Web literacy: Where the Common Core meets common sense

Web literacy: Where the Common Core meets common sense

We believe it’s essential for every teacher to develop lessons that challenge students to learn how to verify sources; here’s one example

By Alan November and Brian Mull

(Editor’s note: This is Part Two of a series of articles on developing web literacy among students. To read Part One, click here.)

Are you as worried as we are that the overall impact of technology on our children’s ability to solve complex research problems is negative? Have you heard a child near you say, “Just Google it,” when asked to describe the meaning of life?

Research shows that students primarily use one search engine and then only look at the first page of results. They can quickly give up or settle for something “close enough” when they don’t find the information they’re looking for. Huge amounts of time are being wasted in searches void of the rigor of research.

A very depressing view of the state of American students’ approach to internet research comes from a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. When challenged, Yale students in Mr. Brill’s advanced journalism class wrote essays describing that they would simply use Google to solve the Watergate scandal by keying in words such as “secret fund.” After New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen heard about this, he posted on Facebook, “I don’t believe this anecdote about moronic Yale students. … It sounds made-up or very, very distorted.” In other communications, Bob Woodward, one of the individuals who broke the Watergate story, wrote to Mr. Brill after reading the essays, “…your students have what I can only call a heart-stopping overconfidence in the quality of the information on the internet.”

Somehow, we do not think this problem is limited to the students admitted to Yale. We believe we have an endemic problem across the country, where our students have weaker research skills as a result of not being taught the rigor and discipline of using Google and other search tools across the curriculum in all grade levels. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, being an excellent researcher with print does not automatically make you thorough in a different medium, the web.

The K-12 students we ask (and the majority of our doctoral students) confidently explain that they know how to use Google. Then we start giving them research questions, such as searching for teacher websites in England that cover the American Revolution. When they cannot generate a single teacher website from the U.K., they discover they really do not understand the architecture of information on the web. Our general analysis is that our students don’t know that they don’t know. We probably would be better off if they knew that they did not know. Then, at least, they might ask their teachers for help with their internet research skills.

There are two driving forces that create an urgency to redefine what it means to be literate in today’s world: common sense and the Common Core. Common-sense observations demonstrate how students are misusing the web for their homework and everyday research. They typically do not realize why or how they are getting their results. As Woodward put it, they believed that “somehow the internet was a magic lantern that lit up all events.”

The second driving force is the Common Core State Standards. Most states will have to rethink their approach to teaching critical analysis of all kinds of information, as the standards require that students be able to:

• Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism;

• Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research; and

• Interpret mathematical results in the context of a situation and reflect on whether the results make sense, possibly improving the model if it has not served its purpose.

In the interest of preparing for the Common Core and common sense, we will demonstrate an example of a research problem and a solution strategy.

This example is guaranteed to grab your students’ attention and possibly elicit some gasps of astonishment. Visit Google and type in ear mouse. Then click on the “Images” tool in the left-hand margin and choose one of the photos that depicts a human ear growing out of the back of a lab mouse. Wait for the gasps. Now, challenge your students to use their research skills to determine how the ear ended up on the back of the mouse.

To help your students focus, have them begin by reading two sources with varying accounts of the ear. One of these articles was published by a trusted news source, the BBC. The second was written by a global team of individuals on Wikipedia. In reading both articles, your students probably will find some inconsistencies rather quickly.

The BBC article opens with claims that a scientist was able to grow an ear on the back of a mouse. The Wikipedia article claims that cartilage was grown around an ear-shaped mold that was surgically implanted on the mouse’s back. Additionally, the BBC article explains that the scientist involved is a transplant surgeon named Dr. Jay Vacanti, while the Wikipedia article says that this scientist is an anesthesiologist named Dr. Charles Vacanti. Yet a third source from Australia explains, “In truth, the mouse was not genetically engineered, and the ‘ear’ had no human cells in it.”

When we challenge students and teachers alike in our critical thinking workshops to determine which version is the most accurate, the response is almost always to find another source. But which other source is the most reliable? If the mouse could talk, we would ask!

The next most logical source would be to find research labs where this kind of work is being done. It is essential to teach students to distinguish between a primary source such as a university lab and a secondary source such as an article in the BBC. In various articles, there are references to both the University of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Let’s use an advanced feature of Google, the “Site” command, to limit our results to those two universities.

Site: will allow a researcher to narrow results to a specific domain or extension. Knowing that, we can begin with the following two separate queries.

Search One: ear mouse vacanti site:umass.edu

Search Two: ear mouse vacanti site:mit.edu

(Please note: you cannot use the Site command twice in the design of one search.)

The use of site: will limit results to one of these universities. Through continued investigation, we find even more connections to Harvard and Brown University. With enough digging, we learn that there were actually two doctors named Vacanti. They were brothers. We also learn much more about the research being done by these brothers in growing tissue around biodegradable molds.

The essential lessons here that link to the Common Core (and common sense) include:

• To understand the difference between primary and secondary sources.
• To understand not to automatically trust so-called reliable sources such as the BBC.
• To learn focused research with the tool that many students use every day, Google. To begin doing so, spend some time investigating Google’sadvanced search tool.

We are not surprised by the Yale example that we referenced at the beginning of this article. Our experience in working with schools around the world has taught us that too many educators and students have a “magic lantern” approach to research on the web.

We believe there should be an urgency to teach students to think when they use the internet. This takes ongoing practice in many different research situations. To ensure that our students learn the grammar and strategies of the web, we believe it’s essential for every teacher to develop lessons that challenge students to learn how to verify sources.

Through our resources, you can find a list of sites that will be useful in developing these types of lessons, as well as a framework that students can be taught. It is not enough to learn how to do this in one class, or only in the library. It must be infused throughout the curriculum. We welcome the Common Core standards that will require this kind of skill set. We also welcome your ideas and strategies for teaching web literacy and critical thinking on the web.

Alan November and Brian Mull article on Web Literacy

Why more schools aren’t teaching web literacy—and how they can start

Fourteen years after we first published ‘Teaching Zack to Think,’ here’s a new three-part framework for making sure students are internet savvy

By Alan November and Brian Mull

The advanced researcher can take Diigo much further. For example, while Zack might have found a few valuable sites about the Holocaust on his own, he might want to connect with others who have been tagging material on the Holocaust for years. To do this, Zack can use Diigo to search for online groups that are sharing resources about the Holocaust. Currently, there are nearly 200 groups sharing information on this topic! A little time spent searching through these groups might prove to be more productive than spending the same amount of time searching with Google.

Additionally, if Zack has classmates who are working on this paper with him, they can all agree to use a specific tag, known only to them, within each of their own accounts. From there, a simple search on Diigo for this tag would provide each student with the resources found by all.

One of the greatest benefits of using such a tool is that the students’ libraries follow them from class to class and from year to year. Therefore, a student who studies biology as a part of the seventh-grade curriculum can return and add to the resources found when taking biology again in high school and then in college.

For teachers who are interested in using this organizational tool with their students, we highly suggest signing up for an educator account. Doing so will allow you to create class accounts easily for all of your students and also immediately makes them part of a class group for easy sharing.Attend Alan November’s ed-tech conference and get $50 off the cost of registration!

Sharing and making sense of information

We are currently witnessing an explosion in the use of social media on the web. For many, this use is for personal purposes—keeping track of friends, interacting with various types of media resources, and sharing interests with others. But another segment of the population is making use of social media to advance their own learning. Services like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ are allowing connected learners to develop personal learning communities of like-minded individuals who are sharing rich learning resources with one another on a variety of topics. Those who are using these personalized networks insist that some of their most important learning opportunities take place online with individuals they have never actually met.

Previously, researchers were confined to local research groups and formal classroom interactions. Beyond these organized efforts, their connections with others were confined to one-on-one phone calls or group eMail messages that bounced around among participants. However, online social networks are allowing adult and student researchers to share and make sense of knowledge they collect in a more fluid manner. Through these interactions, researchers are able to gain a broader perspective from individuals with varying backgrounds.

Looking at Twitter, for example, we can use a similar organizational method that we saw with Diigo to find focused information on topics of interest. Twitter’s method is simply a short word or phrase (like the tags in Diigo) preceded by the “#” symbol. This is called a hashtag. Searching through Twitter using a hashtag allows users to get past all of the shared information not related to the topic at hand.

To do a search like this, first you would need to find an appropriate hashtag. For this example, we’ll use a hashtag from our Popular Education Hashtagsdocument. We’ll select #stem for STEM education. Now, go to Twitter’ssearch tool. Type #stem in the search box as the query. Immediately, everything on Twitter has been filtered out except for content being shared about STEM-related fields. This content would include helpful websites, articles, or answers to others’ questions. Now, let’s say you want information having to do with STEM careers. At the top of the search results, click the gear button and go to the advanced search page. There, you will be able to add careers to your query, thus doing some further streamlining.

For student researchers, understanding how to use methods like this and having the ability to connect to experts and peers who deeply understand specific areas of knowledge can add valuable perspective and broader connections to a topic of research. Even from early grades, we recommend having a class Twitter account. We also recommend having the aforementioned hashtag handout in a public place near a classroom computer.

As questions come up in class, have specific individuals send out these questions and request further information from the “Twittersphere.” As they do this, encourage students to identify the best hashtag to target their queries. Then, as students begin to develop new content that brings together what they have learned, have them share their thinking and their products with others—again, using the appropriate hashtags. In time, this will become second nature for students and will demonstrate how these tools can be used ethically and educationally.

For Zack, sharing and inquiring about the research he found on the professor’s website using the hashtag #holocaust could have been quite eye-opening. Through making powerful connections and digging deeper into the content he was learning with others who share a passion for this topic, Zack could have gained further insight on the legitimacy of the information he found.

Conclusion: Good research hasn’t changed

In the 14 years since the original writing of “Teaching Zack to Think,” the web has seen dramatic changes in the quantity and variety of information to which we all have access. What hasn’t changed is the need to learn how to properly navigate and make the most of these resources. We must remember that good research is still good research. The technology we access each day hasn’t changed our need to bring rigor and purpose into the work that students do. Understanding the three pillars of modern-day web literacy will take students to new levels of ability. By helping students like Zack further develop skills in finding, organizing, and making sense of information, whether in books or online, we will be preparing them for greater opportunities to thrive—no matter what changes technology has in store in the future.

Great article on Web Literacy by Alan November and Brian Mull (Parts 1 and 2)

Why more schools aren’t teaching web literacy—and how they can start

Fourteen years after we first published ‘Teaching Zack to Think,’ here’s a new three-part framework for making sure students are internet savvy

By Alan November and Brian Mull

In 1998, a 15-year-old high school student used the personal website of a professor at Northwestern University, Arthur Butz, as justification for writing a history paper called “The Historic Myth of Concentration Camps.”

That student, who we will call Zack, had been encouraged to use the internet for research, but he had not been taught to decode the meaning of the characters in a web address. When he read the web address,http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html, he assumed that the domain name “northwestern.edu” automatically meant it was a credible source. He did not understand that the “~” character, inserted after the domain name, should be read as a personal web page and not an official document of the university. As with any media, punctuation counts.

Without web literacy, Zack believed Butz’s explanation. Zack read about how the Nazis were fighting typhus, a disease carried by head lice. He went on to read that the pesticide Zyklon was used to kill the head lice—not the prisoners in the gas chambers. Without basic knowledge of web punctuation or the skills necessary to validate internet content, Zack was at a disadvantage to think critically about what he was reading. He had been taught to read paper, but he had not been taught to read the web. Zack was illiterate in what undoubtedly has become the dominant media of our society. At the time, Zack’s teachers also were illiterate about the web.

It turns out that validating content is not rocket science. Even a first-grade student can begin to understand the organization of information on the web. It seemed obvious at the time that understanding the grammar, punctuation, and syntax of the internet was so basic to being literate in our web-based society that schools immediately would begin to teach all children web literacy. Yet, that hasn’t been the case in most schools.Attend Alan November’s ed-tech conference and get $50 off the cost of registration!

For more information about Building Learning Communities 2012, to be held in Boston July 15-20,click here. Get $50 off the cost of registration when you enter the promo code eSchoolMedia12.

It is our sense that two forces have worked in historic tandem to create the conditions where most of our schools do not teach our children basic web literacy. One is NCLB, which—even though it included funding for technology and staff development—we believe has had a chilling effect on introducing any innovation to the U.S. curriculum. The second is that web filtering became the de facto policy for keeping children “safe” online.

Instead of taking the high moral ground to teach students how to deal with odious content and the ethics and critical thinking skills that go along with social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, too many schools simply block these sites. As a point of information, the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) does not require schools to block social media sites (see “FCC opens access to social media sites for e-Rate users“).

To this day, when we visit schools and give students various research problems to solve, it is the very unusual student—who is usually self-taught—who understands how to decode content on the internet. We know many librarians and individual teachers who creatively include web literacy in their curriculum. Colleagues such as Joyce Valenza will tell you this is not enough. As we did with books, we need every teacher to be web literate and to be designing assignments that require students to learn how to research and decode across grade levels and subject areas.

Retooling the research process

The web has grown exponentially during the past 15 years, and new concepts such as search engine personalization have emerged in this time. To learn how everyday search behavior can lead unwittingly to a more narrow view of the world, read Eli Pariser’s book, The Filter Bubble, or see the story “New web-search formulas have huge implications for students and society.” While their access to these sites might be blocked in school, our students are accessing vast amounts of information every day when they leave school via unfiltered search engines and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

This reality should be a warning to all educators that we must prepare our students to make meaning from the overwhelming amount of information at their fingertips, and we must guide their ability to create and publish new information worldwide. To do this effectively, we must return to the basics of what it means to be a good researcher—but at the same time, we must look at the new tools our students have access to.

In our original 1998 article “Teaching Zack to Think,” we focused on teaching students techniques that would allow them to search with more purpose. This skill, while still important, is only one of three pillars we believe are now essential to be web literate. These three pillars are…

1. Purposeful search: Using advanced search techniques to narrow the scope and raise the quality of information found on the web.
2. Effective organization and collaboration: Being able to organize all of this information into a comprehensive and growing library of personal knowledge.
3. Sharing and making sense of information: Sharing what we find and what we learn with the world, and using the knowledge of others to help us make more sense of it all.

If you follow the dictate that we teach what we test, it’s understandable why schools haven’t spent more time preparing students to be web literate since NCLB was passed. However, the Common Core State Standards that 46 states have agreed to follow does require that students be able to manage web-based information. David Coleman, contributing author of the Common Core State Standards, says that students must be able to “…read like a detective and write like an investigative reporter.”

The learning progressions articulated in the Common Core State Standards are structured to support students as they develop competency in discovering meaning, analyzing content, comparing information, synthesizing, and applying and sharing their understanding. Without foundational and working knowledge of information and web literacy, students will not be able to exhibit the range of functional and critical thinking skills required to conduct even the simplest research tasks.

Effective organization and collaboration

We’ll focus on the first of the three pillars of web literacy, purposeful search, in a subsequent article. As for the second pillar, assuming that Zack learns how to find high-quality information online, he’ll still need to develop organizational methods that enable him to make effective use of this information as he creates new content by himself and with others around the world.

A logical starting point to teach students how to be organized and to collaborate in their search experience is to teach them how to use Diigo. Diigo, a social bookmarking tool, allows a researcher to organize sites and images from the web, as well as personal notes, using keywords called “tags.” These tags are set up by individual users and can relate to subjects, content areas, individual projects, and more. In addition, all of these collected resources can be annotated and enhanced through embedded sticky notes. To learn more about the basics of Diigo, watch this online overview.

Literacy and iPad Learning Apps

General Literacy and Learning iPad Apps

1. BrainPOP Featured Movie – BrainPOP®
I’m very impressed with the quality and learning videos – kids love these!

2. The Electric Company
Social-emotional games and content.

Pre-Reading, Reading and Writing Apps

3. Word Games for Kids – Futaba – INKids 

4. Word Wall HD 
A game that makes learning words fun.

5. FirstWords: Animals
Fun and playful.

6. Fingerprint Play Maker
Write your own play.

7. Big Kid Life Fire Fighter
Lots of fun — for free!

8. Big Kid Life Vet
Free!

9. Sight Word Bingo
Engaging fun for learning sight words.

10. Goofy Mad Libs
This app gives you word suggestions so you’re also building vocabulary while learning parts of speech and writing.

11. iF Poems
I LOVE this app! Especially the poems read by Helena Bonham Carter.

12. Toontastic
A big favorite of ours – a great way to write your own stories.

13. Scribblenauts Remix
Thinking, writing, spelling, problem solving . . .

14. Don’t Let the Pigeon Run This App!
Make your own story and learn how to draw pigeon.

             
15. iDiary for Kids Lite            16. abc Joined Up 
An engaging way to get kids to write!

             
17. Story Patch                        18. My Story – Book Maker for Kids

             
19. Sock Puppets                    20. Comic Life

             
21. Kids Crosswords              22. Spellosaur

             
23. Chickitionary                    24. Rory’s Story Cubes

Resources with AWESOME Content for FREE!!!

Sharing content online has become an extremely important part of our online presence. While original content reigns supreme, a high percentage of our output comes from other sources. With Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and countless other networks surfacing daily, there is plenty of space to fill. Companies should have a focus on what they want to share with their audience, but there are so many small organizations and individuals that don’t have a plan. What should we post? Where do I find content to share? It may sound elementary, but you want to focus your efforts on content in your niche. Starbucks is not talking about Healthcare on their Twitter feed, and you shouldn’t get too far away from your core either.

So, where do I find quality content on large range of topics? Facebook, Twitter, Google + are laced with great content. This issue with these three giants is that it becomes a hunt, and it wouldn’t be deemed the most efficient way to curate. Below are 4 sites that give you the key to a quantity of quality.

Scoop.It! – Allows individuals and organizations to create online magazines. As an user you create topics with keywords. So you create a topic called “Social Media Now” and use the keywords Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. When you hit the “Curate” button recent stories will appear that include one or more of your keywords. You can then Scoop-It for your magazine. This content is now a part of your magazine for that topic. You have the option to share any story on Twitter, Facebook, and/or Linkedin at the same time via a check box system. You can also share to Pinterest, Google +, and StumbleUpon through the Scoop-It interface. It’s a fairly open network that allows you to follow, rescoop, and favorite content of others. It’s not going to be confused with Facebook in terms of interaction with other users, but there is definitely a fair amount of give and take that makes the experience worthy. My one suggestion here would be to not exceed 3 topics. It becomes too much to manage when you have too many topics.

My Scoop.it site:  http://www.scoop.it/t/online-blended-schooling

Business 2 Community – B2C is a blog syndicate focused on Social Media, Technology, and Business, etc. It also spans to topics such as Automotive, Entertainment, and Sports to name a few. Their content originates from thousands of bloggers that connect to the network. This content is republished on the B2C site by category within 1-5 days of the original posting. There is a ton of valuable content on the site and it just keeps on coming. A new article appears every 10-20 minutes and starts on the front page. After its time on the front page you can find it sitting in a specified category. It would take you weeks to read all the content on B2C at any one time. As with Scoop-It sharing is made easy across all the major networks. As a matter of fact, this article with be on the B2C site in the next couple of days.

Topsy – Is a real-time search engine that really meshes well with Twitter. This network launched almost three years ago to the day, and seems to fall under the radar. You need to get in there and experience, especially if you’re active on Twitter. When you first go to the site you’ll see what is trending today and a small orange number that shows the number of times the story has been posted. You’ll also see a Real-Time Search Box. Below is a search for “Marketing Strategy” with some of the stats. You can retweet a story right from the interface. Topsy also allows too follow users on Twitter by hovering over their picture without leaving the network. Finally, you can search by Photos, Videos, and Experts.

Standardized Testing and the reality of school.

10 Free Tech Tools for Text to Speech

Today I am introducing you to a set of awesome tools that allow users to easily select any part of a text and hear it in the voice and accent they  want. These tools can be very helpful for language teachers. Students can use them to impprove their pronunciation and develop their reading skills. All these tools are easy to use and above all free of charge. Most of these tools are extensions that you can install on your browser.

1- Select and Speak

Select and Speak uses iSpeech’s human-quality text-to-speech (TTS) reads selected text.  It includes 43 iSpeech text to speech  voices.  You can configure the voice and speed option by changing the settings at options page. ( This is a chrome extension )

3- Announcify
Announcify reads out loud every website you want. For example, if you’re too tired but still need to study one more Wikipedia entry, Announcify can help your tired eyes relax.

5- Text to Voice
‘Text to Voice’ or ‘Text to Speech’ is one of the coolest add-ons. It gives Firefox the power of speech. Select text, click the button on the bottom right and this add-on speaks the selected text for you. Isn’t it brilliant? Audio is downloadable.

7- Vozme

Vozme is a simple online ‘text to speech’ program that lets you type-in any English or Spanish text and then play it as an audio stream.

SpokenText lets you easily convert text into speech. Record (English, French, Spanish or German) PDF, Word, plain text, PowerPoint files, and web pages, and convert them to speech automatically. Download your reccordings as .mp3 or .m4b (Audio Book) files (in English, French, Spanish and German) of any text content on your computer or mobile phone.

9- Odiogo
Odiogo’s media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It transforms news sites and blog posts into high fidelity, near human quality audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device.

10- MP3files
MP3files, play lists and podcast automatically generated from Wikipedia! Let your computer read out the Wikipedia for you!