their research in an environment ...
... where I could coach them and give individual feedback on how they were implementing the strategies we had discussed. It was during this practice that students learned the most as they wrestled with evaluating the validity of the pages they read through. At times things were messy: It wasn't always easy to categorically judge an author's intent, and some sites that held valuable information didn't always pass our review of the initial markers. However, this messiness reflects what truly happens when we look to the Internet as a source of information, and I felt it was important for students to see this in the context of our guided practice. Even though things didn't always go off without a hitch in this practice, overall the students gained new appreciation for how to use these valuable skills.

To assess their implementation of the strategies, I asked students to write a brief defense for each of the sites they chose to use in the final product for this unit. When I read through these paragraphs, I was impressed with what they had done. Some decided to address the issue of evaluation by using only well-known and trusted websites. While this approach was not necessarily adventurous, it did show me that these students recognized the need for critical reading and that they made a conscious decision to stay in safer waters. Those students who did venture out into general Internet searches demonstrated an understanding of critical evaluation Omega Replica as they discussed their efforts to learn more about online authors they encountered as well as their efforts to corroborate information across multiple sites. As I reviewed the Internet sites students had used in their research, I was pleased to see the purposeful choices students had made and their growing awareness of the need to evaluate carefully what they read online.

If recent trends continue, it will not be long before most of us are gathering the information we use in daily life from online sources. From political commentary to product reviews to suggestions for raising children—with the speed and ease of access the Internet allows, its informational role in our lives is only bound to increase. This is especially true for our students, many of whom have spent much of their lives using the Internet and rely on it almost exclusively. If we hope to prepare them for a successful life outside the classroom, it is imperative that we help them learn to read critically as they use the Internet,